Ancient Egypt, Climate and the Nile

The First Intermediate Period in ancient Egypt (22nd–21st centuries B.C.) is characterized by tomb “autobiographies” reporting on low Niles, famine and food donations from high officials and wealthy persons to the poor population after the collapse of the centralized monarchy. Egyptologists have expressed doubts that these sources reflect the real environmental and socio-political situation in Egypt at that date. In the 1970s B. Bell put forward a hypothesis about a severe and prolonged drought that struck in the late 3rd millennium B.C. the Middle East, including the Nile drainage basin; this led to a sharp drop of the Nile floods and, as a consequence (in Bell’s opinion), to the catastrophic decline of the Old Kingdom state. Egyptologists’ rejection of these theses and, in general, the interpretation of historical events of that era in the context of any environmental changes has recently acquired a particularly radical form, up to the revision of the most traditional Egyptological views on the First Intermediate Period, which is now even argued to have not been the time of the deepest crisis of the pharaonic civilization. Numerous independent scientifical studies, however, do not allow denying the important role of the natural factor at certain moments in the history of ancient Egypt, in particular, at the bifurcation between the Old and Middle Kingdoms. From the point of view of the socio-natural history, this was a socio-ecological crisis, a catastrophe that transformed qualitatively the systemic foundations of ancient Egyptian civilization at this stage of its evolution

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