Walk the Nile

The landmarks of Walk the Nile

37 landmarks, in walking order. Each photograph is by the person credited beneath it, used as they licensed it.

1. 

   0 km in · Start

   Abu Simbel

   Four colossal figures of Ramesses II sit carved into the sandstone cliff above Lake Nasser, watching the water as they have for more than three thousand years. In the 1960s the whole temple was cut into blocks and lifted some sixty metres uphill, clear of the reservoir rising behind the new dam. From here fifteen hundred kilometres of river run north to the sea.

2. 

   58 km in · Landmark

   Qasr Ibrim

   Across the water stands Qasr Ibrim, the only major Nubian site never moved, now an island though it once crowned a high cliff above the valley. As Lake Nasser rose it swallowed everything below, leaving the fortress-temple marooned on a shrinking crag that has been sacred since the New Kingdom. It survives alone above the flooded shoreline.

3. 

   117 km in · Landmark

   Amada and Derr

   Two rescued temples sit side by side on the New Amada plateau, high above the reservoir. The little Temple of Amada is one of the oldest standing monuments in Nubia, raised by Thutmose III and his son, its painted reliefs among the best preserved south of Aswan. Beside it the rock-cut Temple of Derr keeps Ramesses II company.

4. 

   159 km in · Landmark

   Wadi es-Sebua

   An avenue of sphinxes gives Wadi es-Sebua its name, the Valley of the Lions, and leads to a temple of Ramesses II dragged four kilometres uphill to escape the flood. Three rescued sanctuaries cluster here now — Sebua, Dakka and Maharraqa — gathered on ground that was once dry desert miles from the river.

5. 

   308 km in · Landmark

   Kalabsha Temple

   On its rocky island just above the High Dam stands Kalabsha, the largest free-standing temple of Lower Nubia, rebuilt stone by numbered stone after a German team lifted it clear of the rising water. Nearby wait the rescued kiosk of Qertassi and the delicate hall of Beit el-Wali, cut for Ramesses II. The dam wall looms ahead, and beyond it the river finally runs free again.

6. 

   338 km in · Landmark

   Aswan High Dam

   The great rampart of the Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, tamed the Nile's ancient floods and pooled Lake Nasser behind it. The wall holds back enough water to fill a sea, drowning old Nubia beneath the reservoir. Below it the living, flowing river begins at last, a green ribbon threading north.

7. 

   363 km in · Landmark

   Philae Temple, Aswan

   At Aswan, feluccas lean their white sails into the breeze around dark granite islands, and Egypt's deep south softens into a city. Just offshore stands the temple of Isis at Philae, rescued block by block from the floodwaters and rebuilt on higher ground nearby. Date palms shade the granite quays along the water.

8. 

   410 km in · Landmark

   Kom Ombo

   Kom Ombo stands right on a bend of the Nile, a rare double temple dedicated jointly to the crocodile god Sobek and the falcon god Horus. Mummified crocodiles still lie in its small museum, offerings to the river's most feared inhabitant. The eastern bank carries the route onward.

9. 

   467 km in · Landmark

   Gebel el-Silsila

   The river pinches to its narrowest here, sandstone cliffs pressing in from both banks at Gebel el-Silsila, the Mountain of the Chain. For two thousand years pharaohs quarried the stone that built Karnak and Luxor from these very walls, and chisel marks and rock shrines still scar the cliffs. Downstream the channel widens again toward Edfu.

10. 

    490 km in · Landmark

    Edfu

    Edfu keeps the most completely preserved temple in all of Egypt, its towering pylon still guarded by a great granite falcon. Dedicated to the god Horus and buried for centuries under sand and silt, it survived almost intact for the modern world to uncover. Beyond it the valley runs on toward Thebes.

11. 

    528 km in · Town

    Esna

    Nine metres below Esna's modern streets sits the Temple of Khnum, its hypostyle hall lately scrubbed of centuries of soot to reveal blazing painted ceilings of stars and zodiac. The town's old barrage still steps the river here, a reminder that boats once queued to lock through.

12. 

    584 km in · Town

    Luxor and Karnak

    Luxor is ancient Thebes, often called the world's greatest open-air museum. Across the river lie the Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut's terraces, while on the east bank the vast forest of stone columns at Karnak fills the largest religious complex of the ancient world. This was the heart of pharaonic Egypt.

13. 

