Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River

by Twigger, Robert

  Shaw used statistical studies of bas-relief depictions of battle that were anatomically accurate. These made the assumption that the type of wounds depicted would reflect their likelihood in battle. He found that head and neck injuries accounted for only 17.1 per cent of those depicted as dying whereas chest injuries were 70 per cent. In ‘camp’ scenes in Luxor temple only 12.5 per cent have head injuries alone. This further shows how the head, as a smaller target, is less likely to be injured than other more exposed and larger parts of the body.

  Could it not be that armour had protected the rest of the body? There is no evidence, however, that soldiers of the Old and Middle Kingdoms wore armour. We first see its appearance in the Eighteenth Dynasty where tightly packed bronze scales were riveted to knee-length linen or leather garments. It is thought that helmets and body armour developed alongside the chariot, which was used as a mobile platform for archers rather than a personal speed wagon in the Ben-Hur tradition. In any case there were no chariots in use in the time of Seqenenre, so again it seems unlikely that this Pharaoh died in battle.

  And who would he have been fighting at this time? The mysterious Hyksos, who Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, believed were synonymous with the Israelites who were expelled during the exodus. He called them ‘Shepherd Kings’, his own translation of the Egyptian Hyksos. Modern scholars now believe the correct translation is ‘rulers of foreign lands’. It sounds far less convincing. The shepherd kings were driven out to Canaan, which again is suggestive of them being Israelites. Josephus gets this idea from the Egyptian historian Manetho who in the third century BC wrote a history of Egypt, which along with Herodotus is the source of much that we know about the ancient Egyptians. Manetho’s own name is derived supposedly from ‘lover or gift of Thoth’. Though earlier beliefs about the Hyksos had them attacking Egypt as a horde, more current accounts have them peaceably infiltrating the Lower Egypt area of the delta – the area where Joseph and the Israelites settled.

  We know from bas-reliefs and textual evidence that the King did not lack a bodyguard. This contradicts to some extent the fanciful narrative tradition of the King vanquishing an entire army alone and single handed, but it ties in with every observed military tradition: the killing of a leader, especially a royal leader, has a huge impact on morale. Therefore he must be protected at all costs. That a protected king could be assailed and killed by blows to the head only, while surrounded by a bodyguard, is unlikely. Increasingly it looks as if Seqenenre Tao did not die in battle.

  Back to the forensics. Maspero concluded that the inept and hasty mummification was performed on the battlefield, or at least far from the capital, Thebes. The decomposition was the result of this hurried treatment and not the result of delaying mummification, since a proper embalmer of that period would have been able to halt any rot in the full process of creating a mummy. In any case, in a hot climate like Egypt, putrefaction begins almost immediately.

  In the late 1960s, X-rays of the body showed that though the skeleton was disarticulated (as a result of mummification) no bones had been broken except those in the skull. It looked as if the King had been executed or, as some suggested, murdered while asleep. There was no healed skin over any of the wounds, which tells us that poor Seqenenre did not survive the attack, whatever form it took.

  Was he asleep, or perhaps having a meal when an assassin sneaked up and belaboured him to death?

  There has been in the past strong support for the assassination case. However, a king when assassinated is not spared a full ceremony of mummification. If Seqenenre had been killed in his own palace or even his own camp there would have been no reason to mummify him in such a partial and clumsy way.

  Another point against assassination is the mixture of weapons used against him. From the several wounds to his head it has been noted that they were made by both Egyptian and Hyksos-type weaponry. Two of the wounds are consistent with a Palestinian bronze battle-axe, a weapon only found in the Hyksos region of the north-eastern delta. Other blows are more in keeping with an Egyptian handaxe or hatchet. It would seem unusual for an assassination to use such mixed equipment. However, the Hyksos had Egyptian vassal warriors fighting for them, so on a battlefield both types of weaponry would have been available, which would lend some credence to death happening in such a place – even if, as we have seen earlier, it was not actually during the battle that he died.

