The mosaic outside Rome
I am like one of those old books that ends up moldering for lack of having been read. There’s nothing to do but spin out the thread of memory and, from time to time, wipe away the dust building up there.~ Seneca the Younger, 4 BCE–65 CE
by Terje Tvedt
On the fourth floor of a modest archaeological museum about 35 kilometres outside Rome can be found the Nile Mosaic. It is about 2,000 years old, almost 6 metres wide, and over 4 metres tall, and depicts vibrantly and from several different vantage points the river and the life along it. At the top, African motifs are represented, and at the bottom Mediterranean scenes are recreated. Although one must view the mosaic from a distance, standing behind ropes to protect it from onlookers, the unusually colourful and clear pattern composed of painted stones attached by mortar comes through. But what is truly original about the Palestrina Mosaic is that the river and the people going about their lives are depicted from an entirely modern perspective, as if the artist saw the Nile from a plane. This work of art is also a prodigiously expressive historical source: it underscores the river’s timelessness as society’s lifeline and centre, and it illustrates that the Mediterranean receives the history of a continent written in water.
The mosaic depicts the Nile’s central place in the lives of the people living on its banks, but also conveys how the river has formed a part of Europe’s cultural and religious history. It reminds us of a distant past when the Nile was worshipped as sacred, not only by priests in magnificent temples along the river in Egypt, but also in Europe. The mosaic stems from an epoch when the Nile and Isis cult spread out from Egypt and into the Hellenic and Roman world. The cult was a new, independent religion – a mystery religion that concerned death and rebirth, and that revolved around spectacular processions and rituals in which Nile water played a central role. The British Museum in London holds one of many statues of Isis, patroness of nature and fertility goddess. In her left hand she carries a jar of sacred Nile water, the very medium of salvation. Two thousand years ago, believers could be seen carrying such pitchers of Nile water across plains and up valleys north of the Mediterranean, illustrating a deep historical connection between the jars of Nile water and the later baptismal fonts in European churches.
The mosaic was created several hundred years before the Nile and its Isis cult became a serious competitor of Christianity, the new religion that had spread from the Middle East. The worship of the Nile and its gods continued long into the Christian era, and it was the followers of Isis who lynched Mark the Evangelist when he suffered a martyr’s death in Alexandria one Easter a few decades after Christ’s death: he was dragged through the streets with a rope around his neck before being decapitated. It was only when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire that the cult surrounding Isis and the Nile was crushed. Having been the cradle of an expansive mystery religion, the Nile Delta now became a centre for early Christianity.
The Nile Mosaic outside Rome represents a long historical thread that subsequent distinctions and borders drawn between continents and nations have rendered indistinct. The river’s name is connected to Europe via the Greek poet Hesiod, who lived between 700 and 600 BCE, when Egypt, the Delta and Greece were parts of a common Mediterranean culture. Hesiod called the river Neilos, since the numerical value of these Greek letters was 365 – that is to say, everything – as if to underscore that the river was perceived to be everything. The mosaic reminds us that the Nile Valley was one of the main routes via which humans wandered out of Africa and peopled the earth; that some of the earliest agricultural societies we know developed along its banks; and that the most impressive and mighty of all the ancient civilizations could emerge thanks to the river.
The mosaic is a topographical depiction of a religious ceremony but can also be interpreted as a celebration of the Nile as a part of Mediterranean culture. The mosaic conveys the same fascination for the river as the Dictator of the Roman Republic, Julius Caesar, must have had, since it has been said he would immediately give away all Egypt if only someone could tell him where the source of the river lay. Where did it come from, all that water that every summer – just when Egypt was at its hottest and driest – flooded out of the burning desert to create one of the most fertile regions on earth? Up until the late Middle Ages in Europe, the river’s mystery was shrouded in fantastic, mythical ideas; in the literature it was described as flowing both from Paradise and over a golden stone staircase. The Nile, as such, was long regarded as a divine manifestation. One of the fourteenth century’s great chroniclers, Jean de Joinville, summarized the prevailing belief in his Histoire de Saint Louis, published between 1305 and 1309: ‘No one knows the source of all this water, unless it be the will of God’.
