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The Nile (Hebrew: יאור y@`or [1], Arabic: النيل an-nīl) of Egyptian origin, meaning river, stream, canal, Nile, Nile-canal. The Nile is one of the two longest rivers on Earth.
After two whole years, Pharaoh dreamed that he was standing by the Nile[2] –Gen. 41:1
In Greek, the word "Nile" ('nIl) comes from the word Neilos (Νειλος), a Greek name for the Nile River. Another Greek name for the Nile was Aigyptos (Αιγυπτος), which itself is the source of the name "Egypt."
1 Then the LORD said to Moses, "Go in to Pharaoh and say to him, 'Thus says the LORD, "Let my people go, that they may serve me. 2 But if you refuse to let them go, behold, I will plague all your country with frogs. 3 The Nile shall swarm with frogs that shall come up into your house and into your bedroom and on your bed and into the houses of your servants and your people, and into your ovens and your kneading bowls. Exodus 8:1-3
Among the Hebrews יאור (A River) signified:
a ditch, canal, channel. Is. 33:21, where it is the fosse of a fortified city ; Sept. SmqvI. So of the canals of the Nile.[3]
- 22 Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: "Every boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live." –Exodus 1:22
- 3 But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. Exodus 2:3–
- 15 Go to Pharaoh in the morning as he goes out to the water. Wait on the bank of the Nile to meet him, and take in your hand the staff that was changed into a snake.–Exodus 7:15
- 5 Then I, Daniel, looked, and behold, two others stood, one on this bank of the stream and one on that bank of the stream. 6 And someone said to the man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the stream, "How long shall it be till the end of these wonders?" 7 And I heard the man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the stream; he raised his right hand and his left hand toward heaven and swore by him who lives forever that it would be for a time, times, and half a time, and that when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end all these things would be finished.–Dan 12:5-7
And, of the plural "rivers," or "channels"
- 10 He cuts out channels in the rocks, and his eye sees every precious thing. –Job 28:10
- But there the Lord in majesty will be for us a place of broad rivers and streams, where no galley with oars can go, nor majestic ship can pass. –Isaiah 33:21
The plural "arms" or "channels" of the Nile
- 3 speak, and say, Thus says the Lord GOD: "Behold, I am against you, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon that lies in the midst of his streams, that says, 'My Nile is my own; I made it for myself.' –Ezekiel 29:3
- 12 And I will dry up the Nile and will sell the land into the hand of evildoers; I will bring desolation upon the land and everything in it, by the hand of foreigners; I am the LORD; I have spoken. –Ezekiel 30:12
- 44 He turned their rivers to blood, so that they could not drink of their streams. –Psalm 78:44
- 18 In that day the Lord will whistle for the fly that is at the end of the streams of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria. –Isaiah 7:18
- 6 and its canals will become foul, and the branches of Egypt's Nile will diminish and dry up, reeds and rushes will rot away. –Isaiah 19:6
- 25 I dug wells and drank waters, to dry up with the sole of my foot all the streams of Egypt. –Isaiah 37:25
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The birth of Moses
1Now a man of the house of Levi married a Levite woman, 2and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. 3But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. 4His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.
5Then Pharaoh's daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the river bank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her slave girl to get it. 6She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. "This is one of the Hebrew babies," she said.
7Then his sister asked Pharaoh's daughter, "Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?"
8"Yes, go," she answered. And the girl went and got the baby's mother. 9Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you." So the woman took the baby and nursed him. 10When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh's daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, "I drew him out of the water." -Exodus 2:1-10
There are two great branches of the Nile: the White Nile, from equatorial East Africa, and the Blue Nile, from Ethiopia. Both branches formed on the western flanks of the East African Rift, which is the southern African part of the Great Rift Valley.
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 East Africa, showing the course of the River Nile, with the Blue and White Nile marked in those colours
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White Nile
The source of the Nile is sometimes considered to be Lake Victoria, but the lake itself has feeder rivers of considerable size. |
| The most distant stream emerges from Nyungwe Forest 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 to Jinga, Uganda as the Victoria Nile. It flows further for approximately 500 km (300 miles), 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 becomes known as the Bahr al Jebel. At the confluence of the Bahr al Jebel with the Bahr el Ghazal, itself 720 km (445 miles) long, the river becomes known as the Bahr al Abyad, or the White Nile, from the clay suspended in its waters. From there, the river flows to Khartoum.
Blue Nile
Meanwhile, the Blue Nile (or Bahr al Azraq to Sudanese; Abbay to Ethiopians) springs from Lake Tana in the Ethiopian Highlands. The Blue Nile flows about 1,400 km (850 miles) to Khartoum, where the Blue Nile and White Nile join to form "the Nile." Most of the water carried by the Nile (about 80-85%) originates from Ethiopia, but this runoff happens only in summer, when the great rains fall on the Ethiopian Plateau; the rest of the year, the great rivers draining Ethiopia to the Nile (Sobat, Blue Nile, and Atbara) flow weakly or are dry.
