From the Vault: The Nile Inundation

let's dive right in. Hail to you, hoppy sprung from Earth, come to nourish Egypt of secret ways at darkness by day, to whom his followers sing, who floods the fields that ray has made to nourish all who thirst. Let's drink the waterless desert his due descending from the sky. Welcome to stot to Blow your Mind product and by heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going

to be talking about inundation. That's right. And we we opened there with a reading from the translation from m Lithium in Ancient Egyptian Literature, a book of Readings, Volume one, The Old and Middle Kingdoms, um. And this is referring to a particular deity who is associated with, but not the sole representation or embodiment of the inundation the annual flooding of the Nile. Right, So this would be the

god we've been saying. Hoppy. He He is a god whose name in English is usually spelled h a p y uh. And I have not I searched in Vain to find a correct pronunciation for this name and could not, But I think it's Hoppy yeah. And I think also Hoppy sounds a little less like happy, Like I have an inclination to not want to call a god by the name happy, but at the same time, as we'll discuss so later on, like this is ultimately a very joyful deity. Everybody loves Hoppy. Hoppy is happy, so it

wouldn't be the worst faux pa. Now, one thing I like about Hoppy is that Hoppy is the god that embodies not not just a physical geo fact, not just an object in the world, but a process within a geo fact. So Hoppy is not the god of the Nile, but the god of the seasonal cyclical flooding of the Nile. Right. Or or you can even get more specific in saying that he is he is one of various gods that

is tied up with the inundation. Uh So, depending on like what aspects of the inundation you're focusing on, uh, be it positive or negative, or the origin, etcetera, there are different deities that can come into play. And it's it's super fascinating to break it down because ultimately you're talking about something that that that was so central to ancient Egyptian life and therefore became so central to their

their worldview and cosmology. It makes sense that you would have a cast of deities as opposed to a single deity. Summing it up, now, Rob, did you end up thinking about doing an episode on the Inundation of the Nile because of that earlier episode we did this year on

the Tempest Stela Um? I think it was every time we've touched on something that involves ancient Egypt, I've been reminded that this is a great episode idea, or at least I don't know it's a great episode, Dada, but one that I was interested in covering um just because I was I was reading a book that I'm going to reference here in a bit, uh pick this up around Christmas. I think Egyptian Mythology, A Guide to God's Goddesses and Traditions of Ancient Egypt by Geraldine pinch Um,

and Uh, part of it is encyclopediaic and cyclopedic. Part of it is more just an overview of Egyptian mythology and UM and Egyptian history at least as as much as is necessary to understand the mythology and um. And this author went into this affair amount and UM. I just hadn't thought about it, uh in these terms before,

or certainly in this much detail. And I thought this would be a fascinating topic to look at because not only is it a chance to sort of geek out on Egyptian mythology and talk about, you know, ancient civilizations, but also I feel like a trend that that we've found on the show before is any time we take a particular mythology and analyze it and try and break it down like, it helps us understand other mythologies more, and it it helps us understand sort of the whole

human exercise itself a little better. And in this case, I think we end up getting into some very interesting scientific territory as well. Yeah, absolutely, um, and and they're they're actually actually future episode of stuff to blow your mind. We can do that kind of um launch off of some of the broader themes that we end up exploring a little bit in this episode. So we are going to be talking a bit about mythology here at at

the top of the episode. And as we've discussed before in the show, there are numerous angles from which to approach a given cultures mythology. That there are tales and traditions that emerges a way of explaining the physical world, to explain the origins or the end of things, to tackle questions about life and death, and to ponder a

great many contemplations of objective and subjective reality. Uh. They can provide a framework by which to interpret our lives, give our lives meaning or to say, empower rulers, and even to provide creative outlets and and provide entertainment. So we don't want to leave anyone with the idea that there's just one way to interpret a myth and cosmology, one way to to dissect it, one way to skin the cat as if you will, Nor do we want to limit the capacity for creativity and complex thought in

ancient people. But without a doubt, environment and place are one of the factors that influence the creation of a mythology, because of course mountain gods don't emerge simply because the mountains exist. No, there has to be a connection of experience. Uh. And and this, uh, this made me pick up a

book I hadn't looked at in a while. I think I picked this up in college um by Jonathan Z. Smith, titled to Take Place, and in it, uh, Smith quotes Alan Gusso, an environmental artist, who said, quote, the catalyst that converts any physical location, any environment, if you will, into a place is the process of experiencing deeply. A place is a piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by feelings. Oh yeah, I think that is so true. The world is full of natural environments, but

within those natural environments are places. And what makes a place a place is the is the part of the environment that you remember and talk about. Yeah. So, so on one level, you can go very specific with this. For instance, Smith's book deals primarily with ritual in relation

to place, in particular constructed ritual environments. But you can also you can pull out I think, and you can look at at the bigger picture, and you can look at something like a great river, uh, large bodies of water, mountains, etcetera. And you know these, you know, the mythology is full of of this relationship between humans and there and then

then their environments. You know, how how we feel about it, how we interact with it, for sure, but then how we feel about it, what hopes are tied up in it, what fears are tied up in it, the order, the chaos and uh and so a lot of that is very visible, uh in is going to be very visible in our discussion about the Nile. So to kick things off, let's just remind everybody a bit about Egypt and the Nile.