  If Seqenenre was not assassinated and did not die fighting, how did he die? The other possibility is an execution of some kind. When people are executed by machete and club, their hands having been secured, we see similar injuries (though even here it is not uncommon to see shoulder-blade and collar-bone wounds where the executioner misses his target even in this controlled situation).

  When I spoke to Dr Garry Shaw he explained that Seqenenre was probably kneeling when he was executed, on or near the battlefield. He also suggested that both sides of a weapon – the cutting edge of the axe and the blunt club-like balancing side – were used to despatch the King. After the killing his body was given a rudimentary mummification before being sent back to Thebes and its final resting place.

  It is fascinating that none of the bodies of kings in ancient Egypt have anything like the damage found on a European king of, say, crusader times. Alexander the Great, contemporary accounts reveal, was covered in healed injuries. One of the most revered warrior kings was Ahmose, Seqenenre’s son, who finally drove the Hyksos invaders from Egypt. Yet Ahmose had the kind of undeveloped body you might find on someone who had done nothing physically demanding in their life. He was literally too frail to have been the kind of sword-wielding hero the friezes and bas-reliefs and textual evidence reveal. Garry Shaw, when examining the relevant texts, found there was genre shift whenever a king’s name was mentioned. From being a prosaic and unemotional account there is a sudden lurch into hyperbole. One is reminded of the great list of works and heroic discoveries that Kim Il Sung, Mao and Stalin were, according to their publicists, supposed to have made during their rule.

  Seqenenre, the Red Pharaoh, seems to contradict the evidence that Egyptian kings kept far from the bloodshed. Yet we can now see that he was simply unlucky – being captured and killed in a manner almost as brutal as one might expect in the midst of battle itself.

  12 • A classical river that rises in the Mountains of the Moon

  A solution to a problem is to its possessor as a road is to the traveller.

  Ethiopian proverb

  The exploits of men like the Red Pharaoh spread Egypt’s fame all round the Mediterranean. But it wasn’t just war. Trade or gift goods from ancient Egypt have been found in Tunisia and Turkey. When in the first millennium BC the Greek Empire rose, its leaders and scholars turned to Egypt as a source of learning. And what they discovered was the Nile.

  The Nile is the classical river. I mean, it is owned in some way by the classical references to it. Of course it is central to the ancient Egyptians and the Jews, but it was the Greeks who gave it some kind of extra glamour, lifting it out of the Middle East and into the European realm.

  The current name ‘Nile’ comes from the Greek Neilios – which means, appropriately, ‘river’. Neilios is almost certainly derived from the ancient Semitic word nahar or nahal that survives in the Arabic word nahar, meaning ‘river’, and the Hebrew word nachal for a smaller stream.

  Homer, writing for eighth-century BC readers, described the world as bounded by an encircling ocean. The Nile was like its plughole, a drainhole reaching down through Libya to the further oceans beyond. At its source pygmies were to be found; and that is true, as pygmies inhabit the dark Ituri Forest abutting the Mountains of the Moon, the Ruwenzori range, source of much of the White Nile’s water. Sceptical readers had for centuries doubted the existence of these moon mountains and of these little people, thinking they had the same reality as Homer’s Cyclops.

  I first heard the expression ‘mountains of the moon’ when I was eighteen. I knew it had vaguely class
ical overtones, that Caesar had written about these mountains and that they were in Africa somewhere. Beyond that I merely liked the sound of their name. Years later, when researching a book about a rare species of deer discovered by Père Armand David, I discovered that one of his students had been the Duke of Abruzzi, the first man to explore the Mountains of the Moon systematically, in 1906. This expedition had been prompted by a suggestion made by Stanley (of Livingstone and Stanley fame) – Stanley being the first European to glimpse them. The Duke scaled all the major peaks.

  The Duke went on to have an interesting career, attempting to climb K2 and importing the first armoured tank into Ethiopia where it helped put down the coup of 1928. He was, at first, unlucky in love. He had been persuaded against his first choice in marriage (to a commoner), but he made up for it later by marrying a Somali peasant woman he had taken up with while setting up an experimental agricultural community in Somalia. During his time in Ethiopia he travelled to Lake Tana at the start of the Blue Nile, thus joining that select band of people who have double-sourced the river.

