Other Natures. Clara Bosak-Schroeder
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ἄλλο τι ἢ οἱ ταύτῃ οἰκέοντες Αἰγυπτίων πεινήσουσι, εἰ μήτε γε ὕσεταί σφι ἡ χώρη μήτε ὁ ποταμὸς οἷός τε ἔσται ἐς τὰς ἀρούρας ὑπερβαίνειν.
If, as I have said before, the land below Memphis (which is now increasing) should rise at the same rate as in the past, how could those living in Egypt not starve, provided that the land is not watered by rain nor the river able to irrigate the fields? (Hdt. 2.14)
The Nile’s best feature, its ability to provide land and irrigate it, will one day (Herodotus surmises) lead the Nile to create more land than it can water, causing drought and famine. Unlike animals in the Histories, rivers are not automatically regulated by the gods (7.10, 3.108).56 Instead, they are judged by their effects on the human community; human well-being determines whether the Nile has crossed natural boundaries.
When rivers transgress, human beings are responsible for taming their excesses. Min, Egypt’s first king, dams and diverts the Nile to protect Memphis from being overwatered (Hdt. 2.99). When the river “steals” (Hdt. 2.109.2: pareloito; cf. Diod. Sic. 1.81.2) someone’s allotted land, the Egyptians respond by inventing the art of land surveying (Hdt. 2.109.3: geōmetriē). Should the Nile create more land than it can irrigate, as Herodotus fears, perhaps a ruler will build erga to keep the Nile within bounds. Diodorus reports this very eventuality: Uchoreus, Egyptian king and founder of Memphis, builds lakes and mounds to protect the people and their livestock from the Nile’s floods (1.50.5) and digs canals to increase the Nile’s “usefulness” (1.63.1: euchrēstian). There is no neutral “background” in which only human beings “artificially” intervene. Instead, the tug of war between humans and the Nile is ongoing, producing works upon works for the historian and the human community.
Both Herodotus and Diodorus highlight rivers, especially the Nile, in their accounts of the making of the world. In one sense, this is not surprising. The Greeks considered rivers divine, although evidence for cult activity is scarce.57 As Brooke Holmes has shown, the river Scamander in Homer’s Iliad is a powerful force, a model to which Herodotus and Diodorus may have looked in their representations of the Nile. Egyptian informants also may have shaped Greek writers’ understanding of rivers.58 Until Roman conquest, the Egyptians did not worship the river itself but rather its inundation, Hapi.59 In Egyptian theology, human kings joined Hapi in the regular re-creation of the world by building temples, which represented earth.60 Although primordial waters are common images in world cultures, kings’ and the Nile’s ongoing participation in creation offered Herodotus and Diodorus a model for describing how humans and rivers interact.61
Egyptian texts like the Hymn to the Nile, in circulation at least by the New Kingdom period (1550–1069 BCE), credit the river with both Egypt’s natural abundance and cultural achievements.62 Without Hapi, the god of the Nile flood, there are
No raw goods for finishing handwork,
no cloth for fashioning clothes,
No decking out offspring of rich men,
no shadowing beautiful eyes,
For lack of him, the trees all in ruins
—no perfumes to linger on anyone.
(9.7–12)63
Egyptian texts emphasize that the Nile could be both creative and destructive, and that it was the job of the king, as the enforcer of Ma’at, the principle of order, to regulate the Nile on behalf of the Egyptian people.64 Kings commonly commemorated their role in opening canals and their nilometers, devices for measuring the Nile floods, were famous in Greece and Rome.65 Kings were responsible for rebuilding if the Nile floods damaged Egyptian settlements, and they claimed to turn the destructive power of the Nile against Egypt’s enemies.66 Sometimes the destruction could not be overcome; when the Nile’s Pelusiac branch filled with silt, the capital city of the nineteenth dynasty (1292–1189 BCE), Pi-Ramesse, had to be permanently abandoned.67 The Egyptian sources that Herodotus and Diodorus drew upon lived with the Nile’s annual gift as well as its potential for violence.
Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s texts reflect a portrait of royal and Nilotic action consistent with what we find in Egyptian literature. Like Egyptian texts, the Histories and Library document the ongoing process of creation as it is carried out by rulers and rivers; indeed, in both Greek and Egyptian texts it is often the ruler’s job to keep rivers in line. The process of creation is neither pregiven nor a pure cultural construct. Instead, both Nile and king make the world and are judged by how their actions benefit the Egyptian people.
HOW BOUNDARIES COME TO MATTER
Although Herodotus and Diodorus do not present humans intervening artificially in an otherwise fixed landscape, neither are their worlds constantly in flux. Rulers and rivers take concrete actions that remake the world, which persists until it is remade again. When Greek historians document erga, they reveal and document the flexibility of the world’s land- and waterscapes and simultaneously create a stable world, fixed at the time of writing or performance, for their readers to apprehend.68 In particular, by freighting certain boundaries with narrative meaning, they materialize these boundaries as fixed and “natural,” and their transgression, for example, Xerxes’s bridge across the Hellespont, as unnatural. And because different historians see the world differently and draw on different erga, their histories result in different demarcations of the “natural.”
We can see how different boundaries materialize in Herodotus’s account of his predecessors and how they divide the world.69 In Herodotus’s text, the borders between continents are a matter of debate, and he takes time to critique the Ionian Greek division of the world into Europe, Asia, and Libya, with the Nile dividing Libya from Asia (2.16). This schema is absurd, Herodotus argues, because it leaves Egypt split between continents. Instead, he claims that Libya and Asia are divided by “the boundaries of the Egyptians” (2.17.1: tous Aiguptiōn orous), and that Egypt is all the land “inhabited by the Egyptians” (2.17.1: hupo tōn Aiguptiōn). Herodotus returns to this critique in book 4, disparaging the Ionians threefold division of continents and asserting instead that the earth is “one” (4.45.2: miēi), but concluding that he will abide by their “conventions” (4.45.5: toisi . . . nomizomenoisi).
This critique, especially in book 4, has led scholars to conclude that Herodotus considers continental divisions “mere” conventions that bind him against his will.70 While Herodotus is certainly troubled by the process that has led to the threefold division, and especially the naming of continents, he nevertheless asserts his own definition of continental borders. In book 2, he says that the “borders of the Egyptians” divide Egypt from the other continents, defining nations by the people who inhabit them. Yet we also know, from his description of the Nile’s activity, that the human population of Egypt depends on the Nile’s extent and the gift of the earth that it provides and irrigates (2.11). The borders of the Egyptians define Egypt, but the Nile has shaped how far the Egyptians extend. Neither human convention nor riverine agency has made Egypt on its own.71 Instead, Herodotus’s inquiry (historia) materializes Egypt as a flexible cocreation of the Nile and the Egyptian people.
The relationship between historia and erga accords with Karen Barad’s philosophy, which explains how different accounts of the world demarcate boundaries between objects. One of Barad’s most famous examples is a fetus as it is being imaged by ultrasound. Whereas we are used to speaking of the fetus as an object separate from the pregnant body and the ultrasound that sees it, Barad argues that fetus and ultrasound are an inextricable phenomenon. By seeing the fetus through the apparatus of the ultrasound, the fetus emerges as an object with boundaries that can be demarcated from the rest of the pregnant body. As Barad says, “The transducer does not allow us to peer innocently at the fetus, nor does