Uh So, Egypt, the Egypt you know from a modern map, is located in the northeastern corner of Africa, but it's technically a transcontinental country because it is it's uh. It also includes a very southwestern corner of Asia that's connected by land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. There's a

very long history of human civilization here. Rock carvings date back to roughly ten thousand b C. Though the pre Dynastic period generally the earliest Egyptian period discussed by historians stretches from fifty five hundred to thirty two hundred b C. Now, for starters, as as we did, we definitely mentioned in the Tempest Stela episode UH that also dealt with with ancient Egypt, the northern portion of Egypt, closest to the Mediterranean was thought of as Lower Egypt, while Upper Egypt

is the region that is to the south. Furthermore, we know the world of the known world was much smaller to the ancient Egyptians. The full extent and size of Africa was unknown, and as Geraldine Pinch points out in her book, the known world for the ancient Egyptians in the third millennium extended roughly from modern Greece and Turkey in the north to Ethiopia and the south, and from Libya or what is modern day Libya in the west

to what is currently Iraq in the east. Now, the defining characteristic of Egypt is of course the mighty Nile River, which cuts through its center and empties through the Nile Delta into the Mediterranean Sea. The Nile itself flowing north out of its flows north out of its two primary tributaries the Blue Nile and the White Nile. The Blue Nile stems from Lake Tana and modern day Ethiopia, and the White Nile stems from Lake Victoria further south on

the borders of Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. It's worth noting that Egypt itself gets extremely little rain. Some of some of the northern areas. I was reading a little bit of rain every year, like maybe a few millimeters, but most of the country gets basically no rain at all on average. And uh, that's pretty interesting to consider, like being completely tied to a river or tributaries of that

river for your only sources of water. There there is all most you can almost count on the fact that no rain is going to be coming down out of the sky. It's just the river or bust. But it's also interesting that while it has been that way for

thousands of years, it was not always that way. That's right, if you go back to the the truly ancient path like basically prehistoric egypt Um, you go back, you go back to this period of time, and you know, for thousands of years, northern Egypt and northern Africa in general had a wetter climate, grasslands and animal population stretched across areas that are now just complete desert, and the the

the life that you would find there. The animals also included nomadic peoples who ranged across the grasslands, while of course still other humans enjoyed the rich environment along the coasts of the Great River. Yeah, and this damp period in ancient prehistoric Africa is one of the reasons that you can, for example, find beautiful rock carvings at places, say in the middle of the Sahara Desert that could not support human life today or not, and not a

sustained sedentary life there today. Yeah. So so yeah, these areas that are now desert were once um more more filled with life, but then the land began to dry out and that left the river as the main thing,

really the only thing to cling to and pinch. Rights that this would have been a period of not only great climatic change but also cultural change, and that it might have helped shape the idea in Egyptian mythology that the world was once different, and of course we see this in other cosmologies as well, the idea that there was a world before, that there was a life before. But it's interesting to think of that about that in

terms of of of climate change. Yeah, totally so by the fourth millennium BC, agricultural communities, you know, it certainly cropped up along the Nile, and uh, the resulting world of the ancient Egyptians was rather unique. So you had host wild deserts that were difficult to cross that made up nine of Egyptian territory, cutting them off from uh, from from these uh you know, other lands to the east, west, and south and also sufferance serving as a buffer zone

between them and these lands. These sort of empty lands were called the red lands. Um. Though Uh, it's also worth noting that you have mountains in some of the desert regions that did offer mineral wealth. So it wasn't just it wasn't simply a case of well, there's nothing out there that that was of use to the Egyptians. Uh, but certainly in terms of like the thing that gave you life on a daily basis, that that was tied

to the Nile. Meanwhile, to the north you had where the Nihil empties into the Mediterranean Sea, you have the vast salt marsh, and and then of course the Mediterranean itself. And Pinch notes that the Egyptians were never enthusiastic seafares, and they're kind of a rarity and being one of the very few coastal cultures to worship no deities of the sea. That's interesting. I never thought of that before. Yeah, because I mean you think about certainly, um uh, you

know Greek traditions. You know, you see the mighty role that Poseidon plays, and not only Poseidon, but various other um see gods and goddesses minor and major that we're you know that that that we're also worshiped, and sometimes we're worshiped instead of Poseidon, and all kind of are kind of caught up in the more or less canonized

versions of of Greek mythology that we have today. Well, in Greek and Roman mythology, I think you can absolutely see this duality of the ocean embodied in the gods and monsters that are associated with it. Because the sea is a place of great opportunity, so it's often sort of associated with wealth somehow, but it is also a place of great danger, and it's temperamental and it's unpredictable. Uh. You know, Poseidon is often just like the jerky ist

