The Source of the Nile River: A Mystery That Spanned Three Millennia

I've been on a boat on Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile. It's pretty cool how you can see, clear as day, a line across the water where it starts to flow. From there it's downhill all the way to the sea.

Besides that, Lake Tana's a beautiful place. I spent an afternoon visiting peaceful island monasteries, where the monks cheerfully handed me 500-year-old goatskin Bibles to leaf through. Spectacularly beautiful things with Ge'ez calligraphy on one page, and elaborate illustrations opposite for people like me who had no hope of being able to read it.

Ethiopia's the most wonderful, misunderstood country.

Brahmaputra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmaputra_River is another notable river whose upper course was not well known till fairly recently.

What fills me with wonder and awe is that it is believed to be older than the Himalayas. Yet it cuts through the Himalayas, originating further North but traveling South, to eventually drain into the Bay of Bengal, sharing the delta with Ganges -- I would be hard pressed to find a more apt metaphor about overcoming Himalayan obstacles.

The river Indus shares the source, Manasarovar with Brahmaputra. Indus lines the subcontinent on the West, draining into the Arabian sea, while Brahmaputra lines it on the East. So essentially, one can consider the subcontinent to be encircled by water.

Pretty sure James May Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond solved this a few years ago. It was part of a BBC documentary if I recall correctly.

:)

Even assuming you map a river catchment completely, how is the source defined anyway? Furthest water drop from the sea (as measured along the river)? Except in odd cases where that's an underground resurgence, it's going to be pretty unspectacular, so what's the attraction?

Mapping the watershed on the other hand, that's a nice thing to know.

That is insane. Lake Victoria is in Uganda. So the water flows halfway across Africa through Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea.

Huh, that’s cool. I live by the river Amstel. Wikipedia says “The Amstel begins where the canal Aarkanaal and the river Drecht meet, just north of the village Nieuwveen in the province of South Holland.”

But there is so much goddamn water around here, no one really cares whether the “source” is somewhere in the alps.

> Richard Francis Burton was one of the first Europeans to visit Mecca while in disguise as a Pashtun. Burton supposedly spoke dozens of languages

With any luck he's got the source already.

other than fame it sounds exploration without much of a payout. seems comparable to finding what root of the tree is longest. what am I missing?

Didn't know about this, very interesting read!