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The Nile River - History and Facts

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Nile River Facts | How Long Is the Nile River

Nile River Information:

The River Nile, stretching across half of Africa, flows northwards from the tropical mountains and forests of the Equator to the temperate Mediterranean Sea.

How long is the Nile River? It is Africa's longest river, reaching 4150 miles from the lakes that feed it and the streams that feed those lakes. Of Egypt, the land with which it is most closely asso­ciated and which the Nile makes fruitful for the last thousand miles of its course, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote that it is an acquired country, 'the gift of the river'.

So it is; but the river itself is, in a sense, the gift of man. 'Help yourself,' runs an Egyptian proverb, 'and the Nile will help you.' The Nile as we see it today is the product of peoples who have been helping themselves for the past 5000 years.

It is a supreme gift, not only of the equatorial rains, but of man with his inherent adaptability, industry, inventiveness, courage, curiosity and sense of adventure.During the millennium preceding the dynastic history of Egypt, which began around 3200 BC, the ending of the Ice Age gradually dried up the grass­lands which bordered the Nile, transforming the pastures of herdsmen and hunters into waterless desert.

Yet the river itself remained, sprawling through this desert, overflowing its banks into jungle swamps and waterlogged marshes where hippo­potamuses and crocodiles flourished and vegetation ran rife and unproductive.

A new challenge thus confronted the inhabitants of the valley and its neighboring lands.

Some evaded the challenge, taking the line of least resistance. Their progeny survive among the Nilotic tribesmen of the Southern Sudan, primi­tive men still living in a natural environment.

Here, in a tropical region perennially watered by rain, is a wilderness of swamps known as the Sudd, in which the river loses half its waters. Traversing a labyrinth of streams, inlets and lakes, its main channels have no fixed banks, but pass between floating masses of vegetable matter-'floes' of matted papyrus and reeds, forever shifting this way and that to block the river's course.

For an excellent resource about the history of The Nile River, click here.

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The Nile - History, Adventure, and Discovery

The Nile - History, Adventure, and Discovery (Exploration & Discovery)

The Nile - History, Adventure, and Discovery (Exploration & Discovery)

by: Gianni Guadalupi

Amazon Price: $19.99 (as of 02/15/2012)Buy Now

In the mid-nineteenth century, the source of the Nile River was found through the efforts of British explorers Richard Burton, James Augustus Grant, and Samuel White Baker, who, through their tenacity, revealed the great river's secret. This handsome volume chronicles the expeditions, exotic lands, initial failures, and hard-won successes through a vivid text accompanied by hundreds of fascinating graphics.The Discovery of the Nile recounts the complex history of the gradual exploration of the course of the river and its tributaries, from the ancient Egyptians to the Napoleonic conquests; from the British expedition to Abyssinia to the Egyptian invasion of Sudan. History comes to life through the lively narrative and superb visuals including nineteenth century landscape paintings, maps, botanical prints, and much more. History buffs will be delighted to delve into the fascinating story of the discovery of the Nile as recounted through hundreds of vibrant images and a narrative as lively and engaging as any adventure story.

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Enjoyable Album

Enchanted Egypt

Enchanted Egypt

Enchanted Egypt

Amazon Price: $9.79 (as of 02/15/2012)Buy Now

This album blends traditional Egyptian rhythms and instrumentation with Western instrumentation to create an excellent world fusion album featuring lively rhythms and expert musicianship.

Reclaimed Soil on The Nile River

Nile River Facts

Below the First Cataract near Aswan, where Egypt properly begins, it is different. Here other tribesmen made a more positive response to the challenge. They faced up to the change in their climate by changing their whole way of living. Stirring themselves to action, they drained the swamps and the marshes, canalized the river between dikes and diverted some of its flow into ditches and basins with low mud walls. Thus they reclaimed soil on which they grew their food instead of gathering it.

Unlike their less spirited neighbors, they im­posed themselves on their environment and thereby transformed Egypt into a cultivated land rich in cereals, vegetables, fodder, oil crops and, in later times, sugar cane and cotton. Their descendants are the industrious fellaheen, toiling in their millions throughout the lower Nile valley today.

A Traveller's History of Egypt

Harry Ades is a Cambridge-educated historian and travel writer

This book is a super resource from the eyes of a historian and traveler.
A Traveller's History of Egypt

A Traveller's History of Egypt

by: Harry Ades

Amazon Price: $7.67 (as of 02/15/2012)Buy Now

Ancient Egypt has gripped the popular imagination like no other country and the lure of its pyramids and the Nile are a magnet for visitors from all over the world. This book provides a concise and fascinating journey from the country's earliest beginnings right up to the present day.

A Traveller's History of Egypt communicates the magic of the pharaohs alongside a level-headed discussion of Islam for the benefit of modern travellers.