of gods. Yeah, and so we're gonna see a lot of that same duality in the ancient Egyptian treatment of the Nile, because, I mean, a river is not a docile thing, especially when you're talking about a great river like like the Nile, which is depending on how you're measuring it against the Amazon, it's either the longest river on Earth or like the second longest. It is it is undoubtedly a great river, uh, and which means it has great power to both create and destroy. And key

to that is the inundation. So the Nihil is subject to This annual inundation occurs between May and August UH, caused by a combination of monsoon rains and melting snow in the mountains of Ethiopia, and as a result, the Nile River expands, the Nile River explodes, It floods low lying lands and the Nile River basin, and the Nile delta Uh. Not only does it water the lands, it also deposits a thick layer of silt, so the waters recede, they leave behind rich and fertile soil that is ideal

for agricultural use. Yeah, and this proves really important in things you'll later see, like the technology that the ancient Egyptians figured out in order to irrigate their crops, which involved um often ways of constructing dikes and canals and stuff where you would let in the waters of the flooding Nile as it comes in from the highlands. Uh and and then you would just let that water sort of sit there and soak in the in the irrigation ditches for a while before you'd eventually let it run

back out into the river later on. And I think the idea there was not just that it would moisten the soil, but that you were you were trying to give it time for the mineral rich silt that comes down from the highlands and the river to settle onto the bottom and and sort of bring the vitamins I know they're not vitamins, but the but the minerals and uh and chemical riches of that soil to help put put the nutrients into the soil in your fields that

your crops need. Yeah, the link here to irrigate ation is U is certainly worth noting because uh, with with the inundation, we're talking about natural irrigation. And this is this is where our you know, our our our ancestors understanding of of what is would be possible with with unnatural irrigation man made irrigation. Uh, you know what they could do in terms of okay, well, you know we have this flooding that occurs, but what if we try to control the flooding? And this is of course not

a tail specific to um to Egypt. We see this in uh In in all the the the great civilizations of old, you know, the the importance of the floodplain and then the the eventual technology that emerges in managing the waters in order to enable agriculture to continue to flourish in a way that could be you know controlled. Oh there are great Chinese myths about controlling the flow

of rivers. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, So this is this is a trend, like like a referenced earlier, Like we could we could go from here and do a whole series of episodes, invention based episodes just on um irrigation technology, because human history is basically a story of humans figuring out the best ways to manage their water supply. Yeah,

that's exactly right. But I wanted to mention another aspect of the Nile and I know you've got thoughts about this too, which is that so we were saying that sometimes gods of the sea are kind of fickle, they're kind of unpredictable there that they can be dangerous at the same time that they can represent great wealth, you know, you you can the sea can be your livelihood, but also it can bring storms that crash you against the rocks. And the same thing can be very true of the Nile,

but in a different way. So on the banks of the Nile, for for the farmers and the crops that support Egyptian civilization, there would be this flooding season that would allow you to moisten your fields and nourish your crops. But if the flooding season fails in either direction, if the waters either do not climb high enough or if they climb too high, it's disaster, right yeah, yeah, If yeah, you don't get enough water, then you're not gonna get

enough flooding and you're not gonna grow enough food. Um, if you get just the right amount, then it's perfect because you're gonna get enough food to feed the entire population plus more. You know, that's surplus. That is such a vital aspect of of the rise and and and you know, and sustaining nature of civilizations. But then yeah, if you get too much water, then it's overflowing of the flood zones. Then it's destroying communities, it's drowning people,

it's causing death and destruction. Yeah, and you saw this, uh, this version of the calamity coming through in one interpretation of the situation that was being described in The Tempest Steela. I remember there was this idea that the Nile is flooding for some reason, and it says that there are well, there's one passage that I think was somewhat open to interpretation, but it sounded like it was talking about the bodies of dead people floating like skiffs of papyrus in the water.

And uh and so yeah, obviously like if the water has come too high, I can destroy your towns. Yeah. So uh. Pinch nicely summarizes this by saying, quote, the whole welfare of the country depended on this one phenomenon. Uh. And because of this, the ancient Egyptians seem to have felt both uniquely blessed and uniquely vulnerable. And um, yeah,

that's that's interesting to think about it. Again. You see shades of this in a in a lot of mythologies that the idea that you're ultimately depending on on some sort of you know, natural abb and flow that you do not control. There's a certain amount of chaos uh to this system, even if there is uh still some order that you can cling to. Now um as we mentioned earlier, they're multiple Egyptian gods and goddess is tied

up with the inundation and ultimately with the Nile. Uh. Oh, well, if you if you were ever read anywhere, if you see like a god or goddess of the ancient Egyptian pantheon described as the god of the Nile, then that is that isn't that is at least an oversimplification of things, because there is no one true god of the Nile.