    639 km in · Town

    Qena

    Where the Nile swings hard in its great bend, Qena sits at the point where the ancient road to the Red Sea coast strikes off into the eastern desert. It is a busy provincial capital known for its pottery, porous clay jars that keep water cool in the heat. Dendera lies just across the water, and the river bends north toward Abydos.

14. 

    643 km in · Landmark

    Dendera, near Qena

    The temple of Hathor at Dendera honours the goddess of love and music, and a famous carved zodiac once spread across its ceiling. The Nile swings sharply east at this great bend before turning north again toward the distant delta. Its columns rise topped with the goddess's serene face.

15. 696 km in · Town

    Nag Hammadi

    An ordinary sugar-and-aluminium town, Nag Hammadi gave its name to one of the great finds of the century. In 1945 a farmer digging for fertiliser unearthed a sealed jar of leather-bound Coptic gospels here, the Gnostic library that rewrote what we know of early Christianity. A long barrage spans the river beside the town.

16. 

    737 km in · Landmark

    Abydos

    Abydos was the holiest of Egyptian cities, where Osiris was believed to lie buried and pilgrims came for three thousand years. The Temple of Seti I shelters reliefs of unmatched delicacy and the famous King List, a carved roll-call of pharaohs reaching back to the dawn of the kingdom. Behind it stands the strange vaulted Osireion.

17. 

    787 km in · Town

    Sohag and Akhmim

    Two towns face each other across the water here: Sohag, capital of its province, on this bank, and ancient Akhmim on the east. Akhmim hides a colossal standing statue of Meritamun, daughter of Ramesses II, unearthed under the modern town, and the desert nearby holds the White and Red Monasteries of the early Coptic age.

18. 

    886 km in · Town

    Asyut

    Asyut spreads along a broad reach of the Nile, the clamour of Upper Egypt's largest market rising from its lanes. A long barrage steps across the river here, feeding the canals that green the fields of Middle Egypt. North of the city the bank runs on toward Amarna and its painted tombs.

19. 

    953 km in · Landmark

    Tell el-Amarna

    Amarna's empty plain once held a whole city, raised by Akhenaten from nothing for his single sun-god and abandoned within a generation. Rock tombs in the eastern cliffs still show the royal family bathed in the rays of the Aten, and boundary stelae mark the limits the pharaoh swore never to cross. Few places feel so haunted by a vanished idea.

20. 

    965 km in · Town

    Mallawi

    The road into Middle Egypt's wonders runs through Mallawi, an unassuming market town. Its small museum, looted and burned in 2013 and since rebuilt and restocked, guards finds from the sacred animal catacombs of Tuna el-Gebel just to the west, where mummified ibises and baboons were buried by the thousand for the god Thoth.

21. 

    991 km in · Landmark

    Beni Hasan

    Cut into the eastern cliff for the provincial governors of the Middle Kingdom, the rock tombs of Beni Hasan hold some of Egypt's liveliest paintings: wrestlers caught in dozens of poses, hunts and harvests, and a caravan of bearded foreigners arriving with their wares. From the terrace the whole green valley unrolls below toward Minya.

22. 

    1,002 km in · Town

    Minya

    They call Minya the Bride of Upper Egypt, its corniche lined with faded mansions from the cotton-boom years. University students fill the riverside gardens at dusk, and the Nile runs broad and easy between palm-lined banks. North of the city lies the buried papyrus town of Oxyrhynchus.

23. 

    1,073 km in · Landmark

    Bahnasa (Oxyrhynchus)

    Dusty Bahnasa was ancient Oxyrhynchus, a town made world-famous by its rubbish heaps. Buried in the dry sand lay hundreds of thousands of papyrus scraps — lost plays, gospels and shopping lists — the largest cache of ancient writing ever found and still being read a century on. Little now stands above ground.

24. 

    1,155 km in · Town

    Beni Suef

    The valley begins to widen at Beni Suef, cotton and sugarcane stretching flat to a hazed horizon on either bank. It is a working river town, humming with trucks and the smell of cut cane. Downstream the gaunt stepped tower of the Meidum pyramid soon breaks the skyline.

25. 

    1,217 km in · Landmark

    Meidum Pyramid

    The strange three-stepped tower of Meidum shows on the skyline from far off, rising from a skirt of its own rubble. This was an early attempt by Sneferu at a true smooth-sided pyramid; its outer casing slid away in antiquity, leaving the gaunt core that stands today. The lesson learned here shaped the pyramids that followed, downstream at Dahshur.

