From the beginning of history, the Nile's Delta has been one of the most sensitive areas of Egypt, as the ubiquitous checkpoints the army and police remember to the few foreigners allowed to travel outside of the highway connecting Cairo with Alexandria. It 'was precisely the dark soil of the Delta, Kemet the" Black Earth, "the engine of over seven thousand years of human history, allowing an agricultural development that favored the birth of the first state of the ancient world well before the pyramids. To understand, just look at any image of Egypt taken from a satellite, an ocean of sand where the green strip of the Nile Valley meanders toward the large triangle of the Delta since 5.5 million years ago the Nile river excavated a bed till to the Mediterranean. The Delta, inhabited by 75% of the Egyptian population, later became the granary of the Roman Empire. In peace times, grain, iron, spices, and copper traveled. In war, the Delta was a battlefield to defend Egypt from any invader. The archaeological site of Tanis also demonstrates the importance of the Delta, an ancient capital and one of the locations of a cult movie, Raiders of Lost Ark. In the Thirties, some French archaeologists discovered the treasures of the Royal Tombs, a discovery worthy of Tutankhamun's tomb. Still, in those years, the world was occupied by the arrival of World War II, so almost no one knew where Tanis was.
In the mid-nineteenth century, five million Egyptians had access to about 12.35 million hectares of farmland. Today there are just over seventeen million hectares for more than seventy-two million inhabitants, and every nine months, there are a million more people to feed. Dams and water diversions have altered the pace of the Nile, ì and chemicals threaten fisheries' viability and drinking water supply. Many military bases mark the roads connecting the capital to the Delta. At the same time, the peasants continue their business, as usual, a world described by Diary of a Country Attorney, written in 1937 by Tawfiq al-Hakim but still very current, filled with deep sorrow for the lives of the fellahin. Today urbanization has eaten a lot of arable lands, whose price has risen to levels that forced emigration to the capital many fellahin. Whoever remains invokes his God, and the Muslims go to Tanta, famous for its mosque dedicated to the revered Sufi Syyed Ahmed al-Badhawi. The Christians flock to the great Moulid of St Damiana, one important Coptic pilgrimage, as the monasteries of Wadi Natrun. Every holiday many inhabitants of Cairo embark on a trip to the dams of Qanater where the Nile widens languidly until Al Rashid, famous for the Rosetta stone. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this town was the largest port of Egypt. Still, today only small ferries cross the Nile before he throws in the Mediterranean, after a long journey of over 6680 kilometers from the African highlands.