The Mythological Control of The River Nile: A Study on the Islamic Sources

‘Hail to thee, O Nile, who came out of the earth, who came to make Egypt live!’ Thus reads the preamble of an ancient hymn dedicated to the god Hapi, the embodiment of the fertility of the flooding of the River Nile (to be distinguished from a personification of the river itself), probably recited by a member of the ancient Egyptian priesthood. From the earliest times, the Nile’s annual floods of were of great importance to the wealth of this land. Following the Arab conquests and the advent of Islamic rule, Egypt and the Nile again found themselves inseparably linked, now in terms of their economic and military strategic importance to the confrontation with the Christian world in the era of the Crusades. This study aims to identify and explore Islamic sources dating from between the fourth/tenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries that related to periods of drought and created or favoured the avowal of the idea that Ethiopia, geographically and/or politically, was involved in this process. What tradition, or set of traditions, lies at the basis of this belief in Ethiopia’s singular power? Can Ethiopia give life or death to Egypt by either causing excessive floods or prolonged periods of drought? However, despite the fact that this narrative continued to circulate in Europe until the end of the tenth/ sixteenth century, for obvious military and strategic reasons, the situation seems to have been different in the Islamic sources. For example, by the eighth/fourteenth-century al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442) no longer seemed to pay attention to such ideas.