26. 

    1,246 km in · Landmark

    Dahshur

    At Dahshur, Sneferu finally solved the riddle of building tall. The Bent Pyramid changes its angle halfway up, frozen mid-correction, while beside it the Red Pyramid is the first successful true pyramid in history. They are gloriously uncrowded out here on the desert edge; Giza and Saqqara wait just to the north.

27. 

    1,261 km in · Landmark

    Saqqara and Memphis

    The Step Pyramid of Djoser crowns Saqqara, the oldest great stone building on Earth and the ancestor of every pyramid that followed. Below in the palm groves lie the ruins of Memphis, capital of a united Egypt, where a fallen colossus of Ramesses II rests on its back in a shed. The necropolis runs for miles toward Giza.

28. 

    1,271 km in · Landmark

    Giza Pyramids

    On the edge of the desert plateau at Giza, the Great Pyramid of Khufu and the Sphinx have kept watch over the valley for four and a half thousand years. The last of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing, the Great Pyramid rises above the sprawl of the modern city. The river runs on into Cairo.

29. 

    1,289 km in · Town

    Cairo

    Cairo is the largest city in the Arab world, and the Nile cuts straight through the middle of it, feluccas drifting past ranks of high-rise towers. Just to the north the river divides into the Rosetta and Damietta branches, fanning out to form the great green delta. The western, Rosetta branch leads toward the sea.

30. 

    1,319 km in · Bridge

    Qanater Barrages

    The Delta's apex is marked by the Qanater el-Khairiya, the Delta Barrages, where the Nile splits into its two great arms and gardens spread across the divide. Begun in the 1830s, these were the first modern works to tame the river's flow and water the cotton fields, and a leafy public park now drapes the old waterworks. The western Rosetta branch runs on from here.

31. 1,340 km in · Town

    Banha, Nile Delta

    Near Banha the single river has dissolved into a web of channels threading between endless fields, the lush heart of the Nile Delta. This triangle of silt-rich land has fed Egypt since the first farmers settled it some seven thousand years ago. Northwest across the canal-laced fields lie Shibin el-Kom and the Rosetta branch beyond.

32. 

    1,361 km in · Town

    Shibin el-Kom

    The capital of fertile Menoufia province, Shibin el-Kom sits deep in the Delta cropland. This is rich black-soil country, dense with canals and villages, and the surrounding province has given Egypt more than one of its presidents. The flat green horizon stretches in every direction toward Tanta.

33. 

    1,392 km in · Town

    Tanta

    Largest of the Delta's inland cities, Tanta grew up around the shrine of the Sufi saint Ahmad al-Badawi. Each autumn after the harvest its mulid festival draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, one of the biggest religious gatherings in Egypt. The town hums with trains and markets; from here the route bends northwest toward Disuq.

34. 

    1,428 km in · Town

    Disuq

    The great mosque of Ibrahim al-Desouqi rises beside the Rosetta branch at Disuq, where the river runs broad and slow. Another revered Sufi saint rests here, and his mulid fills the riverside streets with light and crowds. The water is nearly at the coast now, the sea-air close on the final stretch.

35. 

    1,448 km in · Landmark

    Kafr el-Sheikh

    Rice paddies shimmer across the wide farmland of Kafr el-Sheikh, deep in the delta, and the air begins to carry the first salt tang of the coast. The Mediterranean is close now, the Rosetta branch broadening as it nears its mouth. Only the last stretch to the sea remains.

36. 

    1,474 km in · Town

    Fuwwah

    Fuwwah was once a thriving Ottoman port, and its old riverfront is still studded with crumbling mosques and the workshops of its famous handwoven kilim rugs. Before Alexandria's canal stole its trade, this was a key harbour where Mediterranean goods met the Nile. The Rosetta branch runs wide and final here; the river-mouth and the sea are almost in sight.

37. 

    1,500 km in · Finish

    Rosetta on the Mediterranean

    At Rosetta the western branch of the Nile pours out at last into the Mediterranean, fifteen hundred kilometres from the colossi of Abu Simbel. Here in 1799 Napoleon's soldiers unearthed the Rosetta Stone, the trilingual slab whose Greek and hieroglyphic text finally unlocked the language of the pharaohs. From desert temple to delta shore, the whole length of the river runs behind.