The Egyptian world
In some ways, the Nile's fundamental importance for the sustaining of human life may be more obvious to us than it was to the ancient Egyptians. They thought of its regular flooding, so essential for the fertility of the land it ran through, as the natural state of affairs - so much so that they termed rain in other countries an 'inundation in the sky'.
In order to appreciate the Nile's position in antiquity, we should see it through ancient eyes, remembering the ancient distinctions between the divine and the human. The Egyptians had a relatively matter-of-fact attitude towards the river, whose inundations could sometimes cause destruction but were seen a beneficent moral force. Egyptian gods, by contrast, were seen as complex beings whose abode was outside the physical world of the land and river. It was left to the Greeks and Romans to make a god of the Nile, as they had of the other rivers of the world.
Egypt was protected by natural barriers on all sides. The Nile provided the perfect waterway for trade. Also, the Nile flooded each year at about the same time, a fact that gave them a distinct sense of each year’s passing (they created the calendar to predict this). It also naturally fertilized the land and provided for abundant agriculture. Many people attribute the Egyptians’ optimism (eternal life) on the good fortune of its geography.