The dam at Aswan is the greatest irrigation project ever yet undertaken, but is by no means the last one likely to be executed in relation to the waters of the Nile.  A smaller dam is to be constructed at Assiut, in order to supply a system of irrigation in the neighbourhood of that city, and also to carry water across to thousands of acres between this region and Cairo.  This project is planned somewhat after the design of the barrage which is below Cairo.

It is impossible to forecast what engineering skill may have in store for the future of Egypt.  One may hope, at least, that the most prosperous days of the Pharaohs, the Ptolemies, and the Romans will be reproduced once more for the modern Egyptians, as an outcome of the wise administration which has originated through the occupation of the country by the English, as an international trust held for civilisation.  By aid of British initiative, Egypt now controls a vast empire in equatorial Africa and the Sudan, and the great water ways of this immense territory are being gradually brought under such control that the maximum advantage to all the population will be the necessary result.  The whole Nile is now opened to commerce.  The British have guaranteed equal rights, and what has been called the policy of the “open door,” for the commerce of all nations.

The history of the modern exploration of the Nile is closely associated with the history of Egypt in modern times.  The men who first visited Egypt and ascended the Nile valley were in almost every case Indo-Euro-peans.  The early Egyptians were familiar perhaps with the Nile as far as Khartum, and with the Blue Nile up to its source in Lake Tsana, but they showed little or no interest in exploring the White Nile.  In 457 B.C., Herodotus entered Egypt, and ascended the Nile as far as the First Cataract.  He then learned many things about its upper waters, and made enquiries about the territories which lay beyond.  He heard that the source was unknown; that there was a centre of civilisation in a city of the Ethiopians, in the bend of the Nile at Meroe (Merawi of to-day), but about the regions beyond he was unable to learn anything.  Eratosthenes, the earliest geographer of whom we have record, was born in 276 b. c. at Cyrene, North Africa.  From the information he gathered and edited, he sketched a nearly correct route of the Nile to Khartum.  He also inserted the two Abyssinian affluents, and suggested that lakes were the source of the river.

When Rome extended her domains over Egypt, in 30 B.C., the interest of the Romans was aroused in the solution of the problem of the discovery of the source of the Nile.  Strabo set out with AElius Gallus, the Roman Governor of Egypt, on a journey of exploration up the Nile as far as Philae, at the First Cataract.  About 30 B.C.  Greek explorers by the names of Bion, Dalion, and Si-mondes were engaged in active exploration of the Nile above the First Cataract and perhaps south of Khartum, according to the account