The flooding of the Nile is the result of the yearly monsoon between May and August causing enormous precipitations on the Ethiopian Highlands whose summits reach heights of up to 4,550 m (14,930 ft).
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The Nile is the longest river in the world. In ancient times, it flooded the shores of Egypt once every year, in August. Modern Egyptians still celebrate this event with Wafaa an-Nil, a holiday that starts on August 15 and lasts for two weeks. Here are five Nile facts for the world's most remarkable river!
The civilizations of the Nile were affected by seasonal changes. The rise and fall of the Nile established the three agricultural seasons for ancient farmers in Egypt. The seasons were called Akhet (in the fall), Peret (in winter), and Shemu (in summer). During Akhet, the river flooded the land.
On the Sudanese side of the lake, the lake is called Lake Nubia. Though the Nile River no longer floods, the levels of the lake rise and fall over the course of the year.
Nile discharge rises quickly from late June and peaks in late August or early September. Figure 1 shows a typical flood recorded at Aswan before the building of the High Aswan Dam in 1964. The intensity of the summer monsoon is a key control on flood magnitude, which can change year to year.
The discharge of the main stream, as well as the tributaries, is regularly measured. The Nile swells in the summer, the floods rising as a result of the heavy tropical rains in Ethiopia. In South Sudan the flood begins as early as April, but the effect is not felt at Aswan, Egypt, until July.
The river became known as the “Father of Life” and the “Mother of All Men” and was considered a manifestation of the god Hapi, who blessed the land with life, as well as with the goddess Ma'at, who embodied the concepts of truth, harmony, and balance.
But since the late 1960s, the Nile River has been under the control of humans because of the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Part of the rationale for this dam was to manage the natural cycles of flood and drought to produce dependable water supplies for farming and other uses.
The Nile was a critical lifeline that literally brought life to the desert, as Lisa Saladino Haney, assistant curator of Egypt at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, writes on the museum's website. Without the Nile, there would be no Egypt, writes Egyptologist in his 2012 book, The Nile.