49 Fun Facts About Nile River

Into which sea does the Nile empty?

The Mediterranean meets the Nile at a fan of sediment shaped like the Greek letter delta, and every other river delta takes its name from this one.

Which river rivals the Nile for the title of the longest in the world?

The Amazon carries far more water, and a 2007 Brazilian expedition claimed it was longer too; the answer depends on where each river is judged to begin.

In which direction does the Nile flow?

North: the current carried ancient boats downstream towards the delta, while steady winds from the north let them sail back upstream.

In the Book of Exodus, which baby was hidden in a basket among the Nile's reeds?

Moses was found there by Pharaoh's daughter, who unknowingly paid the baby's own mother to nurse him.

The two great branches of the Nile meet at which capital city?

Khartoum is where a pale river meets one heavy with soil from the Ethiopian Highlands, and the two streams run side by side in different shades.

The Blue Nile flows out of which Ethiopian lake?

Tana feeds the river in Ethiopia's highlands, where many hold its upper course holy as the Gihon, a river of Eden in Genesis.

Which British naval commander destroyed Napoleon's fleet at the 1798 Battle of the Nile?

Horatio Nelson won it at sea, not on the river: he caught the French at anchor in Aboukir Bay, where their flagship L'Orient blew up in the night.

Which country shares Lake Victoria and so sits in the eleven-nation Nile Basin?

Kenya holds only about 6% of the lake, with Uganda and Tanzania splitting the rest, but that sliver makes it one of eleven countries sharing the river's basin.

The Nile's most distant source, a Rukarara tributary, is in which country's Nyungwe National Park?

It sits at 2,539 metres and feeds the Kagera River, which drains into Lake Victoria.

At which Ugandan falls is the whole Nile forced through a rock gorge less than ten metres wide?

Murchison Falls squeezes the river through the gap into a pool called the Devil's Cauldron; Ernest Hemingway survived a plane crash just downriver in 1954.

What is the vast South Sudan swamp where the Nile loses about half its water to evaporation called?

The Sudd soaks up so much water that engineers began digging the Jonglei Canal to bypass it in 1978, only for war to halt the work within a few years.

Which tributary joins the White Nile from the west at Lake No?

Bahr el Ghazal, the river of gazelles, drains a vast basin yet adds almost no water to the Nile, because most of it is lost in swamps along the way.

What swells the Blue Nile each summer, producing the flood that fed ancient Egypt?

Monsoon rains drench the Ethiopian Highlands from June to September, so the flood reached Egypt under cloudless skies, far from any storm its farmers could see.

Which African river, fed by rain on the Equator, carries over ten times the Nile's water?

The Congo drains a rainforest basin astride the Equator, while the Nile loses much of its water to evaporation in swamps and desert before it reaches Egypt.

What has the Nile Delta done since the Aswan High Dam began trapping silt?

Shrunk: the delta's soil began as rock in the Ethiopian Highlands, and with that supply cut off the sea now wears the coast away faster than it is rebuilt.

What are the six rocky rapids that interrupt the Nile in Sudan and Egypt called?

Cataracts is a grand word for them, since none is a true waterfall, yet for centuries these rapids stopped boats sailing straight through to Egypt.

Which Egyptian president built the Aswan High Dam and gave his name to the vast lake behind it?

Gamal Abdel Nasser turned to the Soviet Union for money and engineers after the United States withdrew its offer to fund the dam.

The Nile Delta splits into which two main distributary branches?

Rosetta and Damietta are both port towns too, and it was at Rosetta in 1799 that an officer in Napoleon's army pulled the Rosetta Stone out of an old wall.

Priests read the Nilometer's flood level each year so that officials could set what?

Taxes: a good flood meant a good harvest, so the reading on the gauge set how much would be owed that year.

The ancient Egyptians called their country 'kmt', meaning 'black', in reference to what?

The dark colour of the flood silt marked the farmland, the Black Land, off from 'deshret', the Red Land of desert on either side.

The three seasons of the ancient Egyptian calendar were Akhet, Peret and Shemu; what did Akhet mean?

Inundation came with a warning in the sky: the bright star Sirius returned to the dawn horizon just as the river began to rise, so its reappearance marked the New Year.

Which two plants represented Lower and Upper Egypt respectively?

Papyrus and sedge: the second is drawn in the pharaoh's throne title, written with a sedge and a bee, which named its holder king of both halves of the country.

The kingdom of Kush, whose 'Black Pharaohs' once ruled Egypt, had which two Nile cities as its capitals?

Napata and Meroë both still have fields of steep-sided pyramids, because the Kushite kings who had worn Egypt's crown chose to be buried the old Egyptian way.

Which Egyptian god was responsible for the annual flood?

Hapy was drawn as a plump man with heavy breasts and blue or green skin, a body meant to show the abundance his waters brought.

Why were many ancient Egyptian burial sites placed on the west bank of the Nile?

To be nearer the setting sun was to be nearer the afterlife: Ra was thought to die in the west each evening and be reborn in the east, so the dead got the sunset side.

The legendary Mountains of the Moon described by Ptolemy are associated with which range?

