The River Nile

At 6718km, the Nile is the world’s longest river. In the old colonial days, controlling its source was considered essential to controlling Egypt, because it is this river with its life giving floods that has sustained both Ancient and present Egypt. The problem for the early explorers was that although they’d found the source of the Blue Nile, Ethiopia’s Lake Tana, in 1622 they were ignorant as to the source of the greater part of this river’s flow, the white Nile.

Their quest was made more difficult by the fact that the Greek “Father of History”, Herodotus, had earlier mistakenly stated that West Africa’s Niger was a branch of the Nile. Pliny the Elder further compounded the confusion by writing that the Nile gushed forth not far from the Atlantic Ocean.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, there were several competing expeditions mostly travelling overland from East Africa. In 1863 John Hanning Speke and James Grant sailed down the Nile from Lake Victoria to Khartoum, Sudan.

A great way to explore the Nile today is by buying a place on an Egypt Nile cruise- not so much Agatha Christie style in these days of package tours, but fun nonetheless and a great way of seeing Upper Egypt’s most celebrated treasures including Karnak and the Valley of the Kings.