After the triumph of the Enlightenment in Europe, a different and more scientifically based Nile romanticism arose. In the nineteenth century, few geographical questions were discussed more than where the source of the Nile lay. A century and a half ago, the Nile basin became the arena for some of the most fabled scientific surveys in world history, where adventurers and explorers such as Henry Morton Stanley, David Livingstone, John Hanning Speke and the less renowned but wealthy Dutch woman, Alexandrine Tinne, as well as a then-famous Norwegian long-distance runner searched for the river’s source. The history of how the Nile was mapped by European geographers, explorers, hydrologists and British water-planners is a history of colonial conquest and of modern science’s triumphal march through Africa.
Yet, the river the mosaic captures, frozen fast in a 2,000-year-old moment, has since that time, through every single second, day after day and generation after generation, trickled through impenetrable primeval forests where the sunlight never enters, crashed and roared down volcanic cliffs, forced its way out of gigantic inland lakes, snaked across one of the world’s largest swamps, and crossed one of the driest deserts on the planet, all on its course from inner Africa. The river’s permanent geography and the water’s pulsing rhythm have continued to shape the conditions for society’s development and transformation, and the river itself has remained a perpetual object of myth-making and power struggles.
By the time the mosaic was created, the Persians, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar had, along with their troops, already conquered the Nile Delta – one of the world’s most fertile regions. Later, the Arabs conquered the Nile. The Crusaders appeared there. Napoleon rode at the head of his army up the Delta to fight the Battle of the Pyramids. With Cairo as the axis point, the British established their Nile Empire, from the Mediterranean to the river’s source, in what was described as the ‘heart of Africa’, and for the first and only time in history the Nile came under a single power – London. Since the seventh century, those living along the watercourse have been at the centre of the struggle between Islam and Christianity on the African continent. The Nile basin has also been a breeding ground for the international aid system’s most classic myths and stereotypes, while some parts of it at the beginning of the third millennium CE are undergoing developments that makes the aid epoch’s portrayal of a helpless Africa seem hopelessly outdated.
I have previously written on the Nile’s history, from the period when the river was under British control (The Nile in the Age of the British), and during the postcolonial epoch (The River Nile in the Post-Colonial Age). I have also published bibliographical surveys on the area (in five volumes) as well as books dealing with the aid epoch in the region. The Nile: History’s Greatest River has a different focus and a much longer time perspective, and it attempts to connect everything I have learned after countless journeys criss-crossing the entire watercourse, after endless discussions in the late evening hours over café tables from Alexandria to Kigali, after numerous extended interviews with experts, state leaders and ministers, and after spending years in archives on three continents hunting for sources on the region’s and the river’s history.
What occurs with and along the Nile now and in the coming years will have dramatic consequences for the region and for global politics. As this book is being written, the river, as it courses through both nature and society, is undergoing the most revolutionary transformation it has made throughout its long history. And it is precisely at such dramatic, shifting and inscrutable times that historical knowledge becomes critical; misinterpretation of the present is unavoidable if one does not understand the past.
This narrative is organized as a journey up the Nile, from mouth to source. It is only by following the river up, from place to place, as slowly and systematically as the river’s own heartbeat, that its secrets can be uncovered and its role and significance for society’s development can be understood.
The stream of history
Travelling from Rome, after crossing the Mediterranean I look down on kilometres of sandy beaches; to the west the endless brown desert and below me an immense green garden. I am flying over Egypt and the Nile Delta, my forehead pressed to the window as usual, and while the river appears like a solitary, glistening strip of life surrounded by green, a living protest against the desert’s dominance, I notice that my North European blindness to the water’s significance falters. I am here to give an opening address on the importance of the history of ideas about water at a conference at the Library of Alexandria. Though having long worked with this subject, I still feel a little nervous – that I, a man from Norway, will be discussing water and the Nile in the Nile’s own country. I page again through a classic work on the Nile’s geological history, for although the Nile is culture and mythology, romance and nostalgia, Rushdi Said’s book, The River Nile: Geology, Hydrology and Utilization, underscores that the Nile is fundamentally a physical structure; indeed, one cannot understand its role in society without accounting for its hydrology.3 On page one of my notebook, which lies on the tray table next to my PC, I write in large characters the most important figures concerning the Nile. I do it almost ritually, as if emphasizing to myself that beneath the thick layer of culture, religion and politics that shapes every contemporary Nile perspective, there runs an actual river with a fixed geographical, hydrological character. The figures I write, of course, are figures with atypical societal significance, just as relevant to the time of the mosaic as they are to today. The Nile we know as a perennially flowing river is the result of relatively recent geological processes 15,000 to 25,000 years ago, when water from Lake Victoria connected with water flowing from Ethiopia and met as the two Niles at present-day Khartoum. The modern Nile is thus a quite young river giving birth to very old civilizations.
