Читать книгу A History of Ancient Egypt - Marc Van De Mieroop - Страница 21

With its location just north of the Tropic of Cancer, Egypt is hot, especially in the summer, when average temperatures in Aswan easily reach 40° Celsius. The country also receives very little rain and none of it in the summer. The current conditions did not always exist, however. Before the late 3rd millennium BC, the climate was wetter and enabled people to live outside the valley collecting wild resources and doing some farming. The environment of Egypt in prehistory and early history was thus different from that in the later historical period, and for the earliest developments scholars have to look beyond the valley to understand what went on.

Climate change and its effect on people all over the world is a very prominent concern today, and, not surprisingly, climatologists and historians are exploring evidence of it in the past. Because Egypt is fully dependent on the Nile River for its agriculture, decreases in the amount of rainfall in Africa have great consequences there, and historians have started to use climate change as an explanation for the ups and downs of the ancient Egyptian state. Others remain skeptical, not denying that there were variations in the climate, but questioning the impact on the political situation. Did the Old Kingdom end because of a decrease of Nile floods, for example (Key Debate 4.1)? Obviously, natural conditions were very important to the ancient Egyptians, and the climate was a major factor in those. Using climate change as the sole explanation seems to be a mistake, but we should indeed take it into account.