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99-783: At least 2500 years ago, the first Nubian speakers migrated into the Nile valley from the southwest. Old Nubian is thought to be ancestral to Nobiin. Nobiin is a tonal language with contrastive vowel and consonant length. The basic word order is subject–object–verb . Nobiin is currently spoken along the banks of the Nile in Upper Egypt and northern Sudan by approximately 610,000 Nubians. In 1996 there were 295,000 Nobiin speakers in Sudan , and in 2006 there were 310,000 Nobiin speakers in Egypt . It

198-460: A CV, VC, V or CVC structure with VC only occurring in initial syllables. Final and initial CC occur only in a few specific examples such as skul which means "school" or sems which means "sun" . Stress can change the meaning of words for example saba means "seven" or "morning" depending on whether the stress is on the first or second syllables respectively. Vowels are often omitted in unstressed, final syllables and sometime even

297-433: A Turkish officer, Selim Bimbashi, were made between 1839 and 1842, and two got to the point about 30 kilometres (20 miles) beyond the present port of Juba , where the country rises and rapids make navigation very difficult. Lake Victoria was first sighted by Europeans in 1858 when British explorer John Hanning Speke reached its southern shore while traveling with Richard Francis Burton to explore central Africa and locate

396-716: A distance of 20 days' journey till it reaches the nearest Ethiopians." Modern exploration of the Nile basin began with the conquest of the northern and central Sudan by the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali , and his sons from 1821 onward. As a result of this, the Blue Nile was known as far as its exit from the Ethiopian foothills and the White Nile as far as the mouth of the Sobat River. Three expeditions under

495-468: A factor of 15 at Aswan. Peak flows of over 8,212 m /s (290,000 cu ft/s) occurred during late August and early September, and minimum flows of about 552 m /s (19,500 cu ft/s) occurred during late April and early May. The Bahr al Ghazal and the Sobat River are the two most important tributaries of the White Nile in terms of discharge. The Bahr al Ghazal's drainage basin

594-514: A five- vowel system. The vowels / e / and / o / can be realized close-mid or more open-mid (as [ ɛ ] and [ ɔ ] , respectively). Vowels can be long or short, e.g., jáákí ' fear ' (long / aː / ), jàkkàr ' fish-hook ' (short / a / ). However, many nouns are unstable with regard to vowel length ; thus, bálé ~ báléé ' feast ' , ííg ~ íg ' fire ' , shártí ~ sháártí ' spear ' . Diphthongs are interpreted as sequences of vowels and

693-425: A possible language shift to Arabic, Werner notes a very positive language attitude. Rouchdy (1992a) however notes that use of Nobiin is confined mainly to the domestic circle, as Arabic is the dominant language in trade, education, and public life. Sociolinguistically, the situation may be described as one of stable bilingualism : the dominant language (Arabic in this case), although used widely, does not easily replace

792-621: A result of certain morphophonological processes. The voiced plosive / b / is mainly in contrast with / f / . Originally, [ z ] only occurred as an allophone of / s / before voiced consonants; however, through the influx of loanwords from Arabic it has acquired phonemic status: àzáábí ' pain ' . The glottal fricative [ h ] occurs as an allophone of /s, t, k, f, ɡ/ : síddó → híddó ' where? ' ; tánnátóón → tánnáhóón ' of him/her ' ; ày fàkàbìr → ày hàkàbìr ' I will eat ' ; dòllàkúkkàn → dòllàhúkkàn ' he has loved ' . This process

891-536: A split between Hill Nubian and the two Nile-Nubian languages occurred at least 2500 years ago. This is corroborated by the fact that the oral tradition of the Shaigiya tribe of the Jaali group of arabized Nile Nubians tells of coming from the southwest long ago. The speakers of Nobiin are thought to have come to the area before the speakers of the related Kenzi-Dongolawi languages (see classification below). Since

990-553: A tone. Long consonants are only found in intervocalic position, whereas long vowels can occur in initial, medial and final position. Phonotactically , there might be a weak relationship between the occurrence of consonant and vowel length: forms like dàrrìl ' climb ' and dààrìl ' be present ' are found, but * dàrìl (short V + short C) and * dààrrìl (long V + long C) do not exist; similarly, féyyìr 'grow' and fééyìr 'lose (a battle)' occur, but not * féyìr and * fééyyìr . Nobiin has

1089-628: A useful ally. However, as Arabic remained a language of high importance in Sudan and especially Egypt, Nobiin continued to be under pressure, and its use became largely confined to Nubian homes. Nobiin is one of the about eleven Nubian languages . It has traditionally been grouped with the Dongolawi cluster, mainly based on the geographic proximity of the two (before the construction of the Aswan Dam, varieties of Dongolawi were spoken north and south of

