Egypt has been called the gift of the Nile, for without the river it could not exist as a fertile, populous country, let alone have sustained a great civilization five thousand years ago. Its character and history have been shaped by the stark contrast between the fecund Nile Valley and its Delta, and the arid wastes that surround them. To the ancient Egyptians, this was the homeland or Kemet - the Black Land of dark alluvium, where life and civilization flourished as the benign gods intended - as opposed to the desert that represented death and chaos, ruled by Seth, the bringer of storms and catastrophes.

 

Kemet 's existence depended on an annual miracle of rebirth from aridity, as the Nile rose to spread its life-giving waters and fertilizing silt over the exhausted land during the season of inundation. Once the flood had subsided, the fellaheen (peasants) simply planted crops in the mud, waited for an abundant harvest, and then relaxed over summer. While empires rose and fell, this way of life persisted essentially unchanged for over 240 generations, until the Aswan Dam put an end to the inundation in 1967 - a breathtaking period of continuity considering that Jesus lived only about eighty generations ago.

This continuity and ancient history is literally underfoot. Almost every Nile town and village is built upon layers of previous settlements - pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Roman and Coptic - whose ancient names, modified and Arabized, have often survived. When treasure-hunting "archeologists" first turned their attention to the ancient temples and tombs in the 1830s, they had to sift through metres of sand and debris before reaching their goal. Yet the centuries of burial preserved a panoply of ancient reliefs and carvings that would otherwise have been defaced by Coptic or Muslim iconoclasts, who hacked away at the pagan gods on the accessible friezes, pillars and ceilings, and plundered masonry for their own churches and mosques.

After a century and a half of excavation by just about every Western nation - and by the Egyptians since independence - the Nile's monuments constitute the greatest open-air museum in the world. Revealed along its banks are several thousand tombs (Thebes alone has over 900) and scores of temples : so many, in fact, that most visitors feel satiated by just a fraction of this legacy.

To enjoy the Valley, it's best to be selective and mix sightseeing with felucca rides on the river, roaming around bazaars and camel markets, or attending the odd moulid. Most visitors succeed in this by heading straight for Upper Egypt , travelling by train or air to Luxor or Aswan , then making day-trips to the sights within easy range of either base - most notably the cult temple at Edfu - in addition to exploring the New Kingdom temples and tombs of Karnak and the Theban Necropolis from Luxor. Due to attacks on tourists and an ongoing conflict between Islamic militants and the security forces, the stretch of the Nile Valley known as Middle Egypt is considered a risky area for tourists, though it's still possible to visit the temples of Dendara and Abydos, beyond Qena.