The Nile: A Journey Downriver Through Egypt’s Past and Present

By Toby Wilkinson

Knopf, 2014 

Toby Wilkinson’s slender, very inviting new book The Nile: A Journey Downriver Through Egypt’s Past and Present is something of a pleasant after-dinner treat offered in the wake of his much longer and weightier great 2011 feast of a book The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt. The range of this new book is much broader than that of its predecessor, since it stretches all the way from Egypt’s pre-history to the very doorstep of its present-day news developments, and its depth is correspondingly less.

The resulting book reads very much like its governing conceit: a tour down the course of the great river, with our learned guide explaining passing points of interest only to the extent that the river’s flow will allow. In this way the book’s US cover – a sepia-toned century-old photo of the Great Pyramid at Giza – is illustrative of the whole enterprise: its equivalent has been produced in every book-season for the last 150 years, with only two unstable factors: the terminus ad quem and the prose of the author.

Wilkinson’s prose, freed, one imagines, from the strictures of a comprehensive in-depth history, very often sparkles with wit, as when he talks about Lord Carnarvon, the man who bankrolled the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of Kings:

While sipping cocktails on the terrace and watching the ferries and feluccas ply the waters of the Nile, Carnarvon developed an interest in Egypt’s ancient past, and found himself drawn to the burgeoning discipline of Egyptology. For their part, Egyptologists were certainly drawn to Carnarvon, for what he lacked in historical training he more than made up for in wealth. Archeologists with high ambitions but limited resources made a beeline for the earl.

Course by course, cataract by cataract, Wilkinson’s tour follows the river from the Aswan Dam and the riverbed settlements of Upper Egypt to the ruins of Amarna in Middle Egypt to the far more populous tangle of Lower Egypt, and since the ancient but very modern city of Cairo is by force the destination of both the river and the narrative, the narrative bears us always forward not only on the Nile but through time, until we reach the raucous present. And although Wilkinson’s vast expertise on Egypt’s history is on display everywhere in these pages, his worldly-wise observations on present-day Egypt are often equally interesting:

As well as disfiguring the landscape, threatening Egypt’s ancient monuments and swallowing up agricultural land, the trend of rapid urbanisation is having a profound effect on society in Cairo and throughout the Nile Valley. The close-knit relationships that have characterised Egypt’s communities for millennia are giving way to the disconnectedness and anonymity of city life. One of the aspects of the 2011 revolution that brought Egyptians most joy was rediscovery, among placards and tear gas, of a sense of common purpose, shared identity and communal pride. They will need to hold on to those values if the exponential growth of Cairo is not to do irreparable damage to people and environment alike.

By the time Wilkinson’s book has reached the teeming metropolis of 21st-century Cairo, he’s firmly lodged in the morning’s headlines:

Egyptians, especially in Cairo, have discovered free expression with a vengeance, and every wall and hoarding is covered with political slogans. Those in Arabic are short and to the point – ‘It’s your constitution, not ours’ and ‘Morsi is a murderer’ compete with ‘God is great’ – but one, in English, reflects the high-minded ideals behind the revolution – ‘You will not kill our idea.’

This odd chronological effect is also a fixed feature of the kind of book Wilkinson has written; readers always want to filter their doses of historical instruction through the day’s news stories, and writers always find the contrasts between the almost unthinkable antiquity of Egypt and its loud and vivid modern life irresistible. In a way, it’s reassuring: it seems to promise continuity even in the fact of military occupations, political unrest, and megalomaniacal millionaires. The Nile, Wilkinson’s The Nile seems to say, has seen it all before and still keeps flowing.Anybody planning a trip on that ancient river (even if the trip is only in their imagination) should make that trip with this wonderful little book in hand.