The Nile (Arabic Arabic (العربية al-ʿarabīyah, ( Arabic pronunciation ) or عربي ʿarabi) is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and the Neo-Aramaic languages. Arabic has more speakers than any other language in the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million: النيل‎, an-nīl, Ancient Egyptian Egyptian is the indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 7th century AD in the form of Coptic. The national language of modern-day Egypt is iteru or Ḥ'pī, Coptic Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the final stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the seventh century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the first century. The new writing system became the Coptic script, an adapted Greek alphabet with the addition of six to seven signs piaro or phiaro) is a major north-flowing river in Africa, generally regarded as the second longest river The length of a river is very hard to calculate. It depends on the identification of the source, the identification of the mouth, and the scale of measurement of the river length between source and mouth. As a result, the length measurements of many rivers are only approximations. In particular, there has long been disagreement as to whether the in the world.^[1]

The Nile has two major tributaries A tributary or affluent is a stream or river which flows into a main stem river. A tributary does not flow directly into a sea, ocean, or lake. Tributaries and the mainstem river serve to drain the surrounding drainage basin of its surface water and groundwater by leading the water out into an ocean or some other large body of water, the White Nile The White Nile is a river of Africa, one of the two main tributaries of the Nile, the other being the Blue Nile. In the strict meaning, "White Nile" refers to the river formed at Lake No at the confluence of the Bahr al Jabal and Bahr el Ghazal rivers. In the wider sense, "White Nile" refers to the approximately 3700 kilometers and Blue Nile The Blue Nile is a river originating at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. With the White Nile, the river is one of the two major tributaries of the Nile. Sometimes in Ethiopia the river—especially the upper reaches—is called the Abbai, the latter being the source of most of the Nile's water and fertile soil Silt is granular material of a grain size between sand and clay derived from soil or rock. Silt may occur as a soil or as suspended sediment in a surface water body. It may also exist as soil deposited at the bottom of a water body, but the former being the longer of the two. The White Nile rises in the Great Lakes The Great Lakes of Africa are a series of lakes in and around the geographic Great Rift Valley formed by the action of the tectonic East African Rift. They include Lake Victoria, the second largest fresh water lake in the world in terms of surface area, and Lake Tanganyika, the world's second largest in volume as well as the second deepest. The region of central Africa, with the most distant source in southern Rwanda The Republic of Rwanda , known as the Land of a Thousand Hills, is a landlocked country located in the Great Lakes region of eastern-central Africa, bordered by Uganda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania at 2°16′55.92″S 29°19′52.32″E / 2.2822°S 29.3312°E, and flows north from there through Tanzania Coordinates: 6°18′25″S 34°51′14″E / 6.307°S 34.854°E The United Republic of Tanzania is a nation in central East Africa bordered by Kenya and Uganda to the north, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west, and Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique to the south. The country's eastern borders lie on the Indian, Lake Victoria Lake Victoria or Victoria Nyanza is one of the African Great Lakes. The lake was named after the United Kingdom's Queen Victoria, by John Hanning Speke, the first European to see the lake, Uganda The Republic of Uganda is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by Tanzania. The southern part of the country includes a substantial portion of Lake Victoria, which is also bordered by Kenya and southern Sudan Sudan (Arabic: السودان ‎As Sūdān) is a country in northeastern Africa. It is the largest country in Africa, and tenth largest in the world by area. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, Kenya and Uganda to the southeast, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central, while the Blue Nile starts at Lake Tana Lake Tana is the source of the Blue Nile and is the largest lake in Ethiopia. Located in the north-western Ethiopian highlands, according to the Statistical Abstract of Ethiopia for 1967/68, the lake is approximately 84 kilometers long and 66 kilometers wide, with a maximum depth of 15 meters, and an elevation of 1,840 meters. Lake Tana is fed by in Ethiopia Ethiopia (Ge'ez: ኢትዮጵያ ʾĪtyōṗṗyā) is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa. Officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, it is the second-most populous nation in Africa with over 79.2 million people and the tenth-largest by area with its 1,100,000 km2. The capital is Addis Ababa. Ethiopia is at 12°2′8.8″N 37°15′53.11″E / 12.035778°N 37.2647528°E, flowing into Sudan from the southeast. The two rivers meet near the Sudanese capital of Khartoum Khartoum is the capital of Sudan and of Khartoum State. It is located at the confluence of the White Nile flowing north from Lake Victoria, and the Blue Nile flowing west from Ethiopia. The location where the two Niles meet is known as "al-Mogran". The main Nile continues to flow north towards Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea.