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1188-407: Is a voiced labial-velar. Nobiin is a tonal language, in which pitch is used to mark lexical contrasts . Tone also figures heavily in morphological derivation . Nobiin has two underlying tones, high and low. A falling tone occurs in certain contexts; this tone can in general be analysed as arising from a high and a low tone together. In Nobiin, every utterance ends in a low tone. This is one of

1287-465: Is an archaeological site located in alluvial deposits formed by an ancient channel of the Nile in the Affad region of southern Dongola Reach , Sudan. There are two theories about the age of the integrated Nile. One is that the integrated drainage of the Nile is of young age and that the Nile basin was formerly broken into series of separate basins, only the most northerly of which fed a river following

1386-450: Is an adverb while baara means "the outside" and is a noun, and also where saara meaning "bewitch" is compared to sara meaning "herd, cattle". Despite this, there is a tendency for vowels in stressed syllables to be registered as long vowels. Each of the vowels has multiple allophones and the exact sound of the vowel depends on the surrounding consonants. Speakers may use Standard Arabic phonemes for words for which

1485-642: Is approximately 1,218 m /s (43,000 cu ft/s) in October and minimum flow is about 609 m /s (21,500 cu ft/s) in April. This fluctuation is caused by the substantial variation in the flow of the Sobat, which has a minimum flow of about 99 m /s (3,500 cu ft/s) in March and a peak flow of over 680 m /s (24,000 cu ft/s) in October. During the dry season (January to June)

1584-755: Is in Egypt. Below the Aswan Dam , at the northern limit of Lake Nasser, the Nile resumes its historic course. North of Cairo , the Nile splits into two branches (or distributaries) that feed the Mediterranean: the Rosetta Branch to the west and the Damietta to the east, forming the Nile Delta . The annual sediment transport by the Nile in Egypt has been quantified. Below the confluence with

1683-522: Is spoken by the Fedicca in Egypt and the Mahas and Halfawi tribes in Sudan. Present-day Nobiin speakers are almost universally multilingual in local varieties of Arabic , generally speaking Modern Standard Arabic (for official purposes) as well as Saʽidi Arabic , Egyptian Arabic , or Sudanese Arabic . Many Nobiin-speaking Nubians were forced to relocate in 1963–1964 to make room for the construction of

1782-572: Is the largest of any of the Nile's sub-basins, measuring 520,000 square kilometers (200,000 sq mi) in size, but it contributes a relatively small amount of water, about 2 m /s (71 cu ft/s) annually, because tremendous volumes of water are lost in the Sudd wetlands. The Sobat River, which joins the Nile a short distance below Lake No, drains about half as much land, 225,000 km (86,900 sq mi), but contributes 412 cubic meters per second (14,500 cu ft/s) annually to

1881-545: Is traditionally considered to be the headwaters stream. However, the Blue Nile is the source of most of the water of the Nile downstream, containing 80% of the water and silt . The White Nile is longer and rises in the Great Lakes region. It begins at Lake Victoria and flows through Uganda and South Sudan. The Blue Nile begins at Lake Tana in Ethiopia and flows into Sudan from the southeast. The two rivers meet at

1980-463: Is transparently derived from the set of personal pronouns plus a connexive suffix -íín . Another set is less clearly related to the simple personal pronouns; all possessive pronouns of this set bear a high tone. The third set is derived from the second set by appending the nominalizing suffix -ní . Nobiin has two demonstrative pronouns : ìn 'this', denoting things nearby, and mán 'that', denoting things farther away. Both can function as

2079-545: Is unidirectional, i.e., /h/ will never change into one of the above consonants, and it has been termed ' consonant switching ' ( Konsonantenwechsel ) by Werner. Only in very few words, if any, does [h] have independent phonemic status: Werner lists híssí ' voice ' and hòòngìr ' braying ' , but it might be noted that the latter example is less convincing because of its probably onomatopoeic nature. The alveolar liquids / l / and / r / are in free variation as in many African languages. The approximant / w /

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2178-512: The Aswan Dam at Aswan , Egypt and for the upstream Lake Nasser . There is no standardised orthography for Nobiin. It has been written in both Latin and Arabic scripts ; also, recently there have been efforts to revive the Old Nubian alphabet . This article adopts the Latin orthography used in the only published grammar of Nobiin, Roland Werner's (1987) Grammatik des Nobiin . Before

2277-644: The Democratic Republic of the Congo , Tanzania , Burundi , Rwanda , Uganda , Kenya , Ethiopia , Eritrea , South Sudan , Sudan , and Egypt . In particular, the Nile is the primary water source of Egypt, Sudan and South Sudan. The Nile is an important economic driver supporting agriculture and fishing. The Nile has two major tributaries : the White Nile and the Blue Nile . The White Nile

2376-469: The Hill Nubian languages ( Nuba Mountains , Kordofan ). In recent times, research by Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst has shed more light on the relations between Nobiin and Dongolawi. The groups have been separated so long that they do not share a common identity; additionally, they differ in their traditions about their origins. The languages are clearly genetically related, but the picture is complicated by

