The Nile
The Nile is one of the two longest rivers on Earth (it is in a close tie with the Amazon). It flows north for 6,650 km from deep in central Africa to the Mediterranean Sea, crossing eleven countries. For over 5,000 years the Nile was the lifeline of ancient Egypt; without it, the green strip of life along its banks would just be more Sahara desert.
- Length6,650 kmRoughly the same as the Amazon
- Countries11From Burundi to Egypt
- SourceLake Victoria areaIn East Africa's highlands
- MouthThe Mediterranean SeaThrough a huge delta in northern Egypt
- Famous forAncient Egypt5,000-year-old civilisation grew on its banks
- Biggest damAswan High DamBuilt 1960 to 1970, controls the floods
How long is the Nile?
The Nile narrowly beats the Amazon as the world's longest river, though scientists still argue about the exact start point of each.
What is the Nile?
The Nile is a huge river that flows northward through northeast Africa. It begins in the highlands around Lake Victoria, then winds through swamps and gorges, past deserts and cities, until it spreads into a vast triangular delta and pours into the Mediterranean Sea. The river has two main branches, called the White Nile and the Blue Nile, which meet at Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.
The two Niles
The White Nile is the longer of the two, starting near Lake Victoria in Uganda. It flows slowly and steadily, providing approx. 15% of the total water.
The Blue Nile starts in the highlands of Ethiopia at Lake Tana. It is shorter, but it carries roughly 85% of the water and almost all of the fertile black soil. Most of this water and soil arrives in a few summer months when monsoon rains pour down on Ethiopia.
The Nile and ancient Egypt
Every summer, until modern times, the Blue Nile would flood the lowlands of Egypt with thick black mud. When the water went down a few weeks later, it left behind a perfect layer of fresh fertile soil. Ancient Egyptian farmers could grow huge amounts of wheat and barley without needing to fertilise the soil themselves. The Nile valley became one of the richest farming areas in the ancient world. Ancient Egyptian civilisation, with its pyramids and pharaohs, would not have been possible without these yearly floods.
The Aswan High Dam
In 1970, the Egyptian government finished building the giant Aswan High Dam across the Nile in southern Egypt. The dam controls the flow of the river, ending the yearly floods completely. The reservoir behind it, called Lake Nasser, is one of the largest man-made lakes in the world. The dam provides hydroelectric power for much of Egypt, stops floods and droughts, and allows farmers to grow crops all year round.
But the dam has had downsides too. The fertile black mud that used to be deposited on the fields is now trapped behind the dam, so Egyptian farmers have to use chemical fertilisers. The Nile Delta is slowly shrinking because no fresh sediment reaches it, and the Mediterranean is gradually eating into the coast.
Deeper dive: source disputes, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and Nile politics
The "true source" of the Nile was one of the great mysteries of 19th-century exploration. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, said the source could not be found. The British explorer John Hanning Speke claimed in 1858 that Lake Victoria was the source of the White Nile. Modern geographers track the source even further upstream, to small tributaries flowing into Lake Victoria from the highlands of Burundi and Rwanda. The most distant continuous stream begins at a small spring in the forested mountains of Burundi, making the official Nile length around 6,650 km.
The Aswan High Dam has been an enormous success for Egypt but its construction in the 1960s required moving entire villages, including the relocation of the ancient temples of Abu Simbel (a UNESCO project that involved cutting the temples into giant blocks and reassembling them on higher ground). The reservoir, Lake Nasser, is now approx. 500 km long and stretches into northern Sudan, where it is called Lake Nubia. The dam also stopped the annual flow of nutrients that fed the Mediterranean sardine fishery, which collapsed in the 1970s and has only partially recovered.
The current major Nile issue is the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), completed by Ethiopia in 2023 across the Blue Nile near the Sudan border. The dam is Africa's largest, generating over 5 gigawatts of hydroelectricity (about twice the capacity of the Aswan High Dam). Egypt fears that filling the GERD reservoir during dry years could reduce the flow into Lake Nasser and threaten Egyptian water supplies. Sudan, which sits between the two, also has concerns. Negotiations between the three countries have been tense and are ongoing. The fundamental issue is that 95% of Egypt's water comes from the Nile, and most of that water is from the Blue Nile which originates in Ethiopia. Treaties from the colonial era favour Egypt; modern Ethiopia is determined to use its own water for its own development.
The country with the most famous Nile is Egypt. For the other longest river on Earth, see the Amazon River.