Most Dreaded Terror 12 Egypt

It is the 17 of March, 2018.   Here is the survival experience of Egypt.

You recognize the coordinates (survival as a surrogate for young people against time) of the Mesopotamian graph quite different from the coordinates (fertility against kinship) of the Sibly graph.
An innocent observer might well look at the line, say it’s zig zag and conclude it means nothing.  But if you have followed these talks you are not innocent.  You know the truth.  I’d not have done it for the world seeing what the knowledge has done to me, but this is an emergency and survival depends on having a lot of capable people working on this.  As for me, there is no choice; the incubus is upon me.
Looking at it with your trained eye, you will at once break it down into three time periods.  Over the first two hundred years the chance of survival rises steadily, as would be expected if there is selection. 
Egypt lies along the Nile and setting up an administration is difficult.  If you have a problem 20 miles upstream you don’t know what is happening on the other side of the rebellion.  It takes a couple of centuries of shakedown to reach a good chance of survival.
Here is a map of Egypt; you can see the problem.  The Nile valley is that wiggly green bit. And of course there is the delta in the north, where the green is a lot wider. 

The valley varies in width, sometimes something like 10 miles across. 

At the edges, the land rises abruptly to the desert:

The river tends to be narrow and to run at the edge of the valley.  None the less, you aren’t going to find marriage prospects out there in the desert any more than you’re going to find the king’s couriers.  Your range of choices of mate is less along the river than in the delta, where on average you are a long way from desert. 
So for two hundred years we have selection and survival rises because some groups may really be better at setting up an administrative structure and quelling descent than others are. 
Over the next hundred years, there is the expected decline in survival that we found elsewhere. 
And then something rather remarkable happens.  Survival goes through the roof.  Throughout all of history in this area just three regimes broke through the three-hundred-year brick wall.  No doubt they had some help from geography.  For one thing, the rebels, too, would have had difficulty getting organized.  But for another thing the restricted social choice caused by the geography looks like it meant that, in upper Egypt anyway, people tended to marry kin sufficiently often to produce an excess population, which could move downstream and repopulate the delta, which one would expect to suffer from infertility. 

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