  The Duke was really at the end of a long line of explorers searching for the Mountains of the Moon and the source of the Nile. Herod otus, the Greek historian and the world’s first travel writer, was at the very beginning of this line. Herodotus still defines much of what we know about ancient Egypt and the Nile. His explanations about the Pyramids and mummification are still the accepted basis of our knowledge on these subjects. When he arrived in Egypt in 457 BC it was in decline, but it was still ancient Egypt, a place where practices and language had not altered in thousands of years. He was a skilful questioner and had a wonderful eye for what the Sun newspaper later called the ‘Hey, Gladys’ factor – any piece of information sufficiently intriguing to make a housewife shout over her fence to Gladys. At random: ‘The Egyptians are the most healthy of all men apart from the Libyans . . . on account of purging their bodies through emetics and clysters for three days every month.’ Or ‘Each physician is a physician of one disease only, one for the eyes, one for the head, one for the teeth and even more obscure ailments.’ Or ‘Whenever a household has lost a man the women plaster over their whole heads with mud.’ True or not, it is certainly memorable.

  Herodotus travelled up the Nile as far as Elephantine Island near Aswan in southern Egypt. It’s a respectable journey of over 600 miles. A few hundred years later Eratosthenes would pay men expert in walking at an even pace to measure the exact distance. From this he would correctly calculate the earth’s circumference. Elephantine is known for its ivory and its slaves, a blood island if ever there was one. Thousands of years later by some strange twist of irony a small island next to Elephantine became the gift of the grateful Egyptian government to Lord Kitchener, architect of the bloody River War. This war, fought in 1898, resulted in the slaughter of 11,000 Sudanese by machine gun and exploding shell. Only forty-seven English soldiers were killed. This bloodletting occurred at the point where the White and Blue Nile meet. (Yet another reason to name the subsequent river the Red Nile.) Today there is a fine garden on Kitchener’s island and a hotel of extraordinary ugliness dominating one side of Elephantine. It bears a passing resemblance to a huge air vent.

  Herodotus tells us scornfully that a priest suggested to him that the Nile rises between Aswan and Elephantine between two mountains known as Crophi and Mophi, in a fountain of unfathomable depth. Herodotus suspects the source lies far away in Africa, hence his scorn. We might scorn this priest’s suggestion too, unless we read the story as a garbled version of reality, a mythological rendering of the truth. What if the priest was relating the correct details of the real source, but in the wrong general location? Rather like giving someone a correct map of London but telling them it was a map of New York. By translating the details from Aswan to central Africa it all suddenly makes sense: we now know that the two most northerly of the snowy peaks of the Ruwenzori, Emin and Gessi, have lying between them a deep lake. This lake is the source of the Ruamuli river, a major source for Lake Albert and therefore of the White Nile. Perhaps this is the way a lot of knowledge in Egypt retained its accuracy while remaining ‘secret’.

  Aristotle refers to the Nile’s source as a silver mountain – an allusion again, one suspects, to the snow-capped Ruwenzoris. He calls them by their classical name, of course – the Mountains of the Moon.

  It is fascinating to discover that in a convoluted sense these mountains and the lake they supply – Lake Albert – are the real source of the Nile. The argument is that water flowing into the top of Lake Albert is equal in quantity to that leaving Lake Victoria. Therefore there has been no increase. And a true source from a hydrological point of view is the point when a river begins to increase in volume of flow. Lake Albert is still (as it was 12,500 years ago before Lake Victoria burst its banks) the start of the Nile’s useful life; it is the place from which the river stops merely maintaining its size and starts a continual increase as it heads towards the sea.

  For those, such as myself, who like to think that the ancients had it all nailed, there is further loose evidence that the Mountains of the Moon really are the source – even without invoking obscure hydrological definitions. Suggestively, the Ruwenzoris also join up with the rift-formed chain of hills that includes the upland area where the current ‘real source’, the Kagera river, rises.

