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The most important natural resource in Egypt, in ancient times as well as modern, is the Nile River. Reflecting the importance of the Nile, the Egyptians from the Middle Kingdom on called their land Kemet, which means the "Black Land" of the floodplain where they cultivated their crops, in contrast to the deserts to either side, which were known as Deshret, the "Red Land" where any kind of cultivation was impossible.

Without the Nile, there would have been no fertile valley in which ancient Egyptian civilization could have arisen. Cereal agriculture, which was introduced into Egypt from southwest Asia, was the economic base of pharaonic Egypt. The special environmental and climatic conditions of the Egyptian Nile Valley greatly enhanced the productivity of emmer wheat and barley cultivation without the long-term problems (especially salinization) that threatened agriculture elsewhere in the ancient Near East. Cereal agriculture thrived in Egypt as nowhere else in the ancient world. What the farmers grew fed everyone else - not only the king and elite, but also all of the fulltime workers employed by the state, from bureaucrats to laborers who built the royal tombs and cult temples.

Unlike agriculture in North America and Europe, rainfall is not a significant factor for cultivation in Egypt. The annual flooding of the Nile provided the needed moisture for cultivation on the fertile floodplain. Most of the water of the Nile originates far to the south of Egypt in highland Ethiopia, beginning as heavy rains there from June to sometime in September. Daniel Eugene Stanley, a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution who has analyzed deposits of silts at the mouth of the Nile Delta, has shown that most of these silts came from Ethiopia, carried via the Blue Nile, which originates at Lake Tana in northern Ethiopia. The Atbara River, which feeds into the Nile at Atbara in northern Sudan, also begins in highland Ethiopia, but the Blue Nile has a far greater volume of water. Flowing rapidly through high altitude, mountainous regions in northern Ethiopia, the Blue Nile and Atbara River have created deep canyons and much of their water passes directly into the Nile.

The White Nile, which originates in Lake Victoria in northern Tanzania, also provides some of the water of the Egyptian Nile (about 10 percent). But some of the volume of the White Nile does not reach Egypt. It is lost in a huge swampy region in southern Sudan known as the Sudd, where the flow of the river is sluggish and much evaporation occurs.

The confluence of the Blue and White Niles is at Khartoum, the modern capital of Sudan in the northern part of the country. From Khartoum northward the river is called the Nile. North of Khartoum there is little seasonal rainfall, although the northern extent of the rainfall belt, which first brings rains to northern Ethiopia, can change periodically. . . 

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