Knowing the Nile: Landscape, Empire, and Engineering the Past in Ottoman Egypt, 1713-1863
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Elimam, Samaa
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Elimam, Samaa. 2023. Knowing the Nile: Landscape, Empire, and Engineering the Past in Ottoman Egypt, 1713-1863. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Abstract
Most historical studies of the Lower Nile in the nineteenth century focus largely on the ways in which expert engineers dominated the river through large-scale public works like barrages and dams. This dissertation asks the reverse—how did the Nile landscape demand and produce different methods of knowing? And how did knowing the Nile in these ways require assembling its past? Drawing together agricultural almanacs, surveying manuscripts, printed treatises, and drawings, the study examines the encounter between a set of artifacts and three knowledge communities in Ottoman Egypt—peasant farmers (fellahin), Muslim scholars (‘ulamā), and state engineers (muhandisin). It argues that these actors reckoned with the limits of their own land literacies as they collided and collaborated to form a knowledge system based on the particularities of the terrain.Each chapter revolves around one method of knowing the Nile: cultivating, surveying, translating, and engineering the past. Under eighteenth-century Ottoman rule, peasants practiced cultivation through filaḥa, a term meaning both agriculture and success, which involved a set of sensory techniques that complemented the seasonal rhythms of Nile time. Meanwhile, scholars at the mosque and madrasa of al-Azhar in Cairo copied, verified, and circulated popular manuscripts in what they termed the “uncommon science” of land surveying (misaḥa) which supported a logic of decentralized landholding in the Egyptian countryside. This rich scholarly manuscript culture served in turn as a knowledge infrastructure for the Ottoman-Egyptian viceregal state founding of the Muhandiskhana, Cairo’s school of engineering, in 1816, whose primary aim was to train a new class of engineers in surveying. Former director of the school and an influential figure in Egypt’s industrial projects, Ottoman-Armenian British-educated engineer Yusuf Hekekyan Bey spent years surveying the geography and geology of the Nile landscape. His encounters with local classification and measurement systems, as well as his close study of ancient instruments including the Nilometer river gauge, inspired an elaborate theory of history based on what he called a “monumental system” in the Nile Valley. Across the first half of the nineteenth century, the dissertation shows how the convergence of existing and new surveying methods, media, and actors constituted a complex economy of technical knowledge specific to the Nile landscape. It concludes at a moment just when that landscape was beginning to confront its own attenuation.
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