Book contents
- The Nile Delta
- The Nile Delta
- Copyright page
- For Mona Abaza
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Call Me by My Names
- 3 The Nile Delta before the Pharaohs
- 4 The Khetem-Border-Posts in the Delta during the New Kingdom
- 5 New Land amongst New Rivers?
- 6 The Mareotis Area
- 7 From Memphis to Alexandria
- 8 Growing with the Empire? From Village to Town
- 9 Mapping the Cult of Christian Saints in the Nile Delta from the Fifth to the Ninth Century CE
- 10 Alexandria
- 11 Imperial Power, Tribal Settlement and Fiscal Revolts in the Early Islamic Delta (Seventh to Ninth Century CE)
- 12 The Nile as Nexus
- 13 Water and Prices
- 14 Water Development in the Medieval Western Delta
- 15 The Nile Delta in European Cartography, 1200–1800
- 16 Just Passing Through?
- 17 Reclaiming the Archive
- 18 Short Commentary on Accounting Documents from a Vanishing Cotton Estate (ʿIzba) in the Nile Delta
- Index
- References
14 - Water Development in the Medieval Western Delta
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2024
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Book contents
- The Nile Delta
- The Nile Delta
- Copyright page
- For Mona Abaza
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Call Me by My Names
- 3 The Nile Delta before the Pharaohs
- 4 The Khetem-Border-Posts in the Delta during the New Kingdom
- 5 New Land amongst New Rivers?
- 6 The Mareotis Area
- 7 From Memphis to Alexandria
- 8 Growing with the Empire? From Village to Town
- 9 Mapping the Cult of Christian Saints in the Nile Delta from the Fifth to the Ninth Century CE
- 10 Alexandria
- 11 Imperial Power, Tribal Settlement and Fiscal Revolts in the Early Islamic Delta (Seventh to Ninth Century CE)
- 12 The Nile as Nexus
- 13 Water and Prices
- 14 Water Development in the Medieval Western Delta
- 15 The Nile Delta in European Cartography, 1200–1800
- 16 Just Passing Through?
- 17 Reclaiming the Archive
- 18 Short Commentary on Accounting Documents from a Vanishing Cotton Estate (ʿIzba) in the Nile Delta
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter explores water development in the Buhayra province (western Delta), mainly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, to examine the canal system and how it was developed. Buhayra province, an administrative prefecture in Ottoman Egypt, was located on the route that connected Alexandria to Cairo. From the early Islamic period down to the Mamluk period (1250–1517), the province had seen the development of canals for navigation and irrigation. Although Mamluk sources describe these water development works, we know less about them through the Ottoman period due to a lack of contemporary accounts. The most accessible and seemingly accurate source on the rural landscape is the Napoleonic map from Description de l’Égypte; this map, however, only reflects the landscape at the end of the eighteenth century. Such a situation makes the Ottoman period a blank space in the province’s history. This chapter aims to analyse what happened in the Ottoman period to those canals developed in the Mamluk period to understand, as sequentially as possible, how the canals and the landscape along them changed. The analysis also gives us a glimpse of the fringes of Ottoman rural administration, revealing how the canals were maintained at the time.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Nile DeltaHistories from Antiquity to the Modern Period, pp. 466 - 491Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024
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