Position 35 - An Egyptian Shaduf, The Oldest Of Well-sweeps, Lifting The Nile Waters To The Thirsty Fields

In a tomb-painting at Thebes, there are depicted the ancestors of these men, raising the waters of the ancient Nile, by means of precisely the same device as that which we find in the hands of these modern natives here. For many thousands of years it has been used in this way. It is simply the well-sweep of our grandfathers. A pole with a weight or counterpoise at one end, and a bucket hanging from the other, is suspended at a point not far from the weight, which then by its simple gravity draws up the bucket when filled from the waters below.

The apparatus is of the simplest home-construction; the necessary poles and stakes are furnished by the scanty trees of the neighborhood, the weight is merely a huge lump of Nile mud, plastered on and allowed to dry; the bucket is only a hoop with a pocket of leather lashed to it, while the ropes are twisted from palm fibre as they have been in the Nile valley since the earliest times.

With this primitive equipment the native raises the water from four to eight feet, though a strong man will lift it much higher; but when the Nile is low, it is necessary to resort to a series of “shadufs,” as they are called, one above another, till the level of the field is reached. In the proper irrigation of one crop, which continues for about one hundred days, the native must raise to his field, on the average, nearly four hundred tons of water to the acre four or five times during the one hundred days; and this necessity keeps him at work incessantly during a large part of the season, raising the indispensable 1,600 to 2,000 tons of water necessary for each acre.

An acre is usually counted as consuming the entire labor of one man at the shaduf. Wherever the traveler penetrates, he can hardly escape from its monotonous creak; day and night it is in his ears, and always mingled with the weird song of the weary fellah, as he bends to his heavy and never ending task. His children, although endowed with remarkable keenness and intelligence, are so early put to this blighting task, that they grow up into broken and exhausted energies, to sink at last into an indifferent lethargy. The tiny lad, watching his brother at the middle shaduf, will be forced to take his place by his brother's side before many years have passed, and when he is old and wrinkled like the old man at the top, he will still be found bowed and bent beside the heavy shaduf.