2475-488: The Nubi language , an Arabic-based creole. Nobiin is one of the few languages of Africa to have a written history that can be followed over the course of more than a millennium. Old Nubian, preserved in a sizable collection of mainly early Christian manuscripts and documented in detail by Gerald M. Browne (1944–2004), is considered ancestral to Nobiin. Many manuscripts, including Nubian Biblical texts , have been unearthed in

2574-651: The Paleogene and Neogene Periods (66 million to 2.588 million years ago) a series of separate closed continental basins each occupied one of the major parts of the Sudanese Rift System: Mellut rift , White Nile rift , Blue Nile rift , Atbara rift and Sag El Naam rift . The Mellut Basin is nearly 12 kilometers (7.5 mi) deep at its central part. This rift is possibly still active, with reported tectonic activity in its northern and southern boundaries. The Sudd swamp which forms

2673-787: The River Nile or Nile River ) is a major north-flowing river in northeastern Africa . It flows into the Mediterranean Sea . The Nile is the longest river in Africa. It has historically been considered the longest river in the world , though this has been contested by research suggesting that the Amazon River is slightly longer. Of the world's major rivers, the Nile is one of the smallest, as measured by annual flow in cubic metres of water. About 6,650 km (4,130 mi) long, its drainage basin covers eleven countries:

2772-456: The discharge at any given point along the main stem depends on many factors including weather, diversions, evaporation and evapotranspiration , and groundwater flow. Upstream from Khartoum (to the south), the river is known as the White Nile , a term also used in a limited sense to describe the section between Lake No and Khartoum. At Khartoum, the river is joined by the Blue Nile . The White Nile starts in equatorial East Africa, and

2871-430: The dry season ) an appreciable incoming surface flow for many kilometres upstream, and found a new source, giving the Nile a length of 6,758 km (4,199 mi). The White Nile leaves Lake Victoria at Ripon Falls near Jinja, Uganda , as the "Victoria Nile." It flows north for some 130 kilometers (81 mi) to Lake Kyoga . The last part of the approximately 200 kilometers (120 mi) river section starts from

2970-629: The Arabic pronunciation has been learned. The retroflex version of the /r/ sound may also occur and some dialects use /l/ in its place. Geminates are very unusual in Nubi. These less common phonemes are shown in brackets. Ineke Wellens gives the following orthography for Nubi where it differs from the IPA symbols: / ʃ / = sh; /t ʃ / = ch; / dʒ / = j; / ɲ / = ny; /w/ = w or u; /j/ = y or i; / θ / = th; / ð / = dh; /x/ = kh; / ħ / = ḥ. Syllables typically have

3069-502: The Bahr al Jabal at a small lagoon called Lake No , after which the Nile becomes known as the Bahr al Abyad , or the White Nile, from the whitish clay suspended in its waters. When the Nile floods it leaves a rich silty deposit which fertilizes the soil. The Nile no longer floods in Egypt since the completion of the Aswan Dam in 1970. An anabranch river, the Bahr el Zeraf , flows out of

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3168-652: The Blue Nile begins in Ethiopia. Both branches are on the western flanks of the East African Rift . The source of the Blue Nile is Lake Tana in the Gish Abay region in the Ethiopian Highlands . The source of the White Nile, even after centuries of exploration, remains in dispute. The most remote source that is indisputably a source for the White Nile is the Kagera River ; however,

3267-569: The Blue Nile the only major tributary is the Atbarah River , also known as the Red Nile. Roughly halfway to the sea, it originates in Ethiopia north of Lake Tana , and is around 800 kilometers (500 mi) long. The Atbarah flows only while there is rain in Ethiopia and dries very rapidly. During the dry period of January to June, it typically dries up north of Khartoum . The Blue Nile ( Amharic : ዓባይ , ʿĀbay ) springs from Lake Tana in

3366-589: The Congo, but the Nile is not a border river at this point. After leaving Lake Albert, the river continues north through Uganda and is known as the Albert Nile . The White Nile flows into South Sudan just south of Nimule , where it is known as the Bahr al Jabal ("Mountain River" ). Just south of the town is the confluence with the Achwa River . The Bahr al Ghazal , 716 kilometers (445 mi) long, joins

3465-537: The Delta, and would have been pronounced ni-lo-he in the area around Memphis in the 8th century BCE. Hesiod at his Theogony refers to Nilus (Νεῖλος) as one of the Potamoi (river gods), son of Oceanus and Tethys . Another derivation of Nile might be related to the term Nil ( Sanskrit : नील , romanized :  nila ; Egyptian Arabic : نيلة ), which refers to Indigofera tinctoria , one of

3564-604: The Egyptian border at Wadi Halfa . Additionally, many Nubians have moved to large cities like Cairo and Khartoum . In recent years, some of the resettled Nubians have returned to their traditional territories around Abu Simbel and Wadi Halfa. Practically all speakers of Nobiin are bilingual in Egyptian Arabic or Sudanese Arabic . For the men, this was noted as early as 1819 by the traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in his Travels to Nubia . The forced resettlement in

