"Unfortunately, programmes that deal with impressive chunks of nature often adopt a portentous tone featuring sunsets, awed narration and emphatic music.
Civilisations have risen and fallen on its banks, without its gifts the pyramids would never have been built.Since the dawn of history the miraculous annual floodwaters have risen to transform the desert into a fertile paradise where the great civilisation of Ancient Egypt grew, but their existence was on a knife-edge held hostage by the river and the Pharaoh maintained the balance by appeasing the gods to ensure the gifts of the river.
The New Kingdom of Rameses and Tutankhamun began 3,500 years ago with the province of Thebes at its heart, and farmers, fishermen and temple builders thrive with the blessings of the rivers.
This river was the powerhouse behind the world’s first great civilisation, without the Nile’s extraordinary fertility there would be no Tutankhamun, no Cleopatra, no pyramids; it changed the world forever.The annual flooding of the Nile brought the water and fertile volcanic soil that made the Ancient Egyptian civilisation possible, but impassable rapids made it impossible for them to discover the source of this bounty they attributed to the gods.
The river stretches into Sudan through a forbidding desert known as the Belly of Stones that was home to the Black Pharaohs of the Nubian kingdom of Kush who once ruled over their Egyptian neighbours.
The White Nile flows through the impenetrable swamps of the Sudd where shifting islands of papyrus buoyed by air-sacks in the steams long prevented further exploration.
A lungfish emerges from its cocoon of mud and mucus and uses its primitive lungs to breathe air while it reaches for the nearest pool only to be caught in the oversized beak of the giant shoebill stalk, while family groups of speckle-throated otter and the powerful Nile monitor also hunt the waters.
The Blue Nile flows through dry savannah from a deep barren gorge on the fringe of the Ethiopian highlands where the lammergeier vulture seeks out those who succumb to the drought.
Moisture-laden clouds from the Congo Basin bring annual rains to Africa’s Water Tower that transforms the rodent's world with lush vegetation for food and cover from predators like the auger buzzard.
Night time freezing breaks up the topsoil of one of the oldest areas of cultivated land in Africa and it is washed downstream to the lake where pelicans gather to feed and weaver birds build papyrus nests.
Ancient Egyptians had heard rumours of Lake Tana but had no idea how important the Blue Nile that flows over the Smoking Fire Falls with its fertile volcanic soil was to their civilisation.
Nomads first settled along the banks of the Nile around 5000 BC and replenished by annual floodwaters grew into the Ancient Egyptian civilisation but the source of the miraculous waters remained a mystery to them.