The Nile on medieval Arabic literature

A diachronic perspective spanning from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries, this comparative and interdisciplinary study analyzes the literary images of the river Nile that appear in the most significant texts of Arabic travel and geographical literature.;Among the numerous geographers and travelers from the Arab world analyzed, only those who maintained and developed, in general, the tradition of descriptive geography and history were selected. But it was necessary to date back to the original texts of Greco-Latin sources for several reasons: the subject itself had been discussed in ancient times; the development of literary Arabic geography in Medieval times seems to repeat cyclically that of the classical epoch; and, finally, the sources of many of these Arab authors were the Greco-Latin writers. To top it off and make this scholarly contribution even more heterogeneous, contemporary European sources were analyzed to contrast the Arabic medieval texts.;The rich geographical Arabic textual landscape from the period was discussed from a literary point of view concentrating on the works that somehow indicate phases or constitute some milestone in the progress of the historic, literary, geographical, or chorographic Arabic studies. The texts studied also describe in one way or another Egypt or the Nile in a total or partial way. Therefore this study leaves out other famous works for being repetitive compilations or whose information on the Nile does not contribute with anything new.;This work provides a great contribution to the data supplied by a great number of Arab authors, information that may have omissions, contradictions and errors made by these authors, their translators or copiers. In spite of the possible and apparent contradictions that show the testimonies of the authors that visited Egypt or heard about the Nile, and the evolution of the perceptions and images transmitted on the Nile regarding the cultural and historic period, we have tried to reconcile them, or at least to explain as clearly as possible, where and why these sources differ.