I spread out a map of the Nile I always keep with me when I travel here. Because I am a historian and political scientist who also happens to be geographer, it is a reflex action – for maps illuminate connections that often have been of little concern to social scientists. The Nile is more than 6,800 kilometres long, and if you were to stretch it out and shift it using Cairo as the axis point, the river would run across the Mediterranean, through all of Europe, and further north than the northernmost point of Norway. The precipitation area covers around 3 million square kilometres – about a tenth of the area of the entire African continent. Eleven countries share the watercourse and around a thousand different peoples have developed their diverse cultures and societies here over generations. Due to its size and to its variations in climate, topography, flora, fauna and social formations, the Nile basin is, beyond compare, the most complex and varied of all the great rivers, both when it comes to nature and to social relations. The watercourse’s extreme political significance is framed by a merciless paradox: though its length is enormous, the river carries very little water. Its annual average has largely been fixed at 84 billion cubic metres, as measured at Aswan in Egypt. That is not much water – around 12 per cent of the Yangtze or the Changjiang, around 6 per cent of the Congo, and around 1 per cent of what the Amazon delivers annually on average to the sea. The reason for this is the Nile’s most significant characteristic: long stretches of it run through an entirely precipitation-free zone. In Upper Egypt, the natural annual water flow has been somewhere between 80 and 90 billion cubic metres. Over recent decades, however, that number has been reduced, mainly because about 10 per cent of the water evaporates from large artificial lakes created in the Nubian Desert. And the Nile receives no influx of new water during its almost 2,700-kilometre long journey through one of the world’s driest and hottest regions. No other river on earth flows such a distance through desert landscape without receiving contributions from other water sources.
The river’s long desert journey is unique. Along its course, two distinct tributary systems with completely different hydrological profiles merge. The main Nile’s two principal tributaries, the White Nile and the Blue Nile, converge at Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Here a remarkable hydrological process takes place, which can also explain why the White Nile has served as Egypt’s most important tributary throughout history (up until 1971). In the autumn, the Blue Nile is full of water and acts as a natural barrier to the water in the smaller and weaker White Nile. As the water level in the Blue Nile gradually decreases throughout the spring, the pent-up water from the White Nile runs down to Egypt, and it is this phenomenon that, for thousands of years, made it possible to live and farm during the summer as well.
The Blue Nile flows around 2,500 kilometres from its humble, sacred source on the Ethiopian highlands before it reaches Khartoum. This river, as well as the other tributaries that collect rain in Ethiopia, such as the Atbara (known as the Tekeze and the Setit in Ethiopia and Eritrea) and the Sobat (known as the Baro in Ethiopia), are responsible for almost 90 per cent of the Nile’s total water flow. During the autumn, in the flood season, the Blue Nile is utterly dominant. It alone accounts for around 80 per cent of all water flowing into Egypt. Seasonally, however, these tributaries to the main Nile suffer dramatic variations. The Atbara is almost completely dry during the summer, whereas the Blue Nile for three autumn months sends down almost 90 per cent of its entire annual water discharge.
The White Nile is a completely different river. From Khartoum to the most southern point of the swamps – around 1,800 kilometres – the river has a declivity of 1 metre per 24 kilometres, and its water flow varies much less than the Blue Nile throughout the year. There are no tributaries along the entire stretch between Khartoum and Malakal. Then, from the east, comes the Sobat or Baro from Ethiopia, which absorbs several smaller rivers along the way. At this point, the main river turns sharply to the west and flows out of Lake No, a huge lake located downstream of one of the world’s largest swamp areas.
