The Nile’s gifts for understanding climate – Part 1

Starting with some background information

[There is also a Greek version of the post—Υπάρχει και ελληνική έκδοση της ανάρτησης]

In today’s post I wish to celebrate our booklet (Special Report) that was published yesterday:

D. Koutsoyiannis, and T. Iliopoulou, Understanding Climate: Gifts from the Nile, 60 pages, SR 301, The Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC, USA, 2024.

Its abstract reads as follows:

The Nile has given not only material gifts to Egypt and the world, but also intellectual gifts to science, especially to geoscience. The Nile still has much to teach science—especially about climatology, as it reflects climatic behaviours over vast areas in tropical and subtropical zones. These climatic behaviours have been documented across time with some of its extraordinarily long records surviving to present day. The records provide insights to the perpetual change of climate and support quantification of change in a stochastic framework.

The booklet contains a lot of information about how the Nile helped science develop—particularly geoscience including climatology—and how it can continue to help. I plan to discuss this information in the next two or three posts.

For today’s post let’s put some questions (Q) of general interest and discuss their answers (A) in brief, while the interested reader may see the booklet for more details. I clarify that the answers are mine—I have not verified them with chatbots…

Q1. Is science a recent development and how old is it?

A1. No, it’s not recent but it’s 2600 years old.

Q2. How old is geoscience?

A2. Same age as science. Thales is the father of both.

Picture 1 (from the Annex of Illustrations). Greek philosophers who studied the Nile—depictions based on known sculptures (from left to right): Thales of Miletus (Θαλῆς ὁ Μιλήσιος, c. 624/623 – c. 548/545 BC), one of the Seven Sages of Greece the first Greek philosopher also recognized as the father of science; Herodotus (Ἡρόδοτος, c. 484–c. 425 BC), historian, author of The Histories (Ἱστορίαι), considered to have been the first to treat historical subjects using a method of systematic historiographic investigation; Aristotle (Ἀριστοτέλης, 384–322 BC), founder of the Lyceum and the Peripatetic school of philosophy and author of about 400 books, many of which are lost.

Q3. How is science’s abuse called and how old is it?

A3. Well, this question is not dealt with in the booklet, but I touch upon it here because of its relevance to climate. Science’s abuse is called sophistry and those who practice it are known as sophists.¹ While science is the pursuit of the truth about natural phenomena, sophistry resembles science but with a different objective—to serve interests irrelevant to the truth (e.g. politico-economic). Sophistry is old too—a century younger than science (2500 years old) but it has peaked in the current period with what has been called “climate science”. This is sophistry, considering that its admitted aim is to save the planet (the underlying one being to give all power to the controligarchs/climafia).

Q4. What is the first posed geoscientific problem in history?

A4. It was the flood behaviour of the Nile and was posed by Thales, thus coinciding with the beginning of science.

Q5. Who resolved the Nile’s flood puzzle?

A5. Aristotle, three centuries after Thales.

Q6. What was the first scientific expedition in history?

A6. It was the expedition to the Nile upstream from Egypt, to verify Aristotle’s theory. It was made possible by Aristotle’s pupil Alexander the Great in the frame of his military campaign in Egypt.

Q7. How long did it take for the “scientific community” to accept Aristotle’s correct explanation of the cause of the Nile’s flood?

A7. Despite Aristotle being regarded as an authority, his explanation was not accepted for 21 centuries. Mythical explanations were more attractive and popular.²

Q8. What are the oldest records of environmental information in history?

A8. They are the Nile’s flood levels, beginning 5000 years ago, during the Egyptian Archaic Period also known as the Early Dynastic Period.

Picture 5 (from the Annex of Illustrations). The Palermo Stone, the fragment of the Egyptian Royal Annals housed in Palermo, Sicily, Italy, which included, in other information, measurements of the height of the annual Nile flood and inundation.

Q9. How old are systematic instrumental measurements of the environment?

A9. They date back to the Hellenistic period (just after Alexander the Great). They were river level gauges, known as nilometers. They became so popular that they were inspiring artists even outside Egypt.

Picture 6 (from the Annex of Illustrations). An artwork (Coptic textile) of the Byzantine period, dated between c. 430 – 640 AD, found in Antinoopolis, some 250 km south of Cairo and kept in the Louvre Museum, Paris, with a Nilotic scene including nilometer with marked cubits with Greek numerals, IZ = 17 and IH = 18.

Q10. What do we know about floods and droughts in Egypt?

A10. We know a lot as, in addition to measurements of the Nile level, we have documentary evidence for several natural events, along with social reactions they triggered. Most famous is the long-lasting drought referred to in the Bible (Genesis; the story of pharaoh’s dream with the seven fat and the seven lean cows³) and confirmed by archeologists; its consequences were prevented by wise management through storage of grains. A less well-known event, for which however we have reliable written evidence (by the Arab physician, philosopher, historian, grammarian, and traveler Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī, who stayed in Egypt in that period) is the drought of the year 1200 AD. The writer reports extreme social behaviours triggered by the resulting famine—with one of the most horrific reactions in human history (cannibalism, including parents eating their children).

1. Relevant is the following quotation by Socrates:

Καὶ τὴν σοφίαν ὡσαύτως τοὺς μὲν ἀργυρίου τῷ βουλομένῳ πωλοῦντας σοφιστὰς ὥσπερ πόρνους ἀποκαλοῦσιν. (Those who offer wisdom to all comers for money are known as sophists, just like prostitutors; Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.6.13, quoting Socrates.)

2. The interested reader may find all details in the following paper:

D. Koutsoyiannis, and N. Mamassis, From mythology to science: the development of scientific hydrological concepts in the Greek antiquity and its relevance to modern hydrology, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 25, 2419–2444, doi: 10.5194/hess-25-2419-2021, 2021.

3. Once this story was being taught in schools or related in family before school (I remember well my older sister Ioanna telling me this story long before I went to the elementary school). But not any more. I often asked my students (5th year in the School of Civil Engineering) what they know about this story and they know nothing. The decline of the school and education is another sign of the decadence we live in, to which I may refer in another post. Anyhow, the booklet contains extracts from the Bible and several Greek original texts, along with translations in English, so that the avid reader consult them.