The northern section of the river flows almost entirely through desert A desert is a landscape or region that receives an extremely low amount of precipitation, less than enough to support growth of most plants. Deserts are defined as areas with an average annual precipitation of less than 250 millimetres per year, or as areas where more water is lost by evapotranspiration than falls as precipitation. In the Köppen, from Sudan Sudan (Arabic: السودان ‎As Sūdān) is a country in northeastern Africa. It is the largest country in Africa, and tenth largest in the world by area. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, Kenya and Uganda to the southeast, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central into Egypt Egypt (pronounced /ˈiːdʒɪpt/ ; Arabic: مصر‎ Miṣr, pronounced [misˤɾ] ( listen); Arabic: مِصْر Miṣr [ˈmisˤɾ]; Egyptian Arabic: مَصْر Maṣr [ˈmɑsˤɾ]; Coptic: Ⲭⲏⲙⲓ, kīmi; Egyptian: 𓆎𓅓𓏏𓊖 Kemet), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula, a country whose civilization There is evidence of rock carvings along the Nile terraces and in the desert oases. In the 10th millennium BC, a culture of hunter-gatherers and fishers replaced a grain-grinding culture. Climate changes and/or overgrazing around 8000 BC began to desiccate the pastoral lands of Egypt, forming the Sahara. Early tribal peoples migrated to the Nile has depended on the river since ancient times. Most of the population and cities of Egypt lie along those parts of the Nile valley north of Aswan Aswan or Aswanl, formerly spelled Assuan, is a city in the south of Egypt, the capital of the Aswan Governorate, and nearly all the cultural and historical sites of Ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. The civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh, and it developed over the next three millennia. Its history are found along the banks of the river. The Nile ends in a large delta The Nile Delta is the delta formed in Northern Egypt (Lower Egypt) where the Nile River spreads out and drains into the Mediterranean Sea. It is one of the world's largest river deltas—from Alexandria in the west to Port Said in the east, it covers some 240 km of Mediterranean coastline—and is a rich agricultural region. From north to south that empties into the Mediterranean Sea The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Anatolia and Europe, on the south by Africa, and on the east by the Levant. The sea is technically a part of the Atlantic Ocean, although it is usually identified as a completely separate.

Etymology of the word Nile

The word "Nile" comes from Greek Neilos (Νεῖλος), of unknown derivation. In the ancient Egyptian language Egyptian is the indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 7th century AD in the form of Coptic. The national language of modern-day Egypt is, the Nile is called Ḥ'pī or iteru, meaning "great river", represented by the hieroglyphs Egyptian hieroglyphs (pronounced /ˈhaɪrəɡlɪf/ was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphics for religious literature on papyrus and wood. Less formal variations of the script, called hieratic and demotic, are technically not shown on the right (literally itrw, and 'waters' determinative A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they may derive historically from glyphs for real words, and functionally they resemble classifiers in East).^[2] In Coptic Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the final stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the seventh century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the first century. The new writing system became the Coptic script, an adapted Greek alphabet with the addition of six to seven signs, the words piaro (Sahidic) or phiaro (Bohairic) meaning "the river" (lit. p(h).iar-o "the.canal-great") come from the same ancient name.

