Spiritual ritual and bureaucratic rigour were therefore both needed to maintain prosperity, and the nilometers themselves were usually built inside temple complexes. The same priests who read these scales would oversee the religious festivals that celebrated the floods. ‘The flooding of the Nile and fertility of the land were linked directly to the pharaoh’s rule,’ says Salima. ‘So, if you get lots of bad floods, that means the gods are pissed off with the pharaoh, and, by extension, with all of Egypt.’ In these circumstances, measuring the depth of the Nile seems more than a practical chore:
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