Although the former coexistence of an Upper and a Lower Egyptian kingdom was fiction, the differences between the Valley and the Delta were - and are - very real. Where the Nile valley is essentially a one-dimensional narrow strip of arable land, meandering amidst an endless wasteland of bleak and barren desert, the Delta provides a huge expanse of lush, voluptuous green. In the story of Sinuhe, the pinnacle of alienation is expressed thus: "As if a Delta-man saw himself in Yebu [modern Aswan], a marsh-man [i.e.: from the Delta] in Nubia." (AEL-I, 225).

The differences between Upper and Lower Egypt were very much part of everyday life. There was Upper and Lower Egyptian barley, and the nomes (provinces) of the two regions were always carefully distinguished in two separate lists. As the wetter lands of the Delta were less suitable for crop farming, cattle breeding was the Delta’s dominant trade. And the sun being a bit too hot in the Valley for grapes, the Delta was the preferred wine land. So there were differences enough between the two Egypts, many things that set them apart from one another - but they were recognized by all as the two hemispheres of the Egyptian universe.

The Two Lands could either be referred to by a proper name, or by a symbol. In the latter case, they were identified by their heraldic plants. We already met these in section 14: “A host of symbols”, where they occupied the last two rows of the table:

These symbols were not in any way related to the (alleged) prehistoric Two Kingdoms. Although the king of Upper Egypt was closely associated with the sedge (the rubric n-swt-bit translates as “He of the sedge and the bee”), this was always the “simple” sedge: never the flowering one.

Flowering sedge and papyrus were used in the script to refer to either land as early as the 1st dynasty. On earthenware pots, texts speak of the “taxes of Upper Egypt” (identified by the sedge), or “taxes of Lower Egypt” (papyrus).

In the script, papyrus and flowering sedge remained at all times the standard. In monumental applications though, the sedge proved problematic: it didn’t do so well in stone. This appears to have been the reason why, in all applications except the script, lotus gradually replaced the flowering sedge as emblem plant for Upper Egypt.

The name for Lower Egypt as a region was as follows:

    mHw, or    tA-mHw (“the land mHw”).

One possible derivation for the word mHw is, that it may come from the verb mH: “to fill”,  “to be full of”. There is a word mHt which can either mean “flood-waters”, or “the Delta marshes”. The Delta marshes are obviously “full of water”, so mHw may be “the land that is full of water”. 

An alternative is, that mHw comes from the word mHtt: “north”. In that case, mHw would literally mean: “north land”. This fits with the meaning of “northern plant” for mHyt : “papyrus”.

The name of Upper Egypt is written in a variety of ways, the most common of which are the following (see Wb. IV, 472, 8):