There's no one uh central god even of the inundation, but rather different divine beings that represent different parts of it, which which is uh which also me I think makes a lot of sense because again, if this river and this annual flooding is so central to life and your view of the the of the universe, then it's going to be too They're too complicated to have one figure, one sort of you know, humanoid apparition summing it all up, well, yes,

and I think you can see ways in which the inundation, the yearly inundation of the Nile, took up so much of the brain space of ancient Egyptian peoples that it becomes a central sort of meta for for anything that is overwhelming or unpredictable, or bringing great great riches or

bringing bringing great destruction. I was looking at a different part of Geraldine Pinch's handbook on Egyptian mythology, and there's one part where she's talking about one of the stories of the poisoning of the god Ray and I think the story I believe is called the True Name of Ray. And uh, there's a part where she quotes from the from a translation of the text that said, after he's been poisoned, that the poison had overwhelmed his body, like

the inundation overwhelms everything in its path. So it's just this ready made metaphor. It's the imagery that easily comes to mind whenever you're thinking about, uh, any number of different dynamics. Yeah. Yeah, And the same way that we depend so much on various technologies today, is there there, you know, to draw our metaphors from to make sense

of what we're doing and the world we're living in. Well, I mean, I might compare it to the metaphor of like the metaphors of the seasons and many other cultures, that the inundation metaphor could be as common and easily accessed when one is searching for something with which to compare the thing you're talking about right now to the way that we so easily reach for metaphor, is about winter turning into spring, you know, spring and sprong or

something like that. Is the winter of our discontent? Exactly? Yeah, and you would say something more on the lines of now is the inundation of our discontent or our content depending on how it goes, It's in inundation time in America. Uh so, you know, we have more on on the deities in a bit, but basically the inundation itself was seen as part of the divine order of things or or MOTT which is generally spelled M A A T in English, and the creator of all things, though ultimately

there's less emphasis on this. In an ancient Egyptian mythology is the Sun, uh you know, the the ancient Egyptians, where the children of the Sun and the Egyptian world existed. At the center. Uh and in its divine order. Uh, you know, all encompassing and in surrounding it, you had the primeval waters of None, out of which the creator God emerged, and the nile and the inundation extend out

of the nun So they're flowing out of that as well. Yeah, and what you said reminds me of something else I was just reading about recently, about the idea of primeval waters. One thing that's really interesting about a lot of mythic geography or cosmology around the world is the idea of waters that are beyond the mundane waters. You know, so you've got your rivers, lakes, and seas that are just sort of part of the world. But then there are

waters beyond. And these could be beyond some kind of physical horizon or beyond some kind of like time or metaphysical horizon. Uh, so they're there are often waters that exist underneath the earth, and some mythic cosmology's or waters that surround the continents, or even waters that sur round the sky. I mean a lot of ancient people's thought that the sky was somehow full of a flood, and you could easily see that, you know, when the when the skies break open and it rains. That's water falling

down from above. But then also there are waters that there are tons of stories about waters that existed and flooded everything before the creation of the world. I was reading about this in the Encyclopedia of Creation Myths by the scholar David Lehming, who argues that no motif occurs more often in creation myths around the globe than that

of primordial waters. It is the single most common theme of cosmic origin stories in all of human culture, uh and that it's central to a number of different kinds of creation myths, like the creation out of chaos myths, the earth diver type creation myths. All of these have waters that existed before there were lands and and all of the you know, living things on them and all of the order there. There's some kind of previous time

of an expanse of undifferentiated ocean. And so the question is like, why are there so many creation myths involving this landless cosmic ocean before before the current order of the world. And Leaming actually has thoughts about why that is so. Just to read from his entry here, he says there are several reasons for the ubiquity of this motif. All cultures naturally recognize water as a necessary source of life and survival, making it a useful symbol of creative fertility.

Large masses of water are uncontrollable and therefore aptly representative of chaos. In tandem, these two symbolic functions lead us to the idea of potential as yet unformed creation. Oh and he and he also talks about the idea of waters as traditionally often having UH sort of a divine gender associations like uh waters in some ways being mythically associated with female qualities and having to do with maternal waters and and creation of the earth as a kind

of birth. But the central idea is that water is necessary for every aspect of life, and yet the oceans are untamed and untamable sort of chaos embodied. And this these two things come together to create the the ultimate human vision of a chaos of potential before the world. We know, Yeah, absolutely, we see that. Yeah, and we see they reflected here as well. Yeah. So I don't know. It's like when whenever I picture the creation myth that says creation from the void or creation from chaos, I'm

always picturing space. You know, my my brain has been fed with science fiction. So I'm picturing inner interplanetary interstellar space. Maybe I can see a starfield in the background, But that wouldn't make sense because if it's supposed to be creation out of nothing or from chaos, there wouldn't be stars yet that's some kind of order. It would just have to be space. But but really, maybe to be more in the tradition of of ancient human thinking, I

should be picturing waters. Again, that's not true for every culture and every creation myth, but it's shockingly common. Yeah. So so again in the in the Egyptian tradition, we have Noon that that's the primeval waters, and Noon feeds the Nile and the inundation Um. And then on top of that we also have the foreign lands and deserts that border Egypt, and these are realms of chaos or is fet but um. Again, the Nile was thought to flow from Noon and therefore is the work of the

Creator God. And there are several different versions of the Creator God Uh. And specifically, the floodwaters were said to flow from the two secret caverns formed by the Creator Sandals. And so this is where we get into some of the not all, but some of the the major deities that are tied up with the Nile and specifically the the inundation. So the creator god Kenum guards over these caverns, it said, and also could be thought to control the inundation.