This swamp landscape represents the White Nile’s most astounding hydrological phenomenon with great economic and political importance: around 50 per cent of the water in Bahr al-Jabal, as the White Nile is known here, never reaches Khartoum or Egypt. A few kilometres north of Juba, the capital of what is now South Sudan, is where the swamps begin. Bahr al-Jabal (‘the mountain river’ in English, depicting that it originates on the slopes of Central Africa) becomes a massive, slow-moving water body on the level plains of South Sudan. Extending in all directions, its size fluctuates with the season and the Nile’s water flow. Other large rivers in South Sudan, like the Bahr al-Arab and the Bahr al-Ghazal (or the Gazelle River, called so because it flows through an enormous park-like area with huge gazelle colonies), never reach the White Nile but terminate in the swamp.
At Juba, the While Nile still has 4,787 kilometres to travel before it reaches the sea. At a point 168 kilometres upstream of Juba, it crosses the Sudan–Uganda border at Fola Rapids after flowing out of Lake Albert, through the swamp-lake Kyoga, after having squeezed itself out of Lake Victoria at Jinja, not far from where Uganda’s first hydropower station, known as ‘Uganda’s beginning’, is located today.
These Central African lakes act as the White Nile’s immense natural reservoir. They were formed when a wetter climate arrived here, following the retreat of ice in other parts of the globe during the last ice age. Changes in precipitation patterns combined with geological uplift resulted in Lakes Victoria and Albert overflowing with rainwater; this began to stream northwards, thereby forming the perennial Nile. These vast quantities of water, which coursed unimpeded over what was then a dry region, but which today form the huge swamp of South Sudan, reached Egypt, and over a period of several centuries the river gave rise to a number of very exceptional and powerful floods that created the original Nile Delta with its many watercourses.
For the last 10,000 years, Lake Victoria has been predominately stable and is now the world’s second largest lake (it has completely dried up in earlier periods). It is the source of heavy precipitation itself, due to evaporation from its enormous surface area, and additionally acquires water from rivers flowing from Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and, especially, Kenya. The lake is described as the source of the Nile by both encyclopaedias and tourist guides, but the White Nile has many sources – in the east, in Kenya; in the south, in Burundi; and in the west, in Rwanda and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The mountains in the west of the basin, the source of some of its most important tributaries, belong to the wettest regions on earth, with rainfall 360 days a year and an annual average of 5 metres. The combination of these fortuitous meteorological and geological conditions has enabled the Nile’s continual water flow, even during those times of the year when the Nile rivers in Ethiopia dwindle and some of them practically dry up.
All these figures might seem misplaced, or seem like bean-counting to those who consider a focus on societies to imply limiting oneself to the human realm; that is to say, that a humanistic, human-centred historical narrative should bypass such figures because they are natural science distractions. The opposite is true: these figures summarize in decisive ways not just the framework of societies’ development, but they also describe a sustained axis for social development and what is at the heart of societies’ existence. It is these measurable geographical traits, furthermore, that give the river its unique regional and local identities, revealing how, all along its banks, it has contributed to societal formation in different ways, creating also various regional possibilities for its exploitation. This book will discuss Nile mythologies and the meaning of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Herodotus’ Histories, but it will also show that it is not possible to understand European colonialism’s rise and fall, Ethiopia’s central role in the prelude to the Second World War, South Sudan’s fate and current position, or Egypt’s past and future, without bringing the hydrology of the Nile into the story.
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Terje Tvedt is professor at the Department of Geography, University of Bergen, and a former professor in Global History at the University of Oslo and a former professor in Political Science at the University of Oslo. He has also been a Guest Professor at Cambridge University. Tvedt is the author of a wide range of books and articles, has written and co-directed a number of TV-documentaries and been the leader of national and international research networks and research projects. His main research fields include world history, with a special focus on water-society systems and linkages, development theories and the international aid system. He has also written extensively on Norwegian history, especially Norway’s relations to the non-European world.
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