Note 690 — Chapter XI · —The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers

Every river tends to become a common artery feeding all the life of its basin, and gradually obliterating ethnic and cultural differences among the peoples of its valley. The Nile, with its narrow hem of flood-plain on either bank and barrier sands beyond, has so linked race and history in Egypt and Nubia, that the two countries cannot be separated. A common highway from mountains to sea, a common frontier of trackless desert have developed here a blended similarity of race, language and culture from the delta to Kordofan. The Hamitic race seems to have originated in the south and migrated northward down the Nile towards the delta. Later the whole valley, north and south, received the same Semitic or Arab immigration, which spread from Cairo to the old Sudanese capital of Sennar, while a strain of negro blood has filtered in from the equatorial black belt and followed the current down to the sea.690 The culture of the valley originated in Lower Egypt, and, with that easy transmissibility which characterizes ideas, it moved upstream into Ethiopia, which never evolved a culture of its own. Just as noticeable is the political interplay. The rule of the Pharaohs extended far up the Nile, at times to the Third Cataract at 20° N.L.; and at one period Ethiopian kings extended their sway over Egypt. At another, a large body of mutinous Egyptian soldiers abandoned their country and their wives, and emigrated along the one line of slight resistance open to them into Ethiopia, to found there a new state and new families by marriage with native women, thus contributing to the amalgamation of races in the valley.