3663-414: The Ethiopian rainy season when rainfall is especially high in the Ethiopian Highlands ; the rest of the year, the great rivers draining Ethiopia into the Nile have a weaker flow. In harsh and arid seasons and droughts, the Blue Nile dries out completely. The flow of the Blue Nile varies considerably over its yearly cycle and is the main contribution to the large natural variation of the Nile flow. During

3762-630: The Ethiopian Highlands, satellite imagery was used to identify dry watercourses in the desert to the west of the Nile. A canyon, now filled by surface drift, represents the Eonile that flowed during 23–5.3 million years before present. The Eonile transported clastic sediments to the Mediterranean; several natural gas fields have been discovered within these sediments. During the late- Miocene Messinian salinity crisis , when

3861-491: The Ethiopian Highlands. The Blue Nile flows about 1,400 kilometres to Khartoum, where the Blue Nile and White Nile join to form the Nile. Ninety percent of the water and ninety-six percent of the transported sediment carried by the Nile come from the Atbarah and Blue Nile, both of which originate in Ethiopia, with fifty-nine percent of the water coming from the Blue Nile. The erosion and transportation of silt only occurs during

3960-874: The Kagera has tributaries that are in contention for the farthest source of the White Nile. Two start in Burundi: the Ruvyironza River (also known as the Luvironza) and the Rurubu River . In addition, in 2010, an exploration party in Rwanda went to a place described as the source of the Rukarara tributary, and by hacking a path up steep jungle-choked mountain slopes in the Nyungwe Forest found (in

4059-482: The Mediterranean Sea was a closed basin and evaporated to the point of being empty or nearly so, the Nile cut its course down to the new base level until it was several hundred metres below world ocean level at Aswan and 2,400 m (7,900 ft) below Cairo. This created a very long and deep canyon which was filled with sediment after the Mediterranean was recreated. At some point the sediments raised

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4158-581: The Middle East and Africa, and described being told of the source of the Nile in Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Later in the 15th and 16th centuries, travelers to Ethiopia visited Lake Tana and the source of the Blue Nile in the mountains south of the lake. Supposedly, Paolo Trevisani ( c.  1452 –1483), a Venetian traveller in Ethiopia, wrote a journal of his travels to the origin of the Nile that has since been lost. Although James Bruce claimed to be

4257-527: The Nile Valley, mainly between the first and fifth cataracts, testifying to a firm Nubian presence in the area during the first millennium. A dialect cluster related to Nobiin, Dongolawi , is found in the same area. The Nile-Nubian languages were the languages of the Christian Nubian kingdoms of Nobatia , Makuria and Alodia . The other Nubian languages are found hundreds of kilometers to

4356-624: The Nile near the southern point of the Great Bend. The Nile has been the lifeline of civilization in Egypt since the Stone Age , with most of the population and all of the cities of Egypt developing along those parts of the Nile valley lying north of Aswan. However, the Nile used to run much more westerly through what is now Wadi Hamim and Wadi al Maqar in Libya and flow into the Gulf of Sidra . As

4455-526: The Nile since ancient times. A tune, Hymn to the Nile , was created and sung by the ancient Egyptian peoples about the flooding of the Nile River and all of the miracles it brought to Ancient Egyptian civilization. Water buffalo were introduced from Asia, and the Assyrians introduced camels in the 7th century BCE. These animals were raised for meat and were domesticated and used for ploughing—or in

4554-454: The Nile valley north of the Aswan Dam . Nearly all the cultural and historical sites of Ancient Egypt developed and are found along river banks. The Nile is, with the Rhône and Po , one of the three Mediterranean rivers with the largest water discharge . The standard English names "White Nile" and "Blue Nile" refer to the river's source, derived from Arabic names formerly applied to only

4653-523: The Nile's Bahr al Jabal section and rejoins the White Nile. The flow rate of the Bahr al Jabal at Mongalla is almost constant throughout the year and averages 1,048 m /s (37,000 cu ft/s). After Mongalla, the Bahr Al Jabal enters the enormous swamps of the Sudd region. More than half of the Nile's water is lost in this swamp to evaporation and transpiration . The average flow rate of

4752-595: The Nile. When in flood the Sobat carries a large amount of sediment, adding greatly to the White Nile's color. The Yellow Nile is a former tributary that connected the Ouaddaï highlands of eastern Chad to the Nile River Valley c.  8000 to c.  1000 BCE . Its remains are known as the Wadi Howar . The wadi passes through Gharb Darfur near the northern border with Chad and meets up with

4851-552: The Nobiin area, in Kunuz and Dongola respectively). The uniformity of this 'Nile-Nubian' branch was first called into doubt by Thelwall (1982) who argued, based on lexicostatistical evidence, that Nobiin must have split off from the other Nubian languages earlier than Dongolawi. In Thelwall's classification, Nobiin forms a "Northern" branch on its own whereas Dongolawi is considered part of Central Nubian, along with Birged (North Darfur) and

