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The Evolution of Irrigation in Egypt's Fayoum Oasis State, Village and Conveyance Loss

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The Evolution of Irrigation in Egypt's Fayoum Oasis State, Village and Conveyance Loss THE EVOLUTION OF IRRIGATION IN EGYPT'S FAYOUM OASIS STATE, VILLAGE AND CONVEYANCE LOSS By DAVID HAROLD PRICE A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1993 Copyright 1993 by David Harold Price . ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the following people for their various contributions to the completion of this manuscript and the fieldwork on which it is based: Russ Bernard, Linda Brownell, Ronald Cohen, Lawry Gold, Magdi Haddad, Madeline Harris, Fekri Hassan, Robert Lawless, Bill Keegan, Madelyn Lockheart, Mo Madanni, Ed Malagodi, Mark Papworth, Midge Miller Price, Lisa Queen and Mustafa Suliman. A special note of thanks to my advisor Marvin Harris for his support and encouragement above and beyond the call of duty. Funding for field research in Egypt was provided by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Research Grant (BNS-8819558) PREFACE Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of power. —Joan Didion This dissertation is a study of the interaction among particular methods of irrigation and the political economy and ecology of Egypt's Fayoum region from the Neolithic period to the present. It is intended to be a contribution to the long-standing debate about the importance of irrigation as a cause and/or effect of specific forms of local, regional and national sociopolitical institutions. I lived in the Fayoum between July 1989 and July 1990. I studied comparative irrigation activities in five villages located in subtly different ecological habitats. For the field portion of my study I relied on direct participant observation and structured interviews. The Fayoum was selected as the location for my field study because of its reliance on gravity-fed irrigation. The variety of water- lifting devices used provides a unique opportunity to examine the effects of technology on cultural evolution. The Fayoum Oasis is a natural depression located on the far eastern edge of the Sahara Desert in Egypt's Western Desert, 70 kilometers to the southwest of Cairo (29.5 and 29.35 latitude and 30.22 and 31.5 longitude). 1 The Fayoum is the most western of the series of Libyan Oases that iv stretch across an area over 300 mile long. It is sometimes known as a "semi-oasis" because it receives water both from naturally occurring springs and from the Bahr Yusef Canal directly linked to the Nile River, though in a purely geological sense it is a true oasis. The Bahr Yusef canal enters the Fayoum Depression in the east through the al-Lahun gap. It branches into hundreds of canals through its journey across the Fayoum before its waters dump into the great salt water lake known today as Birket Qarun. At the city of al-Fayoum, Bahr Yusef branches into eight major branches, supplying water to the western, northern and southern reaches of the depression. The declining contour of the Fayoum allows this distant transport of water without the aid of water-lifting devices. In the winter and spring months there are small (often hidden) pockets of green and even water along the barren desert beyond Lake Qarun. During Ptolemaic times the winter and spring rains were collected and used by settlers living in the desert, and in modern times some villagers have farmed the small gully patches of desert that blossom with what little run-off is to be found. The modern climate is for the most part hot, though the winter months do have cool and even cold temperatures. The mean daytime temperature for the month of September is 28.3 degrees centigrade and 11.9 degrees centigrade for the month of January (el-Quosy & el-Guindi 1981:7). This moderate v climate allows for year round agriculture. The Fayoum receives less than 20 mm of rainfall each year, most of this usually falling during only five to ten days in the winter and spring time. The surrounding desert is host to a diversity of flora and fauna. The desert fox, jackal, ostrich (Goodman et al. 1984) and cobra are still to be found in the desert, miles in from the Fayoum. During the winter months, large flocks of birds migrate through the region. Many of these stop along the marshy shores of Lake Qarun where ample supplies of shallow-water fish can be found. Storks, pelicans, herons and geese from Europe migrate through the Fayoum today just as they have for thousands of years. The ecological setting of the Fayoum is important because the agricultural success of the Fayoum has always hinged upon the coupling of two naturally occurring ecological features: the declivity of landforms from east to west and the presence of a water source flowing into the depression at a high point where its flow could be diverted or regulated. As will be shown below, different cultures in different eras have manipulated these two features with varying degrees of return. Even the simplest modifications of canals to