THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE NILE VALLEY

Throughout its length, rocky walls, sometimes 600 to 800 feet tall, flank either side of the Nile. The valley is five to twenty miles in width but sometimes widens up to thirty-three miles.

Near Aswan and the First Cataract the sandstone of Nubia gives way to limestone. The limestone forms cliffs along the Upper Nile (Upper Egypt) for nearly 500 miles to the Delta (Lower Egypt). The cliffs reach high, table-like plateaus that are surrounded by sand from the nearby deserts.

For thousands of years this limestone provided the masonry for Egyptian monumental construction.

The Delta, an area of about 10,000 square miles, is a huge swamp intersected by canals.

The Libyan Desert borders the Nile to the west. It is the northeastern quadrant of the vast Sahara Desert,

The Eastern Desert runs from the Nile to the Red Sea. Limestone plateaus skirt the river and parallel the high mountains further east. Primarily granite and gneiss, these mountains border the Red Sea and rise to heights of 6000 feet or more.

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The currently known distributions of Predynastic settlements are determined by geological rather than by cultural factors. The ecology of the Nile Valley and Delta also determined the placement of sites within a particular region, like Merimda on a terrace or the divided Hierakonpolis society in its formative stages. Yet the unparalleled transport navigability of the Nile, with each settlement located within a few kilometres of one another, also provides an explanation for most of Ancient Egypt's political and religious Dynastic unity.

However, it is in this lead-up to the unification of the Nile city-states under Hierakonpolis that the environment plays one of its most important roles. The end of the Neolithic Subpluvial (thus ruling out expansion into the desert) and the pressure brought to bear by the decreased Nile floods (thereby putting strain on agricultural production), in tandem with the increased population, made the rest of the Valley and the Delta look increasingly attractive for various means of expansion.

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