4950-501: The Nubian region, first into Equatoria , and from there southwards into Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo . They rose to prominence under Ugandan President Idi Amin , who was Kakwa. Jonathan Owens argues that Nubi constitutes a major counterexample to Derek Bickerton 's theories of creole language formation, showing "no more than a chance resemblance to Bickerton's universal creole features" despite fulfilling perfectly

5049-532: The Sudanese capital of Khartoum . The northern section of the river flows north almost entirely through the Nubian Desert to Cairo and its large delta , and the river flows into the Mediterranean Sea at Alexandria . Egyptian civilization and Sudanese kingdoms have depended on the river and its annual flooding since ancient times. Most of the population and cities of Egypt lie along those parts of

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5148-425: The Sudanese stretches that meet at Khartoum . In the ancient Egyptian language , the Nile is called Ḥꜥpy (Hapy) or Jtrw (Iteru), meaning "river". In Coptic , the word ⲫⲓⲁⲣⲟ , pronounced piaro ( Sahidic ) or phiaro ( Bohairic ), means "the river" (lit. p(h).iar-o "the.canal-great"), and comes from the same ancient name. In Nobiin , the river is called Áman Dawū , meaning "the great water". In Luganda ,

5247-554: The Sudd wetlands of South Sudan, the upper reaches of the White Nile remained largely unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Vitruvius thought that source of the Nile was in Mauritania, on the "other" (south) side of the Atlas Mountains . Various expeditions failed to determine the river's source. Agatharchides records that in the time of Ptolemy II Philadelphus , a military expedition had penetrated far enough along

5346-408: The White Nile at the tails of the swamps is about 510 m /s (18,000 cu ft/s). From here it meets with the Sobat River at Malakal . On an annual basis, the White Nile upstream of Malakal contributes about 15% of the total outflow of the Nile. The average flow of the White Nile at Lake Kawaki Malakal, just below the Sobat River, is 924 m /s (32,600 cu ft/s); the peak flow

5445-400: The White Nile contributes between 70% and 90% of the total discharge from the Nile. Below Renk , the White Nile enters Sudan, it flows north to Khartoum and meets the Blue Nile. The course of the Nile in Sudan is distinctive. It flows over six groups of cataracts , from the sixth at Sabaloka just north of Khartoum northward to Abu Hamad . The tectonic uplift of the Nubian Swell diverts

5544-444: The afterlife. The east was thought of as a place of birth and growth, and the west was considered the place of death, as the god Ra , the Sun, underwent birth, death, and resurrection each day as he crossed the sky. Thus, all tombs were west of the Nile, because the Egyptians believed that in order to enter the afterlife, they had to be buried on the side that symbolized death. As the Nile was such an important factor in Egyptian life,

5643-482: The ancient calendar was even based on the three cycles of the Nile. These seasons, each consisting of four months of thirty days each, were called Akhet , Peret , and Shemu . Akhet, which means inundation, was the time of the year when the Nile flooded, leaving several layers of fertile soil behind, aiding in agricultural growth. Peret was the growing season, and Shemu, the last season, was the harvest season when there were no rains. Owing to their failure to penetrate

5742-411: The camels' case, carriage. Water was vital to both people and livestock. The Nile was also a convenient and efficient means of transportation for people and goods. The Nile was also an important part of ancient Egyptian spiritual life. Hapi was the god of the annual floods, and both he and the pharaoh were thought to control the flooding. The Nile was considered to be a causeway from life to death and

5841-406: The central part of the basin may still be subsiding. The White Nile Rift system, although shallower than the Bahr el Arab rift , is about 9 kilometers (5.6 mi) deep. Geophysical exploration of the Blue Nile Rift System estimated the depth of the sediments to be 5–9 kilometers (3.1–5.6 mi). These basins were not interconnected until their subsidence ceased, and the rate of sediment deposition

5940-411: The clearest signs of the occurrence of a boundary tone , realized as a low pitch on the last syllable of any prepausal word. The examples below show how the surface tone of the high tone verb ókkír- ' cook ' depends on the position of the verb. In the first sentence, the verb is not final (because the question marker -náà is appended) and thus it is realized as high. In the second sentence,

6039-409: The construction of the Aswan Dam , speakers of Nobiin lived in the Nile valley between the third cataract in the south and Korosko in the north. About 60% of the territory of Nubia was destroyed or rendered unfit for habitation as a result of the construction of the dam and the creation of Lake Nasser . At least half of the Nubian population was forcibly resettled. Nowadays, Nobiin speakers live in

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6138-412: The course of the Blue Nile to determine that the summer floods were caused by heavy seasonal rainstorms in the Ethiopian Highlands, but no European of antiquity is known to have reached Lake Tana. The Tabula Rogeriana depicted the source as three lakes in 1154. Europeans began to learn about the origins of the Nile in the 14th century when the Pope sent monks as emissaries to Mongolia who passed India,