Tributaries and distributaries

The drainage basin A drainage basin is an extent or area of land where water from rain and melting snow or ice drains downhill into a body of water, such as a river, lake, reservoir, estuary, wetland, sea or ocean. The drainage basin includes both the streams and rivers that convey the water as well as the land surfaces from which water drains into those channels, of the Nile covers 3,254,555 square kilometres (1,256,591 sq mi), about 10% of the area of Africa.^[3]

There are two great tributaries of the Nile, joining at Khartoum Khartoum is the capital of Sudan and of Khartoum State. It is located at the confluence of the White Nile flowing north from Lake Victoria, and the Blue Nile flowing west from Ethiopia. The location where the two Niles meet is known as "al-Mogran". The main Nile continues to flow north towards Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea: the White Nile The White Nile is a river of Africa, one of the two main tributaries of the Nile, the other being the Blue Nile. In the strict meaning, "White Nile" refers to the river formed at Lake No at the confluence of the Bahr al Jabal and Bahr el Ghazal rivers. In the wider sense, "White Nile" refers to the approximately 3700 kilometers, starting in equatorial East Africa, and the Blue Nile The Blue Nile is a river originating at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. With the White Nile, the river is one of the two major tributaries of the Nile. Sometimes in Ethiopia the river—especially the upper reaches—is called the Abbai, beginning in Ethiopia. Both branches are on the western flanks of the East African Rift The East African Rift is an active continental rift zone in eastern Africa that appears to be a developing divergent tectonic plate boundary. It is part of the larger Great Rift Valley. The rift is a narrow zone in which the African Plate is in the process of splitting into two new tectonic plates called the Somali Plate and the Nubian Plate,, the southern part of the Great Rift Valley The Great Rift Valley is a name given in the late 19th century by British explorer John Walter Gregory to the continuous geographic trench, approximately 6,000 kilometres in length, that runs from northern Syria in Southwest Asia to central Mozambique in East Africa. The name continues in some usages, although it is today considered geologically. Below the Blue and White Nile confluence the only remaining major tributary is the Atbara River, which originates in Ethiopia north of Lake Tana Lake Tana is the source of the Blue Nile and is the largest lake in Ethiopia. Located in the north-western Ethiopian highlands, according to the Statistical Abstract of Ethiopia for 1967/68, the lake is approximately 84 kilometers long and 66 kilometers wide, with a maximum depth of 15 meters, and an elevation of 1,840 meters. Lake Tana is fed by, and is around 800 kilometres (500 mi) long. During the dry period of January to June, there is typically no flow from the Atbara River. It flows only while there is rain in Ethiopia and dries very rapidly. It joins the Nile approximately 300 kilometres (200 mi) north of Khartoum.

The Nile is unusual in that its last tributary (the Atbara) joins it roughly halfway to the sea. From that point north, the Nile diminishes because of evaporation.

The course of the Nile in Sudan is distinctive. It flows over six groups of cataracts The cataracts of the Nile are shallow stretches of the river between Aswan and Khartoum where the water's surface is broken by numerous small boulders and stones protruding from the river bed, as well as many small rocky islets. Aswan is also the marking point of Upper and Lower Egypt. In some places, these stretches are punctuated by whitewater, from the first at Aswan to the sixth at Sabaloka (just north of Khartoum) and then turns to flow southward for a good portion of its course, before again returning to flow north to the sea. This is called the "Great Bend of the Nile".

North of Cairo Cairo is the capital of Egypt, and the largest city in Africa, and the Arab World, as well as one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a center of the region's political and cultural life. Even before Cairo was, the Nile splits into two branches (or distributaries) that feed the Mediterranean: the Rosetta Branch to the west and the Damietta Damietta, Damiata, or Domyat is a port and the capital of the governorate of Domyat, Egypt. It is located at the intersection between the Mediterranean Sea and the Nile, about 200 kilometres (120 mi) north of Cairo to the east, forming the Nile Delta The Nile Delta is the delta formed in Northern Egypt (Lower Egypt) where the Nile River spreads out and drains into the Mediterranean Sea. It is one of the world's largest river deltas—from Alexandria in the west to Port Said in the east, it covers some 240 km of Mediterranean coastline—and is a rich agricultural region. From north to south.

