The book presents a ground-breaking view of the navigational landscape of the Nile in medieval Egypt by drawing on a broad range of sources: medieval Arabic geographies; traveler accounts; archaeology; and meteorological, hydrological, and geological studies.
Its first major section charts the changing geography of the Nile waterways, particularly in the Delta, from the eve of Islam to the early modern period, and logs the "rise and fall" of these waterways for natural and/or anthropogenic reasons. The book then presents a new perspective on the Nile: it draws on traveler accounts and...