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NCERT Solutions for Class 9th Social Science Chapter 4 Fig. 4.30, The region in which the Egyptian civilisation flourished — LET'S MAP

Book page 86 Updated on2026-09-08

Q1.
Can you locate the River Nile on the given map? Why do you think the northern part is called Lower Egypt and the southern part Upper Egypt?
Answer

Locating the Nile on Fig. 4.30. The map covers roughly 29°E to 34°E and 28°N to 31°N. The Nile is the dark, narrow ribbon of water and vegetation entering the map at the bottom (south), near 31°E, and running northwards through pale desert on both sides. Near the top it spreads into a wide green triangle — the delta — which meets the Mediterranean Sea along the northern edge. To the right lies the Gulf of Suez.

How to be sure you have the right feature: the Nile is the only continuous green strip on the map. Everything away from it is desert-coloured. That contrast is itself the lesson — Egypt is the watered strip.

Use the labelled sites to fix the course (all of them cluster on or beside the river, which is the point):

Going down the map, north to southRoughly where on Fig. 4.30
Mediterranean Sea and the deltaTop of the map, above 30°N — the river's mouth
Giza, HeliopolisAbout 30°N, at the head of the delta
Memphis, TurahJust below, close to the river on either bank
Sakkara (Saqqara)West of the river, near 29.7°N — the step pyramid of Fig. 4.31
HermopolisFurthest south on the map, near 28°N

Now the naming, which looks backwards on a map and is not. We are used to reading a map with north at the top and calling the top 'upper'. The Egyptians named their country not by the page but by the river, and the rule is:

The Nile flows from south to north, and empties into the Mediterranean.
So the upstream end — the source end — is in the south → Upper Egypt
And the downstream end — the mouth — is in the north → Lower Egypt
'Upper' and 'Lower' refer to height along the river's course, not to position on a page.

The physical reason behind it. Water flows downhill. If the river runs north, the land in the south must stand higher and the land in the north lower. So the names are literally true about elevation — the south really is the upper country. Fig. 4.30 shows the consequence: in the low north the river slows, splits into many channels and spreads its load of silt into the wide green delta; in the higher south it stays a single narrow channel between deserts.

Why this mattered to Egyptians every year. The flood arrived from the south and moved north. Upper Egypt got the inundation first, Lower Egypt later. The chapter says 'every summer the river flooded, leading to annual inundations, with rich mud, kemet' — and that the Egyptians built their calendar 'by counting the days between Nile floods'. Direction of flow set the farming year, and therefore set the calendar.
Check it yourself: the same rule works on Indian rivers. Uttarakhand is upstream on the Ganga and West Bengal is downstream, even though Uttarakhand sits at the top of the map. Try naming an 'Upper' and 'Lower' stretch of the Ganga, the Godavari or the Brahmaputra using flow direction, and then check the contour heights in your atlas.
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