The Nile basin is complex, and because of this, the discharge at any given point along the mainstem In rivers and hydrology, the main stem is defined as the principal channel within a given drainage basin, into which all of the tributary streams in a drainage basin flow. Viewed in terms of the Strahler stream order system, the main stem would be the highest order stream amongst the streams in a given drainage basin. In rivers that anabranch or depends on many factors including weather, diversions, evaporation and evapotranspiration Evapotranspiration is a term used to describe the sum of evaporation and plant transpiration from the Earth's land surface to atmosphere. Evaporation accounts for the movement of water to the air from sources such as the soil, canopy interception, and waterbodies. Transpiration accounts for the movement of water within a plant and the subsequent, and groundwater Groundwater is water located beneath the ground surface in soil pore spaces and in the fractures of lithologic formations. A unit of rock or an unconsolidated deposit is called an aquifer when it can yield a usable quantity of water. The depth at which soil pore spaces or fractures and voids in rock become completely saturated with water is called flow.

White Nile

The source The source of a river or stream is the place from which the water in the river or stream originates of the Nile is sometimes considered to be Lake Victoria Lake Victoria or Victoria Nyanza is one of the African Great Lakes. The lake was named after the United Kingdom's Queen Victoria, by John Hanning Speke, the first European to see the lake, but the lake itself has feeder rivers of considerable size. The most distant stream—and thus the ultimate source of the Nile—emerges from Nyungwe Forest Nyungwe Forest National Park is a national park in southwestern Rwanda, located south of Lake Kivu on the border with Burundi. The park was established in 2004 and covers an area of approximately 970 km² of rainforest, bamboo, grassland, swamps, and bogs. The nearest town is Cyangugu, 54 km to the west. Mount Bigugu is located within the park in Rwanda, via the Rukarara, Mwogo, Nyabarongo and Kagera rivers, before flowing into Lake Victoria in Tanzania near the town of Bukoba.

The Nile leaves Lake Victoria at Ripon Falls near Jinja, Uganda, as the Victoria Nile. It flows for approximately 500 kilometres (300 mi) farther, through Lake Kyoga, until it reaches Lake Albert. After leaving Lake Albert, the river is known as the Albert Nile. It then flows into Sudan, where it is known as the Bahr al Jabal ("River of the Mountain"). The Bahr al Ghazal, itself 716 kilometres (445 mi) long, joins the Bahr al Jabal at a small lagoon called Lake No, after which the Nile becomes known as the Bahr al Abyad, or the White Nile, from the whitish clay suspended in its waters. When the Nile flooded it left a rich silty deposit which fertilised the soil. The Nile no longer floods annually since the completion of the Aswan Dam in 1970. From Lake No, the river flows to Khartoum. An anabranch river, the Bahr el Zeraf, flows out of the Nile's Bahr al Jabal section and rejoins the White Nile.

The term "White Nile" is used in both a general sense, referring to the entire river above Khartoum, and in a limited sense, describing the section between Lake No and Khartoum.

The flow rate of the Bahr al Jebal at Mongalla, Sudan is almost constant throughout the year and averages 1,048 m³/s (37,000 cu ft/s). After Mongalla, the Bahr Al Jabal enters the enormous swamps of the Sudd region of Sudan. More than half of the Nile's water is lost in this swamp to evaporation and transpiration. The average flow rate of the White Nile at the tails of the swamps is about 510 m³/s (18,000 cu ft/s). From here it soon meets with the Sobat River at Malakal. On an annual basis the White Nile upstream of Malakal contributes about 15% of the total outflow of the Nile River^[4].

The Bahr al Jebal and the Sobat River are the two most important tributaries of the White Nile in terms of discharge. The Bahr al Ghazal's drainage basin is the largest of any of the Nile's sub-basins, measuring 520,000 square kilometres (200,000 sq mi) in size, but it contributes a relatively small amount of water, about 2 m³/s (71 cu ft/s) annually, due to tremendous volumes of water being lost in the Sudd wetlands. The Sobat River, which joins the Nile a short distance below Lake No, drains about half as much land, 225,000 km² (86,900 sq mi), but contributes 412 cubic metres per second (14,500 cu ft/s) annually to the Nile.^[5] When in flood the Sobat carries a large amount of sediment, adding greatly to the White Nile's color.^[6]

