Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (77 page)

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Authors: Robert Twigger

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

Papyrus survives even to this day buried in the sands at Oxyrhynchus near the Nile. A piece of papyrus from the Book of the Dead, Late Eighteenth Dynasty, 1350–1300 BC.

Croc skin is reinforced with bony osteoderms, making it the original armour. Back view of a crocodile-skin suit of armour discovered near Manfalut, third century AD.

A 2,000-year-old map that is still substantially correct.
A fifteenth-century version of Ptolemy’s Map with the Mountains of the Moon indicated as the source of the Nile.

The Nile’s flood was used to float the blocks needed to build the pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Cheops reflected in the Nile overflow.

The brainchild of William Willcocks, fitness fanatic and religious scholar: the first Aswan Dam, looking north, c.1936.

The seventh crusade made the Nile, seen here in the background, run red with Frankish blood; from
Les Grandes Chroniques de France
, fifteenth-century French illumination.

The central pillar of the Nilometer on Rhoda Island measured the Nile’s flood throughout the artistic splendour of the Islamic period.

Nelson 1; Napoleon 0. The Battle of the Nile,
1 August 1798 at 10 p.m., as depicted by Thomas Luny, 1834.

The unspeakable Speke’s final triumph: Speke and Grant’s map of their route from Zanzibar to the Nile.

The Tissisat Falls sees the source of the mighty Blue Nile.

The sole picture of the photosensitive Flaubert in Cairo.

The epitome of romance, from Flaubert to Agatha Christie: a late nineteenth-century
dahabiya
in Cairo.

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