Who is nile

Today Egyptologists, archaeologists who focus on this ancient civilization, have learned a great deal about the rulers, artifacts, and customs of ancient Egypt. Use these resources to teach your students about the ancient Egyptians.

Discover the source of the Nile with real-life visuals and animated maps. A river is a large, natural stream of flowing water. Rivers are found on every continent and on nearly every kind of land. Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. Skip to content. Image women and children on the banks of the nile The Nile River has been a central feature of life in northeast Africa for thousands of years. Photograph by David Boyer.

Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google Classroom. Encyclopedic Entry Vocabulary. The Nile River flows over 6, kilometers 4, miles until emptying into the Mediterranean Sea. For thousands of years, the river has provided a source of irrigation to transform the dry area around it into lush agricultural land. Today, the river continues to serve as a source of irrigation, as well as an important transportation and trade route. Blue Nile. Also called linseed. Nile River. Upriver Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania argue that they too need the water that originates on their lands.

Since the twelfth century C. Christian Ethiopian kings have warned Muslim Egyptian sultans of their power to divert waters of the Nile, often in response to religious conflicts. But these were hypothetical threats. Today, however, Ethiopia is building the Grand Renaissance Dam and, with it, Ethiopia will physically control the Blue Nile Gorge—the primary source of most of the Nile waters.

The Nile has been essential for civilization in Egypt and Sudan. Without that water, there would have been no food, no people, no state, and no monuments. As Herodutus famously wrote in the 5th century B.

For millennia peoples have travelled along the banks of the Nile and its tributaries. Scores of ethnic groups in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan share architecture and engineering, ideas and traditions of religion and political organization, languages and alphabets, food and agricultural practices. In B. The Nile was a mysterious god: sometimes beneficent, sometimes vengeful.

Floods between June and September, the months of peak flow, could wipe out entire villages, drowning thousands of people. Hail to thee, O Nile, that issues from the earth and comes to keep Egypt alive! The river flow follows regular patterns, increasing between May 17 and July 6, peaking in September, and then receding until the next year.

But the river volume is very unpredictable, as documented by nilometers multi-storied structures built in the river to measure water heights. Successive empires of Pharaohs, Greeks, Romans, Christian Copts, and Muslims celebrated the rising waters of the Nile and dreaded floods or droughts.

Five millennia of Nile history show how years with high water have produced ample food, population growth, and magnificent monuments, as during the first five dynasties from B.

Periods with low water have brought famine and disorder. The Book of Genesis describes seven years of famine that historians associate with the drought of B. From the time of the Pharaohs until C. The irrigation projects of the 19th century Ottoman ruler Mohammad Ali allowed year-around cultivation, causing population growth from 4 to 10 million.

Despite the extraordinary importance of the Nile to people downstream, the origin of the great river was a mystery until the middle twentieth century. Herodotus speculated that the Nile arose between the peaks of Crophi and Mophi, south of the first cataract. In C. Ptolemy suggested the source was the Mountains of the Moon, in what are now called the Ruwenzori Mountains in Uganda. In the Scottish explorer James Bruce claimed his discovery of the source in Ethiopia, while in John Hanning Speke thought he found it in Lake Victoria and the equatorial lakes.

The Blue Nile River descends feet in miles from Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands through a deep gorge with crocodiles, hippopotamuses, and bandits to the Sudan border and the savannah. Despite the efforts of scores of intrepid adventurers, the Blue Nile in Ethiopia was not successfully navigated until by a team of British and Ethiopian soldiers and civilians equipped by the Royal Military College of Science.

Further south up the White Nile in the lakes and rivers of Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, the Egyptian cultural influence is less pronounced, due to the Sudd, a gigantic and impassable swamp which absorbs waters from the equatorial lake tributaries. The Nile River historian Robert O. Not until the 20th century did it become clear that the Nile is part of a vast river system with dozens of tributaries, streams, and lakes, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the remote mountains of Burundi, in tropical central Africa, and to the highlands of Ethiopia, in the Horn of Africa.

Spanning more than 4, miles, it is the longest river in the world. Ethiopia and Egypt have had a long relationship of both harmony and discord, the latter the result of religious issues and access to Nile water, among other factors.

From until C. Aksumites participated in Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade. The cultural relationship between Egypt and Ethiopia was institutionalized when the Aksumite King Ezana converted to Christianity in C.

For 16 centuries until the Egyptian bishop of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church was appointed by the Egyptian patriarch in Alexandria, often under the influence of the Egyptian government. Ethiopians were profoundly influenced by the Middle East, even writing their state and geography into Bible stories. It is located just over miles northwest of Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa. When complete, the GERD will be the largest hydroelectric dam in Africa and one of the largest in the world.

Controversy has surrounded the project since its beginning in as downstream nations rely heavily on the Nile's waters for their drinking water, agriculture and industrial needs. The Nile River and its banks are abundant with many varieties of animal life.

These include the rhinoceros, African tigerfish the "piranha of Africa" , Nile monitors, enormous Vundu catfish, hippopotamuses, wildebeests, baboons, frogs, mongooses, turtles, tortoises and over species of birds. Hundreds of thousands of water birds spend their winters in the Nile Delta.

This includes the world's largest concentrations of little gulls and whiskered terns. Possibly the most well-known animal — and most feared — is the Nile crocodile. This fearsome predator has a reputation as a man eater and rightly so. Nile crocodiles can reach lengths of 18 to 20 feet, and unlike their American cousins, can be quite aggressive toward people.

Estimates say that about people a year are killed by these reptiles, according to National Geographic. Live Science. Traci Pedersen. The Egyptian religion even venerated a deity of flooding and fertility, Hapy , who was depicted as a chubby man with blue or green skin.

To get the most out of the Nile's waters, ancient Egyptian farmers developed a system called basin irrigation. They constructed networks of earthen banks to form basins, and dug channels to direct floodwater water into the basins, where it would sit for a month until the soil was saturated and ready for planting. To predict whether they faced dangerous floods or low waters that could result in a poor harvest, the ancient Egyptians built nilometers —stone columns with markings that would indicate the water level.

In addition to nurturing agriculture, the Nile provided ancient Egyptians with a vital transportation route. As a result, they became skilled boat and ship builders who created both large wooden craft with sails and oars , capable of traveling longer distances, and smaller skiffs made of papyrus reeds attached to wooden frames. Artwork from the Old Kingdom , which existed from to B.