{"id":37556,"date":"2025-10-31T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/article\/mythological-control-river-nile-islamic-sources-demichelis\/"},"modified":"2025-10-31T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T11:00:00","slug":"mythological-control-river-nile-islamic-sources-demichelis","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/en\/article\/mythological-control-river-nile-islamic-sources-demichelis\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mythological Control of the River Nile: A Study on the Islamic Sources"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Abstract<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Published in the <em>Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies<\/em> (vol. 25, no. 4, 2025, pp. 69-87), in the themed section &#8220;<em>Environmental Challenges in Premodern Eurasian and Mediterranean Narratives<\/em>&#8221; edited by Chiara Fontana and Ines Peta, this article by <a href=\"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/en\/chercheur\/demichelis-marco\/\"><strong>Marco Demichelis<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor in History of the Islamic World and Islamic Thought at the University of Bologna, explores Islamic sources from the tenth to the fourteenth century which, in connection with periods of drought, gave credence to the idea that Ethiopia could give life or death to Egypt by causing excessive floods or prolonged droughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After the Arab conquests, Egypt and the Nile remained inseparable, now because of their economic and military importance in the confrontation with the Christian world in the era of the Crusades. Arab geographers, from al-Khw\u0101rizm\u012b to al-Idr\u012bs\u012b, heirs to Ptolemy, placed the source of the Nile in the &#8220;Mountains of the Moon&#8221;, and in the sixteenth century Leo Africanus still linked the annual flood to the rains of Ethiopia without mentioning any threat. Yet certain crises, such as the fall of the Ikhshidids after a long famine and the great water crisis under the Fatimid caliph al-Mustan\u1e63ir, which coincided with a first diplomatic crisis with Ethiopia, read in the light of Islamic apocalyptic traditions, fuelled the rumour of an Ethiopian power over the river.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the Latin West, after the Crusades, the rumour merged with the legend of Prester John. The Augustinian pilgrim Jacopo da Verona seems to have been the first to make the Ethiopian emperor both Prester John and master of the Nile, a myth that circulated in Europe until the end of the sixteenth century. On the Islamic side, by contrast, it lost credibility: around 1405, al-Maqr\u012bz\u012b attributed Egypt&#8217;s famines to atmospheric phenomena and weak floods, without seeing the hand of Ethiopia in them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The article is freely available on the <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.5617\/jais.12786\"><strong>journal website<\/strong><\/a> (DOI 10.5617\/jais.12786).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":37549,"template":"","class_list":["post-37556","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"date_tournage":"2025-10-31","yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Mythological Control of the River Nile: A Study on the Islamic Sources - Pluriel<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/en\/article\/mythological-control-river-nile-islamic-sources-demichelis\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Mythological Control of the River Nile: A Study on the Islamic Sources - Pluriel\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Abstract Published in the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies (vol. 25, no. 4, 2025, pp. 69-87), in the themed section &#8220;Environmental Challenges in Premodern Eurasian and Mediterranean Narratives&#8221; 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