And he was often depicted as a human with the head of a long horned ram, and was said to have created human beings from the wet clay left over from the inundation. Thus he's a god of of pottery as well, kind of a god of creative technology, and like a lot Like like all gods and goddesses, and in long standing cultures, his exact role shifts over time. There's an evolution, there's their changes that he's not a singular thing but part of a tradition like all of

these these entities. But he's associated ultimately not only with the creation of humans, but of technologies like boats, and also with the birthing of of of newborn gods and kings. So he is the god of the wheel as well, and this is this is beautiful as well, the god of the nocturnal son. He is the soul of ray passing through the underworld. Wow. The nocturnal son. So that that's when they have the idea that the on during the day goes through the sky and at night goes

has to pass through the underworld. Okay, yeah, again, we have to put our put our ourselves in the mindset of of this kind of cosmology where there is only our world, there is only Egypt, and where the sun goes when it goes over the horizon, you know, it's going into darkness. It's going through this uh, this arduous journey so that it might come back up again and light the world. Oh God, I wish I could remember

the details. Isn't there something about how in at least one version of the story, the sun is a barge that as it goes under the ground at night, it gets attacked by the same monster every night, and that's to be set by and by monsters, demons, and it is it's like a group effort to fight off these monsters and protect the sun so that it can come back up the next day. It's gorgeous. Yeah. Uh So, So that that's one major deity. And then one of the other ones, of course, is is Hoppy, who we

talked about at the top of the podcast. The one that's often spelled h ap y. It looks a lot like happy And again that's not completely off the mark, because this god is the personification of the positive aspects of the inundation and is sometimes depicted as an obese,

green or blue man with pendulous breasts. Yeah. So sometimes you'll see him represented with Uh, they don't always look exactly like like organic human breasts, like sometimes they look like a kind of strange like triangle coming out of his armpit, at least some some of the illustrations I've seen, But I think they are supposed to be breasts. Yeah.

And because ultimately he is nourishing. Um though, I have to admit, like when when I picture him in my mind, I imagine something like Max Rebo from Return of the Jedi, you know, the keyboard player, um oh, because he's often got blue or green skin. Yeah. And also I mean Max Rebo has a very um you know, pleasant aura. He's he's he's happiness in good times and thus is is hoppy. All humans seeing hymns to him, the creatures

of joyce. So uh when when he's approaching So he is the lord of fishes, he's the maker of grain, and he also plays a key role in the vital Egyptian myth of murdered Osiris uh as the waters of inundation play a role in reviving him, just as they revived the crops every year. But okay, so that's the this is the pleasant side, the beneficial side of the inundation.

But of course the inundation has this destructive side as well, this dark side, and it is personified by the distant goddess Um, which you can, I guess you can kind of think in in pinches writing. It's kind of like this is the this is the goddess, but it is also kind of a broad categorization of goddess that is

associated with different individual goddesses at times. Um. But basically the idea here is that, first of all, it's the distance thing again in the ancient Egyptian cosmology distance and it probably means pushing you out into the desert and towards those kingdoms of chaos, and so that that is the place where the distant goddess is said to resides. Sometimes it's depicted as having this terrible um leonine form. She's, you know, kind of like some sort of giant lion,

and and so she inhabits these lands. Uh. She is associated with with Ray or Rob, perhaps as a feminine aspect of him or the soul i Uh. But she becomes an uncontrollable and angry deity that therefore takes up in the chaotic land. So she's kind of like a shard of of the almighty Sun God, you know, She's like a piece of him. But she's gone rogue and

is therefore a danger to the people of Egypt. Uh. Though there are myths associated with her retrieval by Onerous the the mythical hunter who brings the solar Lion back to Egypt too much rejoicing. So Pinch writes that the implication of the various distant goddess myths is that quote, if the destructive anger of the Solar eye is not balanced by the justice and truth personified by Matt, the

world will slide into chaos. And again, different goddesses are associated with this role Uh, depending on the exact account, including Uh, Bastet, hath Or, and others. Now, again, there are multiple additional gods that factor into the inundation in one way or another. UM. And again we have to remember the central role that it played in Egyptian life, all the sacred connotations that absorbed. We're not gonna attempt

to list them all here. Um. You can read about about many of them in Pinches Egyptian Mythology book if you want. There are also some other excellent texts out there on on Egyptian deities. But there is one in particular I wanted to bring up, and that is heck At. This is a frog headed goddess who plays a vital role in childbirth and the rebirth of the dead. So

she's she's the divine midwife. So she's a follower of hope and um sometimes a female counter counterpart of of of of keydom and if frequent motif on ivory wands, which are these kind of boomerang shaped pendent things that were that were used to protect women and children, um.