improve water delivery (in terms of energy expenditures and returns) have produced bountiful results. The most significant change in the Fayoum' s irrigation technology during the last thousand years has been the vi . — maintenance of constant levels of water in the Ibrahimia and Bahr Yusef canals though the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Prior to this, all users of irrigation systems were not guaranteed anything approaching an equal share of water. The volume of water that irrigators received was subject to uncontrollable factors: the rise and fall of the Nile, unpredictable dry and wet seasons and the location of their plot from the water source. The philological origins of the name "Fayoum" are not fully understood though it seems to be derived from the Coptic word " phiom, 11 meaning: the lake (Kees 1961:215). The Fayoum has been known by different names during different times. In Dynastic times it was known as Neferet Baht, in Ptolemaic and Roman times as Arsiniote (after Arsinoe I, the sister-wife of Ptolemy II Philadelpius) The lush green of contemporary Fayoum is striking when compared with the harsh desert surrounding it on all sides except for the thin green line along the Yusef canal as it enters the depression from the Nile Valley. The fertile state of the Fayoum is both ancient (culturally speaking) and modern (geologically speaking) The beauty and fertility of the Fayoum has been a relatively constant feature for thousands of years. Two thousand years ago Strabo compared the Fayoum to the whole of Egypt and concluded that the Fayoum as a region was the most noteworthy of all in respect to its appearance, its fertility, and its material vii development, for it alone is planted with olive trees that are large and full grown and bear fine fruit. .And it produces wine in no small quantity, as well as grain, pulse, 2 and other seed-plants in very great varieties. (Strabo 1932:97) 3 It was irrigation that transformed the Fayoum into such a garden surrounded by desert. In any society, the adoption of irrigation makes new levels of agricultural subsistence and/or commodity production possible. Irrigation agriculture transforms the production and social organization of any society that comes to rely on its waters. The specific transformations that occur are, however, not the same for every society. The type of social formation is specifically dependent on the type of irrigation that is adopted. Some irrigation-based societies depend on small scale irrigation networks that are managed and maintained at local levels. There are also modern-industrial societies (such as the U.S.A.) that rely on massive irrigation agricultural systems, yet it would be farfetched to characterize these as "irrigation societies" or "hydraulic societies" given the overall industrial character of their mode of production. While the contemporary Egyptian economy is not solely reliant on agricultural production, the life and economic subsistence of rural Egyptians certainly is. Over 70% of Egyptian households derive some portion of their livelihood and subsistence from agricultural pursuits. It is this nationwide reliance on hydraulic agriculture that makes viii irrigation of central concern to anyone wishing to understand the contemporary Egyptian state. Development of irrigation agriculture has the potential to dramatically increase agricultural production, beyond what is possible with simple rain-fed agriculture. Irrigation's ability to improve agricultural returns has made it a central element in theories of pristine state formation as well as a favorite method of supposedly "aiding" nations of the developing world out of their 4 sinking debtor status . In the Egyptian ecological setting, irrigation water is the single most significant variable in crop production and the limited availability of water determines the nature and extent of current agricultural practices. Given enough water Egypt could put millions of hectares of desert 5 wastelands into crop production . If more water were available, then different and more valuable crops could be planted even in the regions currently under cultivation. Vast regions of the Western and Eastern Deserts could become as productive as the present Nile Valley and Delta (of course, the problems of drainage and salinization would increase at proportionate rates too) . If water were an unlimited resource, farmers could select water intensive and highly profitable crops such as citrus and other orchard crops. With unlimited water the populations of the Nile and Delta would spread into the present desert interior. ix Water's minimal availability in a desert environment such as the Fayoum heightens its prominence as a limiting feature. Irrigation provides for greater levels of production, but presents opportunities for population growth. Increased population levels can be supported after artificial irrigation is introduced in an environment, and improvements in water delivery technologies can lead to increases in productivity and population levels.
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