The average flow of the White Nile at Malakal, just below the Sobat River, is 924 m³/s (32,600 cu ft/s); the peak flow is approximately 1,218 m³/s (43,000 cu ft/s) in October and minimum flow is about 609 m³/s (21,500 cu ft/s) in April. This fluctuation is due the substantial variation in the flow of the Sobat, which has a minimum flow of about 99 m³/s (3,500 cu ft/s) in March and a peak flow of over 680 m³/s (24,000 cu ft/s) in October ^[7]. During the dry season (January to June) the White Nile contributes between 70% and 90% of the total discharge from the Nile.

Blue Nile

The Blue Nile (Ge'ez ጥቁር ዓባይ Ṭiqūr ʿĀbbāy (Black Abay) to Ethiopians; Arabic: النيل الأزرق‎; transliterated: an-Nīl al-Azraq) springs from Lake Tana in the Ethiopian Highlands. The Blue Nile flows about 1,400 kilometres (870 mi) to Khartoum, where the Blue Nile and White Nile join to form the Nile. 90% of the water and 96% of the transported sediment carried by the Nile^[8] originates in Ethiopia, with 59% of the water from the Blue Nile (the rest being from the Tekezé, Atbarah, Sobat, and small tributaries). The erosion and transportation of silt only occurs during the Ethiopian rainy season in the summer, however, when rainfall is especially high on the Ethiopian Plateau; the rest of the year, the great rivers draining Ethiopia into the Nile (Sobat, Blue Nile, Tekezé, and Atbarah) have a weaker flow.

The Blue Nile contributes approximately 80-90% of the Nile River discharge. The flow of the Blue Nile varies considerably over its yearly cycle and is the main contribution to the large natural variation of the Nile flow. During the wet season the peak flow of the Blue Nile will often exceed 5,663 m³/s (200,000 cu ft/s) in late August (a difference of a factor of 50). During the dry season the natural discharge of the Blue Nile can be as low as 113 m³/s (4,000 cu ft/s), although upstream dams regulate the flow of the river.

Before the placement of dams on the river the yearly discharge varied by a factor of 15 at Aswan. Peak flows of over 8,212 m³/s (290,000 cu ft/s) would occur during late August and early September and minimum flows of about 552 m³/s (19,500 cu ft/s) would occur during late April and early May.

Yellow Nile

The Yellow Nile is a former tributary that connected the Ouaddaï Highlands of eastern Chad to the Nile River Valley ca. 8000 to ca. 1000 BCE.^[9] Its remains are known as the Wadi Howar. The wadi passes through Gharb Darfur near the northern border with Chad and meets up with the Nile near the southern point of the Great Bend.

Lost headwaters

Formerly Lake Tanganyika drained northwards along the African Rift Valley into the Albert Nile, making the Nile about 900 miles (1,400 km) longer, until blocked in Miocene times by the bulk of the Virunga Volcanoes.

History

The Nile (iteru in Ancient Egyptian) has been the lifeline of civilization in Egypt since the Stone Age, with most of the population and all of the cities of Egypt resting along those parts of the Nile valley lying north of Aswan. Climate change at the end of the most recent ice age led to the formation of the Sahara desert, possibly as long ago as 3400 BC.

The Eonile

The present Nile is at least the fifth river that has flowed north from the Ethiopian Highlands. Satellite imagery was used to identify dry watercourses in the desert to the west of the Nile. An Eonile canyon, now filled by surface drift, represents an ancestral Nile called the Eonile that flowed during the later Miocene (23–5.3 million years before present). The Eonile transported clastic sediments to the Mediterranean; several natural gas fields have been discovered within these sediments.

During the late-Miocene Messinian salinity crisis, when the Mediterranean Sea was a closed basin and evaporated to the point of being empty or nearly so, the Nile cut its course down to the new base level until it was several hundred feet below world ocean level at Aswan and 8,000 feet (2,400 m) below Cairo. This created a very long and deep canyon which was filled with sediment when the Mediterranean was recreated. At some point the sediments raised the riverbed sufficiently for the river to overflow westward into a depression to create Lake Moeris.

