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removed from their ancestral land, and many of the soil classi
cation and testing
systems of Africa are probably lost with the people who had possessed them.
Written sources, by contrast, allow access to the soil history of peoples long
gone. The Nile Valley is one of the most ancient agricultural landscapes, and the
site of an elaborate civilization. It has been studied in particular by economic
historians, who have also shown some interest in soils. 49 The basis of cultivation,
the Nile
oods, have been decisive for cultivation since the onset of agriculture in
the valley. While it would be a fallacy to assume that agriculture did not change
substantially from Pharaonic Egypt onwards, the overview of Egyptian agriculture
from 640 to 1800 CE, in which Richard Cooper details how soils were used,
provides a good overall description. The cultivable land is clayey, and of black
color (which gave rise to the Ancient Egyptian name for the Nile valley, Kemet,
meaning black). Like all clays, the land is dif
cult to plow, and can dry to hardpans,
if worked at the wrong condition. While the annual Nile
oods deposited a layer of
mud from weathered sandstone and granite upstream before the Aswan dam was
built, this fertile silt did not contain all necessary nutrients. Potassium and phos-
phorus were supplied, but the low nitrogen content had to be supplanted by the
cultivation of legumes, in particular lucerne, which was used for grazing and then
plowed under.
Ruins and trash-heaps were used to supplant nitrogen in the Islamic period, as
was a nitrate-bearing clay available in some regions. The Egyptian farmers had a
name for salt-contaminated land. They used land in the vicinity of such spots for
manuring
ax. The practice of keeping dove-cots was widespread and resulted in
precious dove droppings available as manure. Keeping pigeons meant that
elds
needed protection from them after sowing, seeds had to be covered with earth.
Therefore, the land was
elds after
plowing and seeding. Cinders and the stalks of harvested plants were used as
fertilizers, and the practice of fallowing was also known. When European imple-
ments were introduced, it turned out that local plows, which did not turn the soil,
proved better adapted to the cultivation of Egyptian lands than the imported
moldboard plows.
Through a fascinating set of sources on a large estate in the Fayum during the
Roman period (30 BCE
attened with a tree trunk pulled across the
640 CE) we can follow the reclamation of land for agri-
cultural purposes by means of an elaborate system of dykes and canals.
The Graeco-Roman town of Philadelphia was situated on the eastern edge of the
oasis of Fayum
-
s cultivated land, in the north-western part of Egypt. It was a
Roman garrison and its founder Apollonius, had a large estate laid out for him in the
1st century CE. His lands were partially sandy desert, partially marshland over-
grown with brushwood and reeds, only some of which had been previously watered
with irrigation works or drained. This land was transformed into good arable land
for cereals, vineyards and orchards through the well-planned construction of dykes
and the digging of canals and drainage ditches, after cutting wood and reeds.
'
49 Bowman and Rogan ( 1999 ).
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