  When Strabo appeared some 300 years later in 63 BC he turned his attention to Ethiopia and the Blue Nile’s source. For the first time in literature the Nile’s flood is laid bare: ‘Now the ancients depended mostly on conjecture, but the men of later times, having become eyewitnesses, perceived that the Nile was filled by summer rains when Upper Ethiopia was flooded, and particularly in the region of its furthermost mountains, and that when the rains ceased, the inundation gradually ceased.’

  Which was about right. He also spoke of another source where the arum and the stalks of staphylini were twelve cubits high (about eighteen feet) – which sounds like the outsize and superabundant vegetation in the high Ruwenzoris. That is more loose evidence that everything worth knowing has always been known in some way.

  While pursuing this agreeable fantasy one should not ignore the later religions. One hadith, or saying, of the Prophet Muhammad is ‘The Nile comes out of the Garden of Paradise, and if you were to examine it when it comes out, you would find in it leaves of Paradise.’ This could easily refer to the entangled vegetation of the immense swamp of the Sudd, but, more suggestively, the exuberant, giant, dripping flora of the Ruwenzoris comes to mind – a place of botanical strangeness unrivalled in its primitive grandeur.

  From 7,500 feet upwards the bamboo towers to more than fifty feet high, only diminishing when the altitude creeps past 10,000 feet. At this height you enter the alpine zone where heather can be expected – but Erica arborea and Philippia johnstonii are no ordinary heathers – they grow to forty or fifty feet in height with trunks several feet in diameter. In the Ruwenzoris all year round it is the growing season; there is perpetual dampness but also exceptional quantities of ultraviolet light. What better place to identify as Eden?

  At around 6,500 feet one encounters the giant lobelias – thirty-foot plants are not so uncommon, and many are over twenty feet high. The petals form dense flowers often ten feet in length. These plants have been seeded and can be grown, if treated with care, in England’s cool damp climate. Protected against frost inside a greenhouse they may reach heights of four or five feet in two years of growing. Out of Eden everything is diminished, a pale copy.

  Another giant, Lobelia wollastonii, has a whole flower spike, often fifteen feet in length, pale-blue woolly bracts covering a delicate powder-blue flower. That such vigorous growth is possible at such high altitude is amazing. When transported to Europe, however, the plant almost invariably fails to thrive and soon perishes.

  More Moon Mountain madness: Stanley, in In Darkest Africa (incidentally in this book revealing himself to be someone far more interesting than the conventionally accepted gun
g-ho caricature), explained that he had found an ancient manuscript while travelling through Egypt. Oh, what images that conjures up: the Victorian explorer resplendent in his special ‘explorer’s uniform’ (Stanley invented and popularised such a thing) wending through the labyrinthine souk. A hiss and a whisper alert him to some old wizened pedlar of antiquities. The man’s shop is loaded with dusty treasures, but it is the ancient book that Stanley buys, for a Marie-Thérèse dollar he has hidden in his special ‘gold bearing’ explorer’s belt.

  Back at Shepheard’s Hotel, making sure no one can see him, he peruses the manuscript which he has had translated by a bespectacled schoolmaster down on his luck. It appears to be a copy of an even older text. This was also in Arabic, and was known as The Explorer’s Desire and was said to date from around the time of Saladin, the eleventh century. Stanley was so impressed he quoted at length from this long-lost book:

  Abu El Fadel, son of Kadama, wrote: ‘As for the Nile it starts from the mountains of Gumr [almost certainly derived from kamar meaning ‘moon’] beyond the equator, from a source from which ten rivers flow, every five of these flowing into a separate lake, then from each one of these two lakes, two rivers flow out; then all four of these rivers flow into a great lake and from this great lake flows the Nile.’

  As Stanley confirmed Lake Victoria as the source of the White Nile, one can see that this text supports his findings. The ancient book continues: ‘It is said that a certain king sent an expedition to discover the Nile sources, and they reached the copper mountains, and when the sun rose the rays reflected were so strong that they were burnt.’

  It is interesting to note that in the 1930s, long after Stanley had died, the rich copper mines of Kilembe were found at the foot of the snowy Ruwenzoris. The Mountains of the Moon were rich in everything: water and mystery and now money.