Lake Tanganyika drained northwards into the Nile until the Virunga Volcanoes blocked its course in Rwanda. The Nile was much longer at that time, with its furthest headwaters in northern Zambia.

The integrated Nile

There are two theories in relation to the age of the integrated Nile. The first one is that the integrated drainage of the Nile is of young age, and that the Nile basin was formerly broken into series of separate basins, only the most northerly of which fed a river following the present course of the Nile in Egypt and Sudan.^[10] Said (1981) postulates that Egypt itself supplied most of the waters of the Nile during the early part of its history.

The other theory is that the drainage from Ethiopia via rivers equivalent to the Blue Nile and the Atbara and Takazze flowed to the Mediterranean via the Egyptian Nile since well back into Tertiary times.^[11]

Salama (1987) suggested that during the Tertiary (65 million to 2.588 million years ago) there were a series of separate closed continental basins, with each basin occupying one of the major parts of the Sudanese Rift System: Mellut Rift, White Nile Rift, Blue Nile Rift, Atbara Rift and Sag El Naam Rift.^[12] The Mellut Rift Basin is nearly 12 km deep at its central part. This rift is possibly still active, with reported tectonic activity in its northern and southern boundaries. The Sudd swamps which form the central part of the basin may still be subsiding. The White Nile Rift System, although shallower than Bahr al-Arab, is about 9 km deep. Geophysical exploration of the Blue Nile Rift System estimated the depth of the sediments to be 5–9 km. These basins were not interconnected until their subsidence ceased, and the rate of sediment deposition was enough to fill up the basins to such a level that the basins became connected. The Egyptian Nile became connected to the Sudanese Nile, which captures the Ethiopian and Equatorial head waters during the current stages of tectonic activity in the Eastern, Central and Sudanese Rift Systems.^[13] The connection of the different Niles occurred during cyclic wet periods. The River Atbara overflowed its closed basin during the wet periods which occurred about 100,000 to 120,000 years ago. The Blue Nile was connected to the main Nile during the 70,000–80,000 years B.P. wet period. The White Nile system in Bahr El Arab and White Nile Rifts remained a closed lake until the connection of the Victoria Nile to the main system some 12,500 years ago.

Role in the founding of Egyptian civilization

The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that "Egypt was the gift of the Nile". An unending source of sustenance, it provided a crucial role in the development of Egyptian civilization. Silt deposits from the Nile made the surrounding land extremely fertile because the river overflowed its banks annually. The Ancient Egyptians were able to cultivate wheat and other crops around the Nile. Flax was grown, mostly for trade. Wheat was also traded; it was a crucial crop in the Middle East where famine was very common. This trading system secured the diplomatic relationship Egypt had with other countries, and contributed to Egypt's economic stability. That far-reaching trade has been carried on along the Nile since ancient times can be seen from the Ishango bone, possibly the earliest known indication of Ancient Egyptian multiplication, which was discovered along the headwaters of the Nile (near Lake Edward, in northeastern Congo) and was carbon-dated to 20,000 BC.

The Nile’s water attracted game such as water buffalo; and after the Persians introduced them in the 7th century BC, camels. These animals were killed for meat, and were captured, tamed and used for ploughing — or in the camels' case, travelling. Water was vital to both people and livestock. The Nile was also a convenient and efficient means of transportation for people and goods.

The Nile was an important part of the ancient Egyptian spiritual life. The god named Hapy was the deification of the annual floods, and both he and the pharaoh were thought to control the flooding of the Nile. The Nile was considered to be a causeway from life to death and the afterlife. The east was thought of as a place of birth and growth, and the west was considered the place of death, as the god Ra, the Sun, underwent birth, death, and resurrection each day as he crossed the sky. Thus, all tombs were located west of the Nile, because the Egyptians believed that in order to enter the afterlife, they must be buried on the side that symbolized death.