6237-492: The development of Egyptian civilization. Because the river overflowed its banks annually and deposited new layers of silt, the surrounding land was very fertile. The Ancient Egyptians cultivated and traded wheat, flax , papyrus and other crops around the Nile. Wheat was a crucial crop in the famine-plagued Middle East. This trading system secured Egypt's diplomatic relationships with other countries and contributed to economic stability. Far-reaching trade has been carried on along

6336-402: The dry season the natural discharge of the Blue Nile can be as low as 113 m /s (4,000 cu ft/s), although upstream dams regulate the flow of the river. During the wet season, the peak flow of the Blue Nile often exceeds 5,663 m /s (200,000 cu ft/s) in late August (a difference of a factor of 50). Before the placement of dams on the river the yearly discharge varied by

6435-410: The etymology is disputed. Homer called the river Αἴγυπτος , Aiguptos , but in subsequent periods, Greek authors referred to its lower course as Neilos ; this term became generalized for the entire river system. Thus, the name may derive from Ancient Egyptian expression n ꜣ r ꜣ w-ḥ ꜣ w(t) (lit. 'the mouths of the front parts'), which referred specifically to the branches of the Nile transversing

6534-404: The fact that there are also indications of contact-induced language change . Nobiin appears to have had a strong influence on Dongolawi, as evidenced by similarities between the phoneme inventories as well as the occurrence of numerous borrowed grammatical morphemes. This has led some to suggest that Dongolawi in fact is "a 'hybrid' language between old Nobiin and pre-contact Dongolawi." Evidence of

6633-441: The first European to have visited the headwaters, modern writers give the credit to the Jesuit Pedro Páez . Páez's account of the source of the Nile is a long and vivid account of Ethiopia. It was published in full only in the early 20th century, although it was featured in works of Páez's contemporaries, including Baltazar Téllez, Athanasius Kircher and Johann Michael Vansleb . Europeans had been resident in Ethiopia since

6732-415: The following areas: (1) near Kom Ombo , Egypt, about 40 km north of Aswan , where new housing was provided by the Egyptian government for approximately 50,000 Nubians; (2) in the New Halfa Scheme in the Kassala , Sudan, where housing and work was provided by the Sudanese government for Nubians from the inundated areas around Wadi Halfa ; (3) in the Northern state, Sudan , northwards from Burgeg to

6831-399: The glides / w / and / j / . Consonant length is contrastive in Nobiin, e.g., dáwwí ' path ' vs. dáwí ' kitchen ' . Like vowel length, consonant length is not very stable; long consonants tend to be shortened in many cases (e.g., the Arabic loan dùkkáán ' shop ' is often found as dùkáán ). The phoneme / p / has a somewhat marginal status as it only occurs as

6930-459: The great lakes. Believing he had found the source of the Nile on seeing this "vast expanse of open water" for the first time, Speke named the lake after Queen Victoria . Burton, recovering from illness and resting further south on the shores of Lake Tanganyika , was outraged that Speke claimed to have proven his discovery to be the true source of the Nile when Burton regarded this as still unsettled. A quarrel ensued which sparked intense debate within

7029-468: The historical conditions expected to lead to such features. Scholars (Sebit, 2023) have suggested that the Nubi Language was the main factors of unity among the Nubi community in east Africa, to survive the hardship they got from different community components. There are five vowels in Nubi. Vowels are not distinguished by length except in at least two exceptions from Kenyan Nubi (which are not present in Ugandan dialects) where bara means "outside" and

7128-703: The lake's northern shore. Nubi language The Nubi language (also called Ki-Nubi , Arabic : كي-نوبي , romanized :  kī-nūbī ) is a Sudanese Arabic -based creole language spoken in Uganda around Bombo , and in Kenya around Kibera , by the Ugandan Nubians , many of whom are descendants of Emin Pasha 's Sudanese soldiers who were settled there by the British colonial administration . It

7227-609: The late 15th century, and one of them may have visited the headwaters even earlier without leaving a written trace. The Portuguese João Bermudes published the first description of the Tis Issat Falls in his 1565 memoirs, compared them to the Nile Falls alluded to in Cicero 's De Republica . Jerónimo Lobo describes the source of the Blue Nile, visiting shortly after Pedro Páez. Telles also uses his account. The White Nile

7326-586: The main vernacular of the Funj Sultanate , with Nobiin becoming a minority tongue. In Egypt, the Nobiin speakers were also part of a largely Arabic-speaking state, but Egyptian control over the south was limited. With the Ottoman conquest of the region in the sixteenth century, official support for Arabization largely ended, as the Turkish and Circassian governments in Cairo sometimes saw Nobiin speakers as

