Jonathan –
Your reference to the earlier paper by Bell (1970) is really useful, on an issue that is quite intriguing, compilation of time series which span several millennia.
Most of the research that has been done on the Nile is concerned with the predictability of the river flows. The Nile data set is interesting because it appears to exhibit long cycles, first identified in the seminal work of Hurst (1951). So forecasting the Nile is a topic clearly worthy of investigation.
Some years back, I was speculating about the possibility that the Nile cycles could have influenced the rise and fall of dynasties in Ancient Egypt. Egypt is famous for its bureaucratic, centralized monarchy. But this was true less than half the time. The three periods of political stability and centralization, the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom, collectively span about 1200 years. The early dynastic period, prior to the Old Kingdom, the two intermediate periods, and the long period of decline beginning around 1100 BC, were characterized by civil wars and political disintegration.
I am wondering if the political transitions could have been influenced by long cycles in the Nile. The intuition of course is that Egypt's wealth depended heavily on the Nile, so that long periods of drought would have been more likely to undercut tax revenues, weakening the central monarchy.
Has anyone ever looked at the earlier data, and is it sufficiently detailed to analyze this issue?
Even older data, back to 3000 B.C., is described and graphed in Bell, B. (1970), The oldest records of the Nile floods, The Geographical Journal, 136(4), 569-573. doi:10.2307/179618.
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Gordon Reikard
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-18-2018 15:51
From: Glen Colopy
Subject: Ancient Datasets
Hey,
It looks like that data is available - it's used in the following publication:
Garnett, R., Osborne, M., and Roberts, S. Sequential Bayesian prediction in the presence of changepoints. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 345–352, Montreal, QC, June 2009.
Link: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~parg/pubs/changepoint.pdf
They cite the following related publication:
Whitcher, B., Byers, S., Guttorp, P., & Percival, D. (2002). Testing for homogeneity of variance in time series: Long memory, wavelets and the Nile River. Water Resources Research, 38, 10–1029.
Regards,
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Glen Wright Colopy
DPhil Student
University of Oxford
Original Message:
Sent: 05-15-2018 15:10
From: Glenn Cummings
Subject: Ancient Datasets
I know the ancient Egyptians collected endless data on the flooding of the Nile. Is this data available online? Has it been used to teach time series methods?