The search for the source of the Nile

Despite the failed attempts of the Greeks and Romans to penetrate the Sudd wetlands in southern Sudan, the upper reaches of the Nile remained largely unknown. Various expeditions failed to determine the river's source, thus yielding classical Hellenistic and Roman representations of the river as a male god with his face and head obscured in drapery. Agatharcides records that in the time of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, a military expedition had penetrated far enough along the course of the Blue Nile to determine that the summer floods were caused by heavy seasonal rainstorms in the Ethiopian Highlands, but no European of antiquity is known to have reached Lake Tana.

Europeans learned little new information about the origins of the Nile until the 15th and 16th centuries, when travelers to Ethiopia visited not only Lake Tana, but the source of the Blue Nile in the mountains south of the lake. Although James Bruce claimed to have been the first European to have visited the headwaters (Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 1790), modern writers give the credit to the Jesuit Pedro Páez. Páez’ account of the source of the Nile (History of Ethiopia, circa 1622) was not published in full until the early 20th century. The work is a long and vivid account of Ethiopia. The account is however featured in several works of Páez’ contemporaries, including Baltazar Téllez (Historia geral da Ethiopia a Alta, 1660), Athanasius Kircher (Mundus Subterraneus, 1664) and by Johann Michael Vansleb (The Present State of Egypt, 1678).

Europeans had been resident in the country since the late 15th century, and it is possible that one of them had visited the headwaters even earlier but was unable to send a report of his discoveries out of Ethiopia. For example, John Bermudez provided the first description of the Tis Issat Falls in his memoirs (published in 1565), comparing them to the Nile Falls alluded to in Cicero's De Republica.^[14] Jerónimo Lobo describes the source of the Blue Nile, visiting shortly after Pedro Páez. His account is also utilized by Balthazar Telles.

The White Nile was even less understood, and the ancients mistakenly believed that the Niger River represented the upper reaches of the White Nile. For example, Pliny the Elder wrote that the Nile had its origins "in a mountain of lower Mauretania", flowed above ground for "many days" distance, then went underground, reappeared as a large lake in the territories of the Masaesyli, then sank again below the desert to flow underground "for a distance of 20 days' journey till it reaches the nearest Ethiopians." ^[15] A merchant named Diogenes reported that the Nile's water attracted game such as water buffalo.

Lake Victoria was first sighted by Europeans in 1858 when the British explorer John Hanning Speke reached its southern shore while on his journey with Richard Francis Burton to explore central Africa and locate the great Lakes. Believing he had found the source of the Nile on seeing this "vast expanse of open water" for the first time, Speke named the lake after the then Queen of the United Kingdom. Burton, who had been recovering from illness at the time and resting further south on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, was outraged that Speke claimed to have proved his discovery to be the true source of the Nile when Burton regarded this as still unsettled. A very public quarrel ensued, which sparked not only a great deal of intense debate within the scientific community of the day, but also much interest by other explorers keen to either confirm or refute Speke's discovery. The British explorer and missionary David Livingstone failed in his attempt to verify Speke's discovery, pushing too far west and entering the Congo River system instead. It was ultimately the Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley who confirmed the truth of Speke's discovery, circumnavigating Lake Victoria and reporting the great outflow at Ripon Falls on the Lake's northern shore.

European involvement in Egypt goes back to the time of Napoleon. The Laird Shipyard of Liverpool sent an iron steamer to the Nile in the 1830s. With the completion of the Suez Canal and the British takeover of Egypt in the 1870s, more British river steamers followed.

The Nile is the natural navigation channel in the area, giving access to Khartoum and Sudan by steamer. The Siege of Khartoum was ameliorated with steamers, with purpose-built sternwheelers being shipped from England and steamed up the river to retake the city. After this came regular steam navigation of the river. With British Forces in Egypt in the First World War and the inter-war years, river steamers provided both security and sightseeing to the Pyramids and Luxor. Steam navigation remained integral to the two countries as late as 1962. Sudan steamer traffic was a lifeline as few railways or roads were built in that country. Most paddle steamers have been retired to shorefront service, but modern diesel tourist boats remain on the river.