The Nile River
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 The Great Bend of the Nile in Sudan,
looking north across the Sahara
Desert towards Northern Sudan
and Southern Egypt.
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The Nile in Sudan is distinctive for two reasons:
- it flows over 6 groups of cataracts, from the first at Aswan to the sixth at Sabaloka (just north of Khartoum); and
- it reverses course for much of its course, flowing back to the SW before returning to flow north again to the sea. This is the "Great Bend of the Nile."
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The Nile then reaches the man-made Lake Nasser, impounded behind the Aswan High Dam 270 km (170 miles) into Egypt from the Sudanese border. Since 1998, some of Lake Nasser's waters have spilt westward to form the Toshka Lakes. From Lake Nasser, the main channel flows north through Egypt and into the Mediterranean Sea; a side channel, the Bahr Yussef, splits from the main channel downriver from the city of Asyut, and empties into the Fayum. Where the Nile meets the Mediterranean, the Nile Delta, is the eponym of all river deltas worldwide. Enrichment from Nile sediments carried eastward by currents nurture the fishing industries of the Eastern Mediterranean, or used to before the Aswan High Dam was built.
History
The Nile (iteru in Ancient Egyptian) was the lifeline of the ancient Egyptian civilization, with most of the population and all of the cities of Egypt resting along those parts of the Nile valley lying north of Aswan. The Nile has been the lifeline for Egyptian culture since the Stone Age. Climate change - or perhaps overgrazing - about 8000 BC desiccated the pastoral lands of Egypt to form the Sahara, and the tribes naturally migrated to the river, where they developed a settled agricultural economy and more-centralized society.
The birth of Moses occurred at a time when the current Egyptian monarch had commanded that all male children born to Hebrew captives should be killed by drowning in the Nile River. The Torah leaves the identity of this Pharaoh unstated, but he is widely believed to be Ramses II; other, earlier pharaohs have also been suggested including a Hyksos pharaoh or one shortly after the Hyksos had been expelled (see also Pharaoh of the Exodus). |
After Lake Albert, the Victoria Nile turns into the Albert Nile. ( larger image) |
Murchison Falls in Murchison Falls National Park
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The SeaWiFS image above is centered on Ethiopia. The sites that are labeled will be discussed below. At the bottom of the page is a SeaWiFS image of the entire Red Sea and northern Nile River. ( larger image) |
In the image of the Red Sea and Nile River shown above, several features are also labeled. The delta of the Nile River is prominent on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, above Cairo, Egypt. ( larger image) |
The fertility of the Nile Delta and the banks of the Nile River provided stable agriculture for the Egyptian civilization of the Pyramids and the Pharoahs. To the south of the broad green Nile River valley is the dark water of Lake Nasser, formed by the Aswan High Dam. The reduction of sediments in the Nile north of the river, due to trapping of the sediments in Lake Nasser behind the Aswan dam, is one reason that the Nile River delta is slowly sinking.
Role in the founding of Egyptian civilization
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 Possibly what the world according to Herodotus looked like (5th century BC).
(larger image)The Egyptians were able to cultivate wheat and crops around the Nile, providing food for the general population.
Also, the Nile’s water attracted game such as water buffalo; and after the Persians introduced them in the 7th century BC, camels. These animals could be killed for meat, or could be 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 way of transportation for people and goods.
Egypt’s stability was one of the best structured in history. In fact, it might easily have surpassed many modern societies. This stability was an immediate result of the Nile’s fertility.
The Nile also provided flax for trade. Wheat was also traded, 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 often contributed to Egypt's economic stability. Also, the Nile provided the resources such as food or money, to quickly and efficiently raise an army, whether the army was to take on a defensive or offensive role.
The Nile played a major role in politics and social life. The Pharaoh would supposedly flood the Nile, and in return for the life giving water and crops, the peasants would cultivate the fertile soil and send a portion of the resources they had reaped to the Pharaoh. He/she would in turn use it for the wellbeing of Egyptian society.
The Nile was a source of spiritual dimension. The Nile was so significant to the lifestyle of the Egyptians, that they created a god dedicated to the welfare of the Nile’s annual inundation. The god’s name was Hapi, and both he and the Pharaoh were thought to control the flooding of the Nile River. Also, the Nile was considered as a causeway from life to death/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 time he crossed the sky.
Thus, all the 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 which symbolized death.
The Greek historian, Herodotus, wrote that ‘Egypt was the gift of the Nile’, and in a sense that is correct. Without the Nile River, Egyptian civilization would probably have been short lived. The Nile provided the elements that make a vigorous civilisation and contributed much to its lasting three thousand years.
Discoveries
The Ishango bone, the earliest known indication of Ancient Egyptian multiplication, was discovered along the headwaters of the Nile River (near Lake Edward, northeastern Congo), dating to 20,000 BC.
Despite the attempts of the Greeks and Romans (who were unable to penetrate the Sudd), the source of the Nile was unknown until the 19th century, when John Hanning Speke was the first to identify it as Lake Victoria. Various earlier expeditions since ancient times had 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.
