The Nile is an incredibly convenient river. Long, relatively straight, few rapids or falls, reliable wind to sail up river, reliable current to sail down river, and annual floods that make fertilizing and irrigating the river banks trivial by the standards of the day.

What kills me is the degree to which industrialization hadn’t been invented yet. I’ve seen excavations of the kitchens that were used to make bread to feed the workers on the pyramids, and it was the same setup as a household kitchen just dozens of them side by side. They didn’t scale that process, they just did it a lot in parallel.