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From what I heard, it was necessary to predict and provide for floods and droughts. You had to know what was going on upstream to make your plans and survive. To a large degree you also had to allocate the water from irrigation. Therefore, the state and its scribes, priests, and administrators grew quite powerful. The kind of power they had and the awe that people had for the Pharaoah must have been greater than anything we see in the world today. But it's hard to see how Egyptian civilization could have developed as far as it did had the state not developed.

Take the Mississippi, which is so important to the lives and fortunes of people who live on its banks, and transport it to a much drier climate -- or consider the Colorado, and the use made of its water -- and you get an idea of how important the river was, and how difficult it would be to have the whole process in private hands in ancient times.

Ancient civizations lasted for a very long time with all the faults that we'd attribute their fall to. Rome is another example. What we see as Roman decadence lasted centuries before the empire fell.