The modern era

The Nile was, and still is, used to transport goods to different places along its long path. Winter winds in this area blow up river, so ships could travel up river effortlessly by using a sail, and down river using the flow of the river. While most Egyptians still live in the Nile valley, the construction of the Aswan High Dam (completed in 1970) to provide hydroelectricity ended the summer floods and their renewal of the fertile soil.

The Nile supports much of the population living along its banks, enabling Egyptians to live in otherwise inhospitable regions of the Sahara. The flow of the river is disturbed at several points by the Cataracts of the Nile, which are sections of faster-flowing water with many small islands, shallow water, and rocks, which form an obstacle to navigation by boats. The Sudd wetlands in Sudan also forms a formidable obstacle for navigation and flow of water, to the extent that Sudan had once attempted to dig a canal (the Jonglei Canal) to bypass the swamps.^[16]

Cities on the Nile include Khartoum, Aswan, Luxor (Thebes), and the Giza – Cairo conurbation. The first cataract, the closest to the mouth of the river, is at Aswan to the north of the Aswan Dams. The Nile north of Aswan is a regular tourist route, with cruise ships and traditional wooden sailing boats known as feluccas providing trips on the river. In addition, many cruise ships ply the route between Luxor and Aswan, stopping in at Edfu and Kom Ombo along the way. It used to be possible to sail on these boats all the way from Cairo to Aswan, but security concerns have shut down the northernmost portion for many years.

Drought during the 1980s led to widespread starvation in Ethiopia and Sudan, but Egypt was protected from drought by water impounded in Lake Nasser. Beginning in the 1980s techniques of analysis using hydrology transport models have been used in the Nile to analyze water quality.

The usage of the Nile River has been closely associated with the politics of East Africa and the Horn of Africa for many decades. Various countries, including Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya have complained about Egyptian domination of the Nile water resources. The Nile Basin Initiative is a program to promote equal usage and peaceful cooperation between the Nile Basin states. ^[17] However, many still feel the Egyptian domination of the waters causes economic obstacles in the area.

Modern achievements and exploration

The White Nile Expedition, led by South African national Hendri Coetzee, became the first to navigate the Nile's entire length. The expedition began at the source of the Nile in Uganda on 17 January 2004 and arrived safely at the Mediterranean in Rosetta, four and a half months later. National Geographic released a feature film about the expedition in late 2005 entitled The Longest River.

On 28 April 2004, geologist Pasquale Scaturro and his partner, kayaker and documentary filmmaker Gordon Brown became the first people to navigate the Blue Nile, from Lake Tana in Ethiopia to the beaches of Alexandria on the Mediterranean. Though their expedition included a number of others, Brown and Scaturro were the only ones to remain on the expedition for the entire journey. They chronicled their adventure with an IMAX camera and two handheld video cams, sharing their story in the IMAX film Mystery of the Nile and in a book of the same title. The team was forced to use outboard motors for most of their journey, and it was not until 29 January 2005 when Canadian Les Jickling and New Zealander Mark Tanner reached the Mediterranean Sea, that the river had been paddled for the first time under human power.

A team led by South Africans Peter Meredith and Hendri Coetzee on 30 April 2005, became the first to navigate the most remote headstream, the remote source of the Nile, the Akagera river, which starts as the Rukarara in Nyungwe forest in Rwanda.

Crossings

Crossings from Khartoum to the Mediterranean Sea

• Aswan Bridge, Aswan
• Luxor Bridge, Luxor
• Suhag Bridge, Suhag
• Assiut Bridge, Assiut
• Al Minya Bridge, Minya
• Al Marazeek Bridge, Helwan
• First Ring Road Bridge (Moneeb Crossing), Cairo
• Abbas Bridge, Cairo
• University Bridge, Cairo
• Qasr El Nile Bridge, Cairo
• 6th of October Bridge, Cairo
• Abu El Ela Bridge, Cairo (removed)
• New Abu El Ela Bridge, Cairo
• Imbaba Bridge, Cairo
• Rod Elfarag Bridge, Cairo
• Second Ring Road Bridge, Cairo

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

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