carried as it arose in the highlands of Africa and
journeyed across varied terrain to empty itself into
the Mediterranean. There is another gift. Fertile
silt, eroded from upland, has always been trans-
ported in its yearly floods and deposited in places
that would have been part of the largest desert in
the world but for this annual replenishing nour-
ishment from the longest river in the world.
The Nile has run through Africa and the lives
of Africans for millennia. In Kemet, at first it
brought devastating and fearful floods to vulnera-
ble settlements that clung precariously along its
banks to thin margins of land with agricultural
possibilities. Then as human knowledge and skill
developed, and predictability and flood control
evolved, threat became promise, and the Nile flood
a welcome deluge to provide for an increasingly
more productive and secure future. Here the river
provided water for irrigation, transportation,
communication, drinking, washing, and sewage
disposal. It also yielded large quantities of fish,
birds, and other edible animals. That part of the
Nile Valley had become a magnet that attracted
more and more settlers from all directions. So was
born the foremost country in the ancient world,
owing much of its life to water in the form of the
then foremost river in the world.
The people of Kemet, not coincidentally the
most bountiful recipients of this annual act of
nature, certainly recognized the importance of the
river in their life. They made the Nile in flood the
divinity they called Hapi. The Nile was sacred. Its
running water was a sacred thing: To dam up Nile
water and so detain or prevent it from flowing all
over the land was an offense under the Declarations
of Innocence, an ancient Egyptian guide to moral
living that was to be recited flawlessly by the justi-
fied dead before the seat of judgment. So too was
wrongfully diverting water in the season of inunda-
tion when the flow was strongest. Social ideals aris-
ing from the best daily practice surrounding the use
of the Nile were invested with the highest sanction,
restated as religious and moral norms or as dogma,
and so a population was encouraged to aspire to
the highest standards of humanity—and to behav-
iors that tended to keep an elite in power.
Human habitation dominated the east bank of
the river; the west bank was the preserve of ceme-
teries, mortuary temples, and other things to do
with the departed. People had to cross the river to
bury their dead. These material conditions strongly
influenced images of life and death in ancient
Egypt. The east bank of the Nile became synony-
mous with this world, with the rising sun and
transformation, rejuvenation, and resurrection; the
west bank with the setting sun, death, and the
underworld. Crossing the river became symbolic of
making the transition into the underworld. The
Dead were called the westerners. Apart from
the boat and the mythical river, the entire notion
of the transition came to be dominated by images
of ferrying and the ferryman, the archetype of that
now ubiquitous conductor of souls across the
Great Divide first attested in the Nile Valley those
multiple millennia ago. This symbolic significance
of crossing the river has also been retained by
many African people in an unbroken tradition
down into contemporary times. Examples include
the Akan of Ghana and the Igbo in Nigeria.
Every people have their story of the beginning.
In the first known African account of the begin-
ning, water is fundamental. In the creation story
of Kemet, the nun, or primordial waters, is the
oldest and most fundamental substance in the cos-
mos, containing all the possibilities of existence.
Hence, before life, there was water. The first life
forms were resident in water, and all life forms,
for the first stage(s) of their lives or for all of their
lives, are resident in water. All life is conceived in
water, develops in water, and is then born out of
water and often inside water. Without water, no
form of life is possible.
So profound was the impact of water on the
psyche of the people of Kemet that, for them,
every manifestation of water in the Duat or under-
world was in fact an aspect of the nun, the great
primeval water that was before creation and sur-
rounds the world on all sides. There were many
manifestations of this water in this Kemetic after-
life. One of its branches, in the form of a river,
separated this world of the living from the Duat,
the place of the departed. Another branch formed
the route of the sun in the sky. The sun rode along
this river in a wia, a boat—an occurrence that
provided the associated explanations of the
nightly disappearance of the sun, death, decay, trans-
formation, rejuvenation, and creation.
The Kemetyu certainly did not imagine any
world in which water was not a predominant
and determining presence. Perhaps they could notWater 707