Speke was part of a 1856-1858 expedition led by Richard Francis Burton to search for the source of the Nile by entering Africa from Dar-Es-Salaam (modern Tanzania). Burton was convinced that Lake Tanganyika was the source, but it was Speke who, leaving a sick Burton behind, found the large body of water now known as Lake Victoria and convinced himself that this was the Nile's true source. Speke returned with James Augustus Grant in 1860-1863 for further explorations around Lake Victoria and traced the Nile northwards to Gondokoro, on the southern boundary of the Sudd.
The White Nile Expedition, led by South African national Hendri Coetzee, was to become the first to navigate the Nile in its entire length. The expedition took off from The Source of the Nile in Uganda on January 17, 2004 and arrived safely at the Mediterranean in Rosetta, Egypt, 4 months and 2 weeks later. National Geographic is releasing a feature film about the expedition towards the end of 2005, to be entitled The Longest River.
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| On April 28, 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. Despite this attempt, the team was forced to use outboard motors for most of their journey, and it was not until January 29, 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.
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 Alexandria, Egypt
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The river today
The Nile still supports much of the population of Africans living along its banks, as well as Egyptians, the latter living between otherwise inhospitable regions of the Sahara Desert. The river flooded every summer, depositing fertile soil on the fields. The flow of the river is disturbed at several points by cataracts, which are sections of faster-flowing water with many small islands, shallow water, and rocks, forming an obstacle to navigation by boats. The sudd in the Sudan also forms a formidable obstacle for navigation and flow of water, to the extent that Egypt had once attempted to dig a canal (the Jongeli Canal) to improve the flow of this stagnant mass of water (also known as Lake No).
The Nile was, and still is, used to transport goods to different places along its long path; especially since winter winds in this area blow up river, the ships could travel up with no work by using the sail, and down using the flow of the river. While most Egyptians still live in the Nile valley, the construction of the Aswan High Dam (finished in 1970) to provide hydroelectricity ended the summer floods and their renewal of the fertile soil.
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. In addition, many "floating hotel" cruise boats 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.
Flooding of the Nile
The annual cycles of the Nile were very important to the lives of ancient Egyptians. During inundation the Nile 'mysteriously' but predictably rose each summer to flood and fertilize the land, without rain and in the hottest time of the year. A good flood and Egypt's wealth was assured; a poor flood or too great of a flood and Egypt would suffer.
The cyclic mystery created awe and stimulated worship, and the job of recording the history of Nile flooding, when the Nile was expected to flood, and the locations of farmers' plots after the floodwaters receded stimulated creation of the first scientific instrument (the Nilometer), astronomy, and surveying. The concerns of ancient Egyptians for a good flood were justified. The failure of the Nile floods and the generally low level of the river is thought to have been responsible for the collapse of the Old Kingdom about 4200 years ago. These concerns are captured in the Bible, where Joseph correctly interpreted Pharaoh's dreams of 7 years of abundance and 7 years of poverty in Egypt to relate to good and then bad Nile floods.
Ledyard, in his Travels, speaks contemptuously of this celebrated wonder:—"This is the mighty, the sovereign of rivers—the vast Nile that has been metamorphosed into one of the wonders of the world! Let me be careful how I read, and, above all, how I read ancient history. You have heard, and read too, much of its inundations. If the thousands of large and small canals from it, and the thousands of men and machines employed to transfer, by artificial means, the water of the Nile to the meadows on its banks—if this be the inundation that is meant, it is true; any other is false; it is not an inundating river."
More recently, 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 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. The Eonile transported clastic sediments to the Mediterranean, where several gas fields have been discovered within these sediments. South of Cairo, the sand-filled canyon can reach a depth of up to 1400 meters.
During the late-Miocene Messinian Salinity Crisis, when the Mediterranean Sea was a closed basin and sealevel in the sea dropped approximately 1500 m, the Nile cut its course down to the new base level until it was several hundred feet below world ocean level at Aswan. This huge canyon is now full of later sediment.
Formerly, Lake Tanganyika drained northwards into the Nile, until the Virunga Volcanoes blocked its course in Rwanda. That would have made the Nile much longer, with its longest headwaters in northern Zambia.
see also:
Eastern Cape of Africa
History of South Africa
Notes
- « Babylon Hebrew-English יאור nm. Nile river Retrieved 8/8/2010
- « Strongs H2975 Variant spellings for this word: יאר (Strongs and Gesenius) יאור (Gesenius)
- « Hebrew and English Lexicon the old testament, including the biblical Chaldee from the Latin of William Gesenius, late professor of Theology in the University of Halle-wittembero by Edward Robinson Retrieved 8/8/2010
- « Biblegateway.com, English Standard Version
- Exodus 8:1-3,
- Is. 33:21,
- Exodus 1:22,
- Exodus 2:3,
- Exodus 7:15,
- Dan 12:5-7,
- Job 28:10,
- Isaiah 33:21,
- Ezekiel 29:3,
- Ezekiel 30:12,
- Psalm 78:44,
- Isaiah 7:18,
- Isaiah 19:6,
- Isaiah 37:25
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