Rihla 7

---

The Nile River Valley has played a unique role in human history. Because of its special ecology, featuring the annual overflow of rich soil from the Great Lakes regions of Central Africa, the banks of the Nile were able to support intensive agricultural development. Food surpluses and the concentration of populations migrating from parts of African and Asia laid the foundations of the Nile Valley civilization of the ancient world. The enormous impact of this high culture of the Nile Valley spread to various parts of Africa and the world. The African social structure has functioned through the extended family system with a unique preservation of the spirit of the ancestors. It is this African value system that became the basis of the Nile Valley civilization and explains the monumental building of temples, tombs and the pyramids and the need to produce sacred writing and literature, medicine, mathematics, art, and architecture. All of these developments left a golden legacy for the ancient world which not only nurtured Africa, but inspired the early Hebrews and Greeks who sojourned in the Nile Valley.

---