“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.”
—From The Nile: History’s Greatest River
Though it follows the journey of the Nile, from its Mediterranean delta to its sources, (the rivers flowing from central Africa’s Lake Victoria), this history of one of the world’s longest rivers (6,825 kilometers, counting its branches) takes a nonlinear path through 11 countries and more than 5,000 years. Tvedt, a Norwegian professor specializing in the history of waterways, begins in a small archeological museum near Rome contemplating the 2000-year-old Palestrina Mosaic’s fanciful depiction of life along the Nile’s banks. Soon, however, he plunges the reader into the river itself. What follows is a ricocheting ride through history, from roughly 3000 BCE to modern times and back again, as Tvedt follows the Nile upstream. He includes stories of those famously connected to the river,
to the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, alongside drier history and his own observations into this comprehensive, episodic study of the Nile’s history.