The Nile's highest sources lie on their slopes in Uganda.

Which Greek writer, called the Father of History, puzzled over a Nile that flooded in the rainless summer?

Herodotus was told that melting snow far to the south fed the flood and scoffed, asking how snow could lie in the hottest part of the world.

Which missing explorer, tracked down by Henry Morton Stanley in 1871, had been searching for the source of the Nile?

David Livingstone had wandered far to the west and was tracing a river he took for the upper Nile; it was the Lualaba, which never joins the Nile at all.

Which European first saw Lake Victoria in 1858 and declared it the source of the White Nile?

John Hanning Speke was due to debate his doubting rival Richard Burton in 1864, but the day before he fatally shot himself while out hunting partridge.

Which Egyptian god, worshipped along the Nile, was shown as a man with a crocodile's head?

Sobek's temples kept tame crocodiles in their own pools, where priests hand-fed them, hung them with gold and jewels and mummified them when they died.

In the Book of Exodus, what did the water of the Nile turn into during the first of the ten plagues?

Blood filled the river for seven days in the story: the fish died, the water stank, and the Egyptians had to dig along the banks for something to drink.

Which famous temples were saved from the Aswan High Dam's waters by an international campaign?

Abu Simbel was sawn into huge blocks between 1964 and 1968 and rebuilt about 65 metres higher up, under an artificial hill made to stand in for the original cliff.

Howard Carter found Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 in which burial ground across the Nile from Luxor?

Valley of the Kings tombs had nearly all been stripped by robbers long before 1922, which is why one young pharaoh's almost intact burial made headlines around the world.

Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam, a long-running cause of tension with Egypt, was built mainly to produce what?

Electricity was the point: most Ethiopians had no power supply when building began in 2011, and the dam was meant to reach them with some output left to sell abroad.

Which predatory fish, introduced to Lake Victoria in the 1950s, wiped out hundreds of the lake's native fish species?

Nile perch were released on purpose in 1954 to give fishermen a bigger catch, and it worked: the fillets became a valuable export to Europe even as the native fish vanished.

Which bird, mummified by the million in ancient Egypt, died out there in the nineteenth century?

Sacred ibis mummies were bought by pilgrims as offerings to Thoth, the ibis-headed god of writing, and temple catacombs filled up with millions of the wrapped birds.

Snails in Nile lakes carry parasitic worms that cause which disease in humans and livestock?

Schistosomiasis needs no bite and no swallow: the larvae leave the snails, swim free and burrow straight through the skin of anyone wading or bathing in the water.

What let the Nile cut a vast canyon under Egypt about six million years ago?

The sea dried up, or very nearly, when its link to the Atlantic closed, so the river cut down towards the emptied basin; the gorge later filled with sediment.

Which Roman emperor, ruling the empire at its largest, restored a canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea?

Trajan was reviving a route begun under the pharaohs and re-dug by later rulers; like every earlier version, his canal eventually fell back into disrepair.

Bernini's Piazza Navona fountain shows the Nile as a man with his head covered, symbolising what?

The unknown source of the river is the real meaning, though tour guides say the figure is hiding his eyes from a rival architect's church opposite, which was only built after the fountain.

Which Verdi opera, with an act set on the banks of the Nile, had its premiere in Cairo in 1871?

Aida opened months late because its scenery and costumes, made in Paris, were trapped there when the Prussian army besieged the city.

Who wrote the 1937 mystery Death on the Nile, set aboard a river steamboat?

Agatha Christie later turned the novel into a stage play and wrote her own detective, Hercule Poirot, out of it altogether.

Which travel firm began running steamboat tours of the Nile for Victorian tourists in the 1870s?

Thomas Cook's firm was hired by the British government in 1884 to carry an army up the river, the force sent to rescue General Gordon.

Which Nile animal did the ancient Greeks name the 'river horse'?

Hippopotamus is a misleading name, because the animal's closest living relatives are not horses at all but whales and dolphins.

The Giza pyramids stand kilometres from the Nile, so what once let boats bring stone to their feet?

A lost river channel once ran along the desert edge past Giza; scientists have traced its buried course, and the pyramids' causeways lead down to temples that may have served as its harbours.

What giant monument still lies unfinished in a granite quarry beside the Nile at Aswan, abandoned when it cracked?

An obelisk about 42 metres long lies there, a third bigger than any the Egyptians ever raised, and the trenches around it still show where workers pounded the granite away.

Which lake on the White Nile did the explorer Samuel Baker reach in 1864 and name after a British royal?

Lake Albert honours Queen Victoria's late husband; Zaire's ruler Mobutu Sese Seko later renamed it after himself, though that name did not outlast him.

Which future British prime minister rode in a cavalry charge beside the Nile at the 1898 Battle of Omdurman?

Winston Churchill, then 23, was there as both a cavalry officer and a war reporter, and turned the campaign into his book The River War.

At which Ugandan town does the White Nile flow out of Lake Victoria?

Jinja once had a waterfall marking the spot where the river leaves the lake, but it vanished under water when a hydroelectric dam was completed just downstream in 1954.