Reviews of the historiography of irrigation regularly single out Karl August Wittfogel’s “hydraulic hypothesis” as a uniquely deleterious contribution to the study of ancient water management. His errors notwithstanding, this article argues that the ideological misshaping of Western scholarship on irrigation instead emerged from Egypt’s long colonial experience. First articulated in the Napoleonic Description de l’Égypte, the theory of a centralized, ancient Egyptian “hydraulic state” was crafted to justify French attempts to reshape Egypt’s irrigated landscape. British hydraulic engineers later received and refined this narrative during the British colonial period. Their popularizing discourse retrojected the technocratic character of modern irrigation into antiquity, defining the Egyptian “irrigation system” as a static and unchanging fusion of hydraulic expertise and state power. Widely disseminated in specialist and popular fora, this tendentious argument had become received wisdom by the beginning of the twentieth century and subtly shaped early Egyptological descriptions of irrigation in antiquity.

对灌溉史的回顾经常指出卡尔·奥古斯特·维特福格尔的“水力假说”是对古代水资源管理研究的独特有害贡献。尽管他犯了错误，但本文认为西方关于灌溉学术的意识形态变形反而来自埃及长期的殖民经验。在拿破仑描述 de l'Égypte 中首次阐明，古埃及“水力国家”的中央集权理论旨在证明法国试图重塑埃及灌溉景观的企图。英国液压工程师后来在英国殖民时期接受并完善了这种叙述。他们的大众化话语将现代灌溉的技术官僚特征追溯到古代，将埃及的“灌溉系统”定义为水利专业知识和国家权力的静态和不变的融合。在专家和大众论坛上广泛传播，这种倾向性的论点在 20 世纪初已成为公认的智慧，并巧妙地塑造了早期埃及学对古代灌溉的描述。