But plenty of the elder actually wrote on some of this talking about the frog motif, apparently commenting that the Egyptians thought that frogs spontaneously emerged from the mud left over by the inundation, which is interesting because on one hand, of course that's that's not exactly how it works. Obviously, the mud of the inundation is not giving birth to the frogs. But but, but but that flooding is what makes the reemergence of the frogs possible, you know. It

is the the annual sustaining um uh flood. It is the is the bringing of the water and the bringing of the nutrients that make life possible in Egypt. Yeah, that's really interesting. Now I wonder I don't know if Plenty is correct in ascribing that belief to the ancient Egyptians, but he is. But if he is correct, that would be in keeping with a lot of theories throughout history about the spontaneous generation of animals from certain types of

especially damp sorts of conditions. Now, one thing I was thinking about is that, of course, things are different in the Nile today because of human technology. You know, in the twentieth century, Egypt implemented a system of dams and reservoirs to control the flow of the Nile pretty much

with with complete success. Now like the people of Egypt, of course, have been using various forms of dams and dikes and irrigation on the Nile for thousands of years, but with modern techniques and modern technology that were available in the twentieth century, I think the real keystone here was the construction of the aswan Hi Dam under Nassa

in the nineteen sixties. UH. Following that, Egypt was essentially able to end its flooding cycle like that it could now store up excess water from the rainy season to be released in a controlled way even during the traditional dry season, which of course would just be a revolutionary change for the Egyptian people. But at the same time, I have wonder, like, in in mythological terms, does this represent a kind of de acide? Is this a slaying

of Hoppy? Um? Yeah, you could look at it that way, right, like the like this is the tale of how humans finally um conquer the gods. But on the other hand, you could say, well, um, you know Kenom was the is kind of a god of technology as well as this god tied up with the inundation, so you know, he's he's kind of president at the victory celebration. So it's it's he's ultimately some of these entities are tied

up in the same the same tale. I mean, also, Hoppy in a way, he would be there right because he's all about the good stuff that comes with the inundation. Um, And that I mean, the story of modern technology is that the the the negative connotations are are never completely dispelled, So the distant goddess is never that distant. Well, maybe you could think about it now that that Hoppy is just h embodied in the water that sits in the reservoir high in the damn and has just released gradually

throughout the year. So instead of sending his blessings in an unpredictable way, his blessings can now be distributed in a very organized and orderly way. Instead of being a comedian or music of you know, a music star that that periodically appears at the casino, Hoppy has a residency at this point, so you can count on him being there.

Thank So, I've got another thing I want to talk about, and this is going to take us into the realm of biochemistry because I was thinking about the cycles associated with the flooding of the Nile and uh, this this led me to a really interesting article that was published just a few months ago, was in December of and it was a news feature for the journal Nature, written by Michael Marshall that was called how the first life

on Earth survived its biggest threat Water. So we've discussed this a bit on the show before, but obviously one of the biggest outstanding puzzles in all of the biological sciences is the origin of life on Earth. You know, assuming that the first living cells evolved from precursor chemicals somewhere in the early history of the planet, how did that happen? You know, what were the conditions that led to that, How common are those conditions and could they

be replicated? So for a long time, the dominant thinking among biochemists has been that the earliest chemical precursors to life as we know it must have arisen in the ocean. This is the classic primordial soup idea, right that somehow in the ancient oceans that would have been the swirling mix of organic molecules of carbon based chemistry, and then gradually those molecules would kind of come together and form

the molecular building blocks of life. This was something that was advocated by people like JBS Haldane, and there are still some theory is about life emerging, but about the first precursors to Earth life emerging in parts of the ocean, for example, around deep hydrothermal vents. That's one of the the versions of this theory that's still going today, but an alternative explanation has been really gaining some traction in

recent years. Um because what seems absolutely clear is that you need water in order to put together the first building blocks of cells. So these building blocks would include things like DNA or RNA, which are information carrying molecules, but then also things like proteins that can do the work of metabolism in life. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the ocean is the best place for those chemicals

to come together. And Marshall in this article calls attention to the research of a scientist named John Sutherland, who is a biochemist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge Marshal rights quote. Several studies suggest that the basic chemicals of life require ultra violet radiation from sunlight to form, and that the watery environment had to become

highly concentrated or even dry out completely at times. In laboratory experiments, Sutherland and other scientists have produced d n A, proteins, and other core components of cells by gently heating simple carbon based chemicals, subjecting them to UV radiation, and intermittently drying them out. Chemists have not yet been able to synthesize such a wide range of biological molecules in conditions

