How did ancient Egyptians farm their land?

Child: A quern for grinding grain to make flour.

Wow! That must have been really hard work.

These tools are so basic. It’s all so primitive!

Ancient Egyptian person: I beg your pardon. Did you say primitive?

Child: What I meant to say was…

Ancient Egyptian person: This is the cutting edge of farming technology!

Child: More ‘grinding’ really.

Ancient Egyptian person: And I suppose you think it’s easy growing wheat and barley in heat like this?

Child: Well no, but…

Ancient Egyptian person: Well it’s not! We need to know exactly when the river will flood, so that we plant our crops at the right time.

That way, we can take advantage of all the nutrients left behind by the floodwater.

We even measure the level of the River Nile to see how much flooding we can expect.

We have three seasons: Akhet, the flooding season, Peret, the growing season and Shemu, the harvesting season.

During growing season, the fields are ploughed, either by hand, or with oxen.

And we set up a complex network of water channels, for irrigating the crops, otherwise they would dry out.

Child: Wow, that’s really clever!

Ancient Egyptian person: The grain is held in big stores to keep it preserved. We exchange it for other goods like cloth or bread.

So the stores are a bit like banks, where we can keep our grain, or take it out when we need it.

Child: Cool! So what re you grinding in your quern?

Ancient Egyptian person: We’re making flour for baking bread.

Child: Ow! There’s some stone from your quern in my bread.

Ancient Egyptian person: Ok, we’re good at farming, but we’re not perfect.