Creatures of the Nile

Rising in Lake Victoria and Lake Tana respectively, the White and Blue Niles meet at the Sudanese capital Khartoum, becoming the River Nile. Passing through an otherwise arid landscape, through northeast Africa to the Mediterranean Sea, the Nile has witnessed the rise and fall of many civilisations.

The Nile does not just provide a home for humans.  The lives of animals, and the interactions between all the creatures of the Nile, and the human inhabitants of the region, are central to the art, culture and archaeology of the Nile Valley.

People along the Nile would depict their world in many different ways, in elaborate tomb scenes, as amulets, on pots, and in their sacred writings. Their interactions would see the decline of species that had called the Nile their home since long before humans settled there.  As Nile-centred civilisations appeared, the people who built them would have an irreversible impact on their natural world, even as they immortalised it in their material culture.

Next: Ecosystems of the Nile