The book will span the entire history of Egypt, from the murkiest origins of prehistory right up to the latest developments - all in a style that is as entertaining as it is well-informed. There are few books on the country that attempt this feat, but to do so is perhaps more important today than it has ever been, at a time when an understanding of contemporary Egypt is not merely an advantage for travel there, but a necessity. It will make sense of the major controversies and guide the reader carefully where Egyptologists cannot agree - whether it is the dates of certain kings or the positioning of whole dynasties. A full chronology of major events, a cross-reference historical gazetteer, a list of pharaohs, rulers and presidents, a bibliography, index and historical maps, will add to its accessibility, and afford it the most useful elements of a reference book.

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Egyptian Sun God

The land of Egypt was the gift not only of the Nile but of the sun, which was visible all day in a cloud-free, mist-free sky. The slow, undeviating cycle of the sun was Egypt's life-beat, setting the rhythm of every man's day. Thus the Egyptians worshipped, above all other deities, the sun-god.

Traveling the Nile River

The best in travel writing

Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff

Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff

by: Rosemary Mahoney

Amazon Price: $4.78 (as of 02/15/2012)Buy Now

The journey she takes in the book is not so much about what she sees along the way. Like Florence Nightingale, Flaubert, and other earlier visitors to Egypt, whose travel writings she includes in the book, she focuses on how travel "washes one's eyes and clears away the dust." Illumination comes in the form of talks with the people she meets, and what they reveal is often a kind of perplexed dismay at the cultural ironies that weigh down the spirit and generate a longing for a life that is always elsewhere. Until the final pages, rowing down the Nile itself turns out to be mostly uneventful. Then a late-night encounter with another traveler on the river galvanizes all the pages leading up to it into an eye-clearing vision of what some would call a collision of cultures. Finally, this is a disturbing book that haunts one long afterwards with post-colonial images of a world strangely adrift and - what's the word for it - foreign.

Nile River History and Nile River Facts

Land of Ghosts and Spirits

The ancient Egyptians knew no other world but their long river valley, a secure 'oasis' walled in between the broad desert wastes which only occa­sional raiding Bedouin tribes would venture to cross. The world beyond it meant little to them, and the source of the Nile was unknown to them beyond the fact that it was located in an unfamiliar 'Land of Ghosts and Spirits' somewhere to the south.

At first the river was believed to gush forth from the underworld through a mythical cavern above the First Cataract. But early in the 3rd millennium a military expedition into Nubia, beyond the First Cataract, showed that the river rose in remoter African lands hundreds of miles to the south.

It was not until the 19th century that the source of the Nile was finally discovered. The Blue Nile pours out of Lake Tana, in the Ethiopian highlands, and passes over a series of cataracts and rapids to join the main stream of the river, the White Nile, at Khartoum. From here these waters run distinct for a while, side by side in the same bed, more grey and green than white and blue; they finally merge and, fed by only one more stream, the Atbara, flow unbroken for 1600 miles to the Mediterranean.

The River Nile, a Gift to Civilization

Nile River History

British administration led to the co-ordinated construction of dams and barrages throughout the length of the Nile, from the great lakes to points close to the river's two mouths at Rosetta and Damietta. This control of the waters was designed to replace the old system of basin irrigation by one of perennial irrigation.

The conversion was accom­plished in an area that covered five-sixths of the cultivated land of Egypt, permitting the growth of two or more crops each year instead of one, as before, and facilitating the production of cotton, which needs water at a season when the river is naturally low. The old Aswan Dam-completed by the British in 1902 and heightened twice since then -conserves water in the flood season and releases it as the flow abates, thus affording an even supply. Thanks to this, the lower Nile valley is today onr of the most intensively cultivated agricultural area in the world.

Thus if Egypt is still, as in the days of Herodotus, essentially an acquired country, 'the gift of the river', it is a country more than ever acquired by man, through his progressive sub­jugation of its waters. The Nile valley is in truth a gift to civilization by the people of Egypt themselves.

Farming by the Nile River, Pyramids, Egypt

Farming by the Nile, Pyramids, Egypt

Nile River From Ancient History Forward

The period of this book stretches from about 4000 BC into the present

Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization (Exploding the Myths)

Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization (Exploding the Myths)

by: Anthony T. Browder

Amazon Price: $17.00 (as of 02/15/2012)Buy Now

This is truly a book that needs to book on the book shelves of every school library and in the hands of all teachers, whether they teach european history(plagarized african history) or are an african american studies teacher! Every parent also needs to add this to their book shelves and teach their children what the system won't! Don't be blind anyomore and stand up and take your place as the Pharoahs and Queens that we ARE!

Early Egyptians Using a System of Weights and Poles Called Shadoofs to Get Water from the Nile River

Early Egyptians Using a System of Weights and Poles Called Shadoofs to Get Water from the Nile

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