50 Fun Facts About Nile River

Into which sea does the Nile empty?

It reaches the sea near Alexandria after forming a large delta north of Cairo.

How long is the Nile, according to the 2009 satellite measurement of its longest watercourse?

That makes it the longest river in the world, though it carries far less water than the Amazon or Congo.

In which direction does the Nile flow?

It rises in the African Great Lakes region and runs to the Mediterranean, which confused early Europeans used to rivers running the other way.

The Nile's two major tributaries are named for which two colours?

The White Nile is longer, but the Blue Nile brings more than twice as much water.

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

The two streams are visibly different colours where they join, one pale with quartz sediment and one dark with Ethiopian clay.

The Blue Nile begins near which lake?

It rises as a stream called the Abay near the town of Gish Abay in Ethiopia.

For roughly how long has the Nile followed its present course?

Geologically it is a young river, assembled from older systems by rift uplift and tilting lake plateaus.

How many countries lie wholly or partly within the Nile Basin?

South Sudan became the eleventh when it gained independence in 2011.

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.

Which pair of waterfalls at the Nile's exit from Lake Victoria were submerged by the Nalubaale dam?

The river first takes the name 'Nile' at that outlet, and the stretch to Lake Albert is called the Victoria Nile.

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

The ground there slopes just 1 in 13,000, and papyrus and invasive water hyacinth choke the channels.

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

Its name means 'gazelle river'; despite an 860,000 sq km basin it adds little water to the Nile.

Roughly what share of the main Nile's annual flow comes from the Blue Nile?

The White Nile supplies 32% and the Atbarah 14%; during summer floods the Blue Nile's share rises to about 70%.

The Nile's discharge is roughly what fraction of the Amazon's?

Its flow of about 87 cubic km a year is also just 6% of the Congo's and 12% of the Yangtze's.

What share of the Nile's sediment comes from the Blue Nile and Atbarah, both rising in Ethiopia?

The soil of the Nile Delta essentially began as rock in the Ethiopian Highlands.

How many cataracts interrupt the Nile between Sudan's capital and Aswan?

The sixth and furthest upstream is at Sabaloka near Khartoum; the first, at Aswan, is now submerged behind the dams.

Lake Nasser, formed by the Aswan High Dam, ranks where among human-made lakes?

It drowns more than 480 km of the river's course.

The Nile Delta splits into which two main distributary branches?

The delta covers about 22,000 sq km and has been shrinking since the High Dam began trapping its sediment in 1970.

Which ancient river gauges have measured the height of the Nile for thousands of years?

An ideal flood was a rise of about 6 metres; the Roda Island gauge was used from at least 622 CE until 1921.

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

The same Egyptian word, jtrw, was used for both 'Nile' and 'river'.

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

Peret was the growing season and Shemu the rainless harvest; the whole calendar followed the flood.

Which two plants represented Lower and Upper Egypt respectively?

Lower Egypt was the delta and Upper Egypt the valley from Giza to the first cataract.

The world's earliest known major dam, the Sadd el-Kafara, was built by the Egyptians around which date?

It was an attempt to control flooding; Egyptians then built no successful dams on the Nile until the 19th century.

The Kushite 'Black Pharaohs' who conquered much of Egypt ruled from which two Nile cities?

The Kushite Empire arose around 780 BCE along the Nile and Atbarah in what is now Sudan.

Which Egyptian god was responsible for the annual flood?

Egyptians believed the floodwaters rose out of the netherworld at Elephantine Island, home of the ram god Khnum.

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

Sunset stood for death in a cosmology built on the daily cycle of Ra and the yearly cycle of the flood.

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 historian visited Egypt in 457 BCE and puzzled over floods that came in the rainless summer?

He travelled up the Nile as far as Aswan.

Which Jesuit missionary reached the source of the Blue Nile at Gish Abay in the early 17th century?

James Bruce later publicised his writings; the White Nile's source was not settled for another 260 years.

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

He never followed the outflow to Sudan, which left room for doubters.

What was the first major dam built on the Nile, completed in 1902?

It was raised in 1912 and 1933; the High Dam that followed in 1970 stores about two years of the river's flow.

The 1959 Nile water agreement gave Egypt how many billion cubic metres a year?

Sudan got 18.5 billion; Ethiopia, source of over two-thirds of the water, was not party to it.

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

Many Nubians were less lucky and were forced from their flooded homelands into cities in Egypt and Sudan.

The Aswan High Dam let Egyptian farmers raise how many harvests a year, compared with one before?

The dam also generates about 10 billion kilowatt-hours a year.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, announced in 2011, sits on which river?

Egypt's president Morsi hinted at military strikes; the reservoir was full and generating by 2025.

Which fish, introduced to Lake Victoria in the 1950s, caused the extinction of over 500 cichlid species?

Scientist Les Kaufman called it the first mass extinction of vertebrates that researchers had a chance to observe.

Which bird, revered and sacrificed by the million in ancient Egypt, went locally extinct there in the late 1800s?

It remains common in central and southern Africa.

Snails in Nile lakes carry blood flukes that cause which disease in humans and livestock?

The parasitic flatworms are one of the High Dam's unwelcome side effects, since still water suits the snails.

During the Messinian salinity crisis, the ancestral 'Eonile' cut a canyon roughly how deep at Cairo?

The Mediterranean had evaporated, so the river carved down toward the empty basin; the gorge later filled with sediment.

Which Roman emperor built a canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea in the first century?

Rome relied on Egyptian grain grown with the floodwaters.

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

The Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi pairs the Nile with the Danube, Ganges and Río de la Plata.

Which Verdi opera, with an act set on the Nile's banks, was performed in Cairo in 1871 to mark the Suez Canal?

Isma'il Pasha commissioned it for the new Egyptian Royal Opera House.

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

Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz set his 1966 novel Adrift on the Nile on a Cairo houseboat.

Which travel firm began regular steamboat cruises on the Nile in 1875?

It had started offering Nile tours in 1870, the year the Suez Canal celebrations drew crowds to Luxor and Philae.

The river god Nilus fathered which naiad, mythical founder of an Egyptian city?

Nilus was one of thousands of river-god children of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys.

Roughly how far is the Giza pyramid complex from the modern course of the Nile in Cairo?

The pyramids have drawn tourists since the time of the Greeks.

In the ancient Egyptian language, the word jtrw meant 'Nile' and also what?

For Egyptians there was effectively only one river, so no separate word was needed for it.

What do Luganda speakers in Uganda call the Nile?

Abay is the Ethiopian name for the Blue Nile's headstream, Bahr el-Jebel is used in South Sudan and Áman Dawū is a Nubian name meaning 'Great Water'.

The Atbarah River, the last major tributary from Ethiopia, is also known by which colour name?

It rises in northern Ethiopia, joins the Nile about 320 km north of Khartoum, and can dry up entirely in winter and spring.

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

Some argue the river's true source is the rain clouds over the lake, which supply most of its water.