that mimic seawater. So, in other words, if these studies are going in the right direction, it may be evidence that the origins of life itself are not in the deep dark of the ocean, but in the cyclical flooding and drying out of something like a sun baked puddle or stream bed on the surface of a continent. So in effect, we're talking about not the inundation but a

kind of primeval inundation. Yeah, I mean this, the seasonal flooding and drying out of I mean the metaphorical connection to the nile here is fascinating, and in some ways the similarities are not just like aesthetic or superficial, like you could say that there are actually there are there are There are significant similarities in the causal effects of of what's going on in these two cases. We'll get

to more of that as I go on. Um. So, not all biochemists agree with this direction, obviously, but Martial rites that quote. It offers a solution to a long recognized paradox that although water is essential for life, it is also destructive to life's core components. And now remember, you know we we talk on the show a lot about how water is an amazing chemical because it is

a master solvent. It's a polar molecule with the terrible clause, you know, these two hydrogen claws, that this molecule will dissolve almost anything, and the molecules necessary for life tend to break down over time when submerged in water. Martial rights quote, Proteins and nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA are vulnerable at their joints. Proteins are made of chains of amino acids, and nucleic acids are chains of nucleotides. If the chains are placed in water, it attacks the

links and eventually breaks them. And he quotes the biochemist Robert Shapiro who famously said that when you're talking about organic chemistry, quote, water is an enemy to be excluded as rigorously as possible, which which is so funny because I mean, what we're normally thinking about when we're thinking about water in life is how necessary water is, and it is necessary, but uncontrolled inundation of water will destroy the very information and machinery necessary. Uh too, that's underlying

all life and all cells on Earth. Yeah. Again, the very duality that is summed up in and in these these these deities that we discussed here. Yeah. Yeah, So you can see almost a kind of like the irrigation systems and the systems of dams and dikes that are used to manage the nile, that actually there's something similar going on in our cells. Like the cells in organisms today keep very tight control on the movement of their

water contents to prevent the water in their cytoplasm. And the cytoplasm is the kind of gel that makes up the interior of a cell, uh to keep the water in their cytoplasm from harming the genetic material and proteins that it surrounds. Marshal in this article quotes a synthetic biologist from the University of Minnesota and Minneapolis named Kate Adamala, who says, quote, we are taught that cytoplasm is just a bag that holds everything and everything is swimming around.

That is not true. Everything is incredibly scaffolded in cells, and it's scaffolded in a gel, not a water bag. So cytoplasm is mostly made of water. I think it's something something like eight percent water by mass or something. But there are structural features in cells that keep the water from tearing up the important stuff again, kind of

like the structures built around the nile to manage its flooding. Yeah. Yeah, so you can look at the things that civilization does are only that in many cases the things that the that are happening just in life itself. Right, But of course that's that's once we have the cells that have evolved today, think about how the first cells could have evolved when they didn't have those structures in place yet.

So the implication is that if the earliest life arose in some kind of natural condition, you know, it didn't have cell structure to protect it. Yet those natural conditions must have somehow placed limits on how and in what ways things got wet. And again this brings us back to the idea of places that would intermittently flood and then dry out again. And the article goes on to

site some examples of recent studies supporting this idea. UH. One example by a team including that researcher mentioned earlier, John Sutherland, the biochemist from Cambridge UH. This study is by Matthew W. Pounder, Beatrice Garland, and John D. Sutherland published in Nature in two thousand nine called Synthesis of Activated pyramidine Ribonucleotides in pre biotically plausible conditions. So basically what happened here is that uh and this is summarized

by Marshall, but I trust his summary. Here he says that the team managed to create two of the four nucleotides in RNA out of some simple chemical precursors, so this would be phosphate and some carbon based compounds. I

think cyanide salts were an important part of it. So you just start with some chemicals in water and then by dissolving those chemicals in the water too down to a very high concentration, they were able to create two of these four nucleotides by by some reactions that mimic the kind of reactions that would take place in a pool or st aam of water that was drying out and concentrating while being exposed to sunlight, including UV radiation.

And the UV radiation was important and another study in showed that researchers were were able via similar means to create the precursors to proteins or lipids and another study did the same to the constituents of d n A. Here's what I thought that was interesting. Also, it references

a a researcher who's close to us. So there's a biochemist named Moran Frinkle Pinter at the NSF NASA Center for Chemical Evolution in Atlanta, and she and colleagues published an article in p n AS in twenty nineteen that argued, again this is marshall summary quote. It showed that amino acid spontaneously linked up to form protein like chains if they were dried out, and those kinds of reaction were more likely to occur with the twenty amino acids found

in proteins today compared with other amino acids. That means intermittent drying could help explain why life uses only those amino acids out of hundreds of possibilities. Yet again, so like if if this were the way that life on Earth first evolved, it would explain some chemical features of modern life that you might otherwise be able to see is just kind of random or contingent. Another interesting finding

about those wet dry cycles. So several of the researchers that Marshall talks about in this article point to the importance again not just high concentrations of chemicals and reducing pool of water, but the cycles specifically repeated wet dry cycles. It gets wet, it gets dry, gets wet, it gets dry.