7425-580: The main Nile during the 70,000–80,000 years B.P. wet period. The White Nile system in Bahr El Arab and White Nile Rifts remained a closed lake until the connection of the Victoria Nile to the main system some 12,500 years ago during the African humid period . The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that "Egypt was the gift of the Nile". An unending source of sustenance, it played a crucial role in

7524-438: The minority language since the latter is tightly connected to the Nubian identity. Nobiin has been called Mahas(i) , Mahas-Fiadidja , and Fiadicca in the past. Mahas and Fiadidja are geographical terms which correspond to two dialectal variants of Nobiin; the differences between these two dialects are negligible, and some have argued that there is no evidence of a dialectal distinction at all. Nobiin should not be confused with

7623-531: The next three decades of linguistic theorizing about stress and tone in Nobiin. As late as 1968, Herman Bell was the first scholar to develop an account of tone in Nobiin. Although his analysis was still hampered by the occasional confusion of accent and tone, he is credited by Roland Werner as being the first to recognize that Nobiin is a genuinely tonal language, and the first to lay down some elementary tonal rules. The basic personal pronouns of Nobiin are: There are three sets of possessive pronouns . One of them

7722-513: The original sources of indigo dye . Another may be Nymphaea caerulea , known as "The Sacred Blue Lily of the Nile", which was found scattered over Tutankhamun 's corpse when it was excavated in 1922. Another possible etymology derives from the Semitic term Nahal , meaning "river". Old Libyan has the term lilu , meaning water (in modern Berber ilel ⵉⵍⴻⵍ means sea ). With a total length of about 6,650 km (4,130 mi) between

7821-523: The phenomena now recognized as a tone system. Carl Meinhof reported that only remnants of a tone system could be found in the Nubian languages. He based this conclusion not only on his own data, but also on the observation that Old Nubian had been written without tonal marking. Based on accounts like Meinhof's, Nobiin was considered a toneless language for the first half of the twentieth century. The statements of de facto authorities like Meinhof, Diedrich Hermann Westermann , and Ida C. Ward heavily affected

7920-575: The present course of the Nile in Egypt and Sudan. Rushdi Said postulates that Egypt supplied most of the waters of the Nile during the early part of its history. The other theory is that the drainage from Ethiopia via rivers equivalent to the Blue Nile, the Atbara and the Takazze flowed to the Mediterranean via the Egyptian Nile since well back into Tertiary times. Salama suggests that during

8019-462: The region of Lake Victoria and the Mediterranean Sea , the Nile is among the longest rivers on Earth. The drainage basin of the Nile covers 3,254,555 square kilometers (1,256,591 sq mi), about 10% of the area of Africa. Compared to other major rivers, though, the Nile carries little water (5% of that of the Congo River , for example). The Nile basin is complex, and because of this,

8118-813: The reverse influence is much rarer, although there are some late loans in Nobiin which are thought to come from Dongolawi. The Nubian languages are part of the Eastern Sudanic branch of the Nilo-Saharan languages . On the basis of a comparison with seventeen other Eastern Sudanic languages, Thelwall (1982) considers Nubian to be most closely related to Tama, a member of the Taman group, with an average lexical similarity of just 22.2 per cent. Nobiin has open and closed syllables : ág ' mouth ' , één ' woman ' , gíí ' uncle ' , kám ' camel ' , díís ' blood ' . Every syllable bears

8217-632: The river is called Kiira or Kiyira . In Runyoro , it is called Kihiira . In Egyptian Arabic , the Nile is called en-Nīl , while in Standard Arabic it is called an-Nīl . In Biblical Hebrew , it is הַיְאוֹר ‎, Ha-Ye'or or הַשִׁיחוֹר ‎, Ha-Shiḥor . The English name Nile and the Arabic names en-Nîl and an-Nîl both derive from the Latin Nilus and the Ancient Greek Νεῖλος . Beyond that, however,

8316-618: The river south-west for over 300 km, following the structure of the Central African Shear Zone embracing the Bayuda Desert . At Al Dabbah it resumes its northward course towards the first cataract at Aswan forming the S-shaped Great Bend of the Nile mentioned by Eratosthenes . In the north of Sudan, the river enters Lake Nasser (known in Sudan as Lake Nubia), the larger part of which

8415-532: The riverbed sufficiently for the river to overflow westward into a depression to create Lake Moeris . Lake Tanganyika drained northwards into the Nile until the Virunga Volcanoes blocked its course in Rwanda. The Nile was much longer at that time, with its furthest headwaters in northern Zambia. The currently existing Nile first flowed during the former parts of the Würm glaciation period. Affad 23

8514-407: The scientific community and interest by other explorers keen to either confirm or refute Speke's discovery. British explorer and missionary David Livingstone pushed too far west and entered the Congo River system instead. It was ultimately Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley who confirmed Speke's discovery, circumnavigating Lake Victoria and reporting the great outflow at Ripon Falls on

