Nile exploration by Roman emperor Nero

Nile exploration by Roman emperor Nero was a Roman expedition undertaken around 61 AD that aimed to reach the sources of the Nile.

Emperor Nero sent a small group of Praetorian guards to explore the sources of the Nile in Africa around 61 AD. He did this in order to obtain information for a possible conquest of Ethiopia, as equatorial Africa was called by the Romans.

The Roman legionaries navigating the Nile from southern Egypt reached the city of Meroe and, later, the Sudd, where they found it difficult to go further.

From Meroe the Roman party travelled 600 miles up the White Nile, until they reached the swamp-like Sudd in what is now southern Sudan, a fetid wetland filled with ferns, papyrus reeds and thick mats of rotting vegetation. In the rainy season, it covers an area larger than England, with a vast humid swamp teeming with mosquitoes and other insects. The only large animals in the Sudd were the crocodiles and hippos that occupied the muddy pools within its vast expanse. Those who entered this region had to endure severe heat and risk disease and starvation. The Sudd was discovered to be too deep to be crossed safely on foot, but its waters were also too shallow to be explored any further by boat. The Romans ‘reached an area where the swamp could only bear a small boat containing one person’. At this point the party despaired of ever finding a definite source for the Nile and turned back reluctantly to report their findings to the emperor in Rome. They had probably reached a position nearly 1,500 miles south of the Roman-Egyptian border.

Seneca the Younger's De Nubibus in Naturales Quaestiones documents the expedition to "explore the top of the world" (caput mundi investigandum). In this book he recounts what two legionaries told him about their discovery of the source of the Nile: "There we saw two huge rocks, from which the power of the river went out in a powerful way.....[The Nile] comes from a very large lake of the [African] lands." Historian Giovanni Vannini argues that this place is Murchison Falls in northern Uganda, meaning that the Romans reached Equatorial Africa. Vannini wrote in the magazine Nigrizia in 1996 that the legionaries made an exploratory journey of more than 5,000 km from Meroe to Uganda, a remarkable feat undertaken with small boats in order to bypass the Sudd, a vast swamp full of dangerous Nile crocodiles. According to Vannini, the Nero expedition from Roman Egypt reached the area of Jinja in present-day Uganda; he believes that the legionaries were able to reach Lake Victoria, based on the description of waterfall. Vannini noted that the falls described in Seneca's interview with the legionaries are very similar to Murchison Falls, where the Nile forces its way through a gap in the rocks, only 7 metres (23 ft) wide and falls 43 metres (141 ft) before flowing west into Lake Albert. Furthermore, according to Vannini, the lake described by the legionaries could only be Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa and the source of the White Nile (known as the "Victoria Nile" when exits the lake), which flows north from Jinja toward Murchison Falls. If this were the case, however, it begs the question as to why the legionaries subsequently described their journey as a failure ending at a swamp rather than as a success ending in the discovery of the enormous lake.

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