And one cool example he brings up his research going back several decades by a couple of scientists who were at you see Davis at the time, named David Deemer and Gail BArch Field, and they were studying the formation of lipids. Now, lipids are also long chain molecules like protein is like DNA and RNA, and lipids generally do not dissolve in water. You know, of course, you know that oil and water don't mix well. Oil is a lipid. Lipids include things like fatty acids and waxes, and cells

make use of lipids to survive. Cells tend to have a protective membrane around them, the sack that holds everything inside, and this protective membrane that goes all around the outside is made in part of lipids. There's the thing on them called the lipid by layer. Uh. And of course cell membranes. They do a lot of things, but you can think of them mainly as a means of chemical control of what gets in and what gets out of

a cell. They're almost in a way like putting a dam on a river, controlling the flow of materials rather than just letting a free flow in in either direction. And so here again this is martial summary of the research by Deemer and Bartschfeld. To quote. They first made vesicles spherical blobs with a watery core surrounded by two lipid layers. Then the researchers dried the vesicles and the lipids reorganized into a multi layered structure like a stack

of pancakes. Strands of DNA previously floating in the water became trapped between the layers. When the researchers added water again, the vesicles reformed with DNA inside them. This was a step towards a simple cell. So you're beginning to see ways that again you know, it's not knowing that this is how it's happened, but very intriguing ways to imagine

cells structurally coming together for the first time. If you've got chemical reactions in reducing concentrated water that are creating molecules like DNA or RNA, and then somehow that DNA or RNA is getting trapped inside layers of lipids, it can start to function like the cells we know today. Very cool. Yeah, I love it. It's the the primordial water,

so the the inundation all in one. Yeah. And and of course again the key thing being these repeating wet dry cycles as a means of getting the constituents of life suspended inside protective lipid membranes. And uh and Marshall of course mentions a bunch of other stuff. Actually, they're they're subsequent research by Deemer and colleagues that has continued

to drive this logic forward. There's also some cool stuff in this article about ways that you could think about about wet and dry cycles is almost kind of an evolutionary pressure on early chemical constituents of life by like

repeatedly wetting them and drying them out. There was this process of uh, sort of winnowing out the weaker forms of molecules and allowing the more robust types of life, precursor molecules to to survive, a kind of evolution before there's actually a cell, which is which is pretty interesting possibility. But anyway, towards the end of the article it starts talking about, well, so specifically, what kind of situation. Are these scientists really imagining like where life could have arisen?

And so several researchers mentioned different ideas. One is the idea of a partially flooded meteorite impact crater drying out in the sun, maybe with streams running into and out of it somehow, or perhaps a volcanic hot spring pool

with wet and dry cycles that its edges. So yeah, I mean, this goes against the traditional idea of the earliest life forms arising in the ocean, But I like this new image that it's almost the kind of like a tidal zone of a tiny ocean that may have been no bigger than a puddle, you know, the part of the rock surface that gets wet and then dries out in the sun and then gets wet again could be where the the oldest of our ancestors came from.

And then the article also mentions a bunch of other studies that it comes back I think to be even handed with reasons for thinking that oceanic origins, particularly those around deep sea hydrothermal vents, could still be viable explanations. According to some other experts, there's even like one hypothesis about how you could pretend really create wet dry cycling in and around the rocks, lining deeps events. So the

article as a whole is definitely worth a read. But then one last thing that's cool is he connects this strain of research to some of the goals of the Mars Perseverance Rover around the Ja zero Crater on the surface of Mars, because it's going to be looking for possible signs of past or present life on Mars in similar wet dry conditions. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, I mean that's that that makes sense. So yeah, you know, in a way, we're looking for the possible uh birth of of of life,

the birth of a new pantheon on Mars. Yeah, the recurring blessings of Hoppy on another planet. Yeah space Hoppy. I love it, uh, And I also love that that we were able to, you know, to begin by by talking about about mythology and um in irrigation and and get into these these questions about life itself that ultimately kind of loop back around into the mythological you know, uh, the areas that are that are contemplated by both uh, you know, science and mythology. Oh, this kind of stuff

that really gets my brain tingling. Yeah, absolutely, And like we said, we uh, there are various jumping off points from here, so we we I guess we can ask the listeners to chime in, like what what would you like next? You want us to do you want us to talk about of Cyrus in a future episode? Do you want us to to go all in on irrigation technology? Or maybe you just wanted to go like partially in, like I don't know, knee deep in irrigation technology. Uh,

what's your comfort level? Because it's I was looking through some of it earlier and it's you know, super fascinating. Again, human human civilization is kind of a story of irrigation technology.

So there's a lot to discuss. All Right, we're gonna go ahead and close it out there, But in the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you know where to find them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed and you can get that, oh pretty much anywhere wherever you get podcasts. Uh, you'll find core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we try and slip in an artifact on Wednesdays. Listener mails on Monday and Friday is weird how cinema.

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