8613-588: The sea level rose at the end of the most recent ice age , the stream which is now the northern Nile captured the ancestral Nile near Asyut . This change in climate also led to the current extents of the Sahara desert, around 3400 BCE. The Giza pyramid complex originally overlooked a branch of the Nile that no longer exists. This branch was highest during the African Humid Period . The existing Nile has five earlier phases: Flowing north from

8712-574: The second half of the twentieth century also brought more Nubians, especially women and children, into daily contact with Arabic. Chief factors in this development include increased mobility (and hence easy access to non-Nubian villages and cities), changes in social patterns such as women going more often to the market to sell their own products, and easy access to Arabic newspapers. In urban areas, many Nubian women go to school and are fluent in Arabic; they usually address their children in Arabic, reserving Nobiin for their husband. In response to concerns about

8811-531: The seventh century, Nobiin has been challenged by Arabic . The economic and cultural influence of Egypt over the region was considerable, and, over the centuries, Egyptian Arabic spread south. Areas like al-Maris became almost fully Arabized. The conversion of Nubia to Islam after the fall of the Christian kingdoms further enhanced the Arabization process. In what is today Sudan, Sudanese Arabic became

8910-625: The southwest, in Darfur and in the Nuba Mountains of Kordofan . For a long time it was assumed that the Nubian peoples dispersed from the Nile Valley to the south, probably at the time of the downfall of the Christian kingdoms. However, comparative lexicostatistic research in the second half of the twentieth century has shown that the spread must have been in the opposite direction. Joseph Greenberg (as cited in Thelwall 1982) calculated that

9009-477: The stressed final "u" in the passive form may be deleted after "m", "n", "l", "f" or "b". This can cause syllables to be realigned even across words. Nouns are inflected by number only (taking a singular or plural form) although for most nouns this does not represent a morphological change. Jonathan Owens gives 5 broad inflectional categories of nouns: The table below shows examples of each type of pluralisation. The apostrophe has been placed before

9108-400: The stressed syllable: Pluralisation Nuswan may be supplemented by a suffix as if it were type 3, thus, nuswana could also mean "women". Adjectives follow the noun and some adjectives have singular and plural forms which must agree with the noun. Adjectives may also take the prefixes al , ali , ab or abu which mark them as habitual . Possessor nouns follow

9207-407: The subject or the object in a sentence; in the latter case they take the object marker -gá yielding ìngà and mángá , respectively (for the object marker, see also below ). The demonstrative pronoun always precedes the nouns it refers to. ìn this íd man dìrbád hen wèèkà one: OB kúnkènò have: 3SG . PRES Nile The Nile (also known as

9306-533: The vegetables. Tone plays an important role in several derivational processes. The most common situation involves the loss of the original tone pattern of the derivational base and the subsequent assignment of low tone, along with the affixation of a morpheme or word bringing its own tonal pattern (see below for examples). For a long time, the Nile Nubian languages were thought to be non-tonal; early analyses employed terms like " stress " or "accent" to describe

9405-400: The verb is at the end of the utterance, resulting in a low tone on the last syllable. Íttírkà vegetables. DO ókkéé-náà? cook:she. PRES - Q Íttírkà ókkéé-náà? vegetables.DO cook:she.PRES-Q Does she cook the vegetables? Èyyò yes íttírkà vegetables. DO ókkè. cook:she. PRES Èyyò íttírkà ókkè. yes vegetables.DO cook:she.PRES Yes, she cooks

9504-560: The western shores of the lake and flows at first to the west until just south of Masindi Port , where the river turns north, then makes a great half circle to the east and north to Karuma Falls . For the remaining part, it flows westerly through the Murchison Falls until it reaches the northern shores of Lake Albert where it forms a significant river delta. Lake Albert is on the border of the Democratic Republic of

9603-574: Was enough to fill and connect them. The Egyptian Nile connected to the Sudanese Nile, which captures the Ethiopian and Equatorial headwaters during the current stages of tectonic activity in the Eastern, Central and Sudanese Rift systems. The connection of the different Niles occurred during cyclic wet periods. The Atbarah overflowed its closed basin during the wet periods that occurred about 100,000 to 120,000 years ago. The Blue Nile connected to

9702-597: Was even less understood. The ancients mistakenly believed that the Niger River represented the upper reaches of the White Nile. For example, Pliny the Elder writes that the Nile had its origins "in a mountain of lower Mauretania ", flowed above ground for "many days" distance, then went underground, reappeared as a large lake in the territories of the Masaesyli , then sank again below the desert to flow underground "for

9801-525: Was spoken by about 15,000 people in Uganda in 1991 (according to the census), and an estimated 10,000 in Kenya; another source estimates about 50,000 speakers as of 2001. 90% of the lexicon derives from Arabic , but the grammar has been simplified, as has the sound system. Nairobi has the greatest concentration of Nubi speakers. Nubi has the prefixing, suffixing and compounding processes also present in Arabic. Many Nubi speakers are Kakwa who came from

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