Word: niles
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Levers & Virgins. Out of the ancient Egyptian attempts to tame the Nile floods developed the tools of civilization: a 365-day calendar to predict the coming of the flood; a crude astronomy to further refine forecasts; systems of accounting, and, ultimately, written language to handle the stores of grain needed to tide the society over the lean months between the floods; building implements like the wedge, the lever, the screw, the pulley, the inclined plane...
...including overtime), the Egyptians often slept under tarpaulins that flapped in the blast-furnace desert wind, ate their rice and drank their syrupy tea mixed with sand. When blasting shocks crumpled a temporary dam above the diversion channel last July, and the onrushing Nile threatened 5,000 workers in the incompleted turbine shafts, thousands of fellahin swarmed in with sand and other fill, saved the whole project from disaster. An amazing spirit swept through the hot, dusty camp as D (for Diversion) Day neared. Drivers actually wept when their trucks broke down; Arab laborers swarmed in like ants when Soviet...
...once-sleepy resort of Aswan, where thin-blooded Edwardians and the Aga Khan wintered, has become a boom town; its population has effectively tripled in the past four years to 140,000. Steel mills, nucleonics plants, and vast chemical complexes that will provide fertilizer to replace the lost Nile silt, are rising in what the Cairo press calls "the Pittsburgh of Egypt." Four resort hotels, plus the Aswan Hilton currently abuilding, loom glassy and air-conditioned ("TV in every room") above the Old Cataract Hotel, where oldtimers still sip icy martinis on the veranda and watch the river ride...
...Snefru 4,600 years ago reported "Nubia hacked to pieces: 7,000 men and women, 200,000 cattle and sheep led away." Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks and British followed, leaving hundreds of monuments, temples, fortresses, churches and works of art buried in the sand or exposed along the sear Nile Banks...
Already many lesser structures have gone under. The distinctive mud houses of some 50,000 Nubians, their walls of tobey (from which Spanish takes the word adobe) gaudily painted with symbols ranging from scorpions to flowering steamboats, dissolve and collapse as the Nile laps among them. Of 43 villages, 33 have already been evacuated, their citizens relocated in stone-and-cement villages replete with grocery markets and food-processing plants, at Kom Ombo, 40 miles north of Aswan. Many Nubians resent the move. Their culture, which survived waves of invaders from the Egyptians to the Turks, seems doomed to certain...