Nile Valley

The Nile Valley is the strip of habitable land in northeast Africa that follows the course of the Nile, the world's longest river at roughly 7,088 kilometers, as it flows north from its sources to the Mediterranean Sea. The Nile is formed from two main tributaries, the White Nile and the Blue Nile, which meet at Khartoum in Sudan before the combined river flows through Egypt and fans into a large delta near Alexandria. Although the Nile carries far less water than rivers such as the Amazon or the Congo, its valley has been central to the environmental, economic, and cultural history of Africa for millennia, and the river's present course is thought to be around 15,000 years old. The Nile's drainage basin spans eleven countries, and the valley has supported dense human settlement and agriculture along its length for that entire span.