The Nile Basin

Martin Williams is Adjunct Professor in Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He has worked with archaeologists in the Sahara, Nile Valley and Ethiopia, and has written over two hundred research papers and a dozen books, including Climatic Change in Deserts (Cambridge, 2014), A Land Between Two Niles (with Donald Adamson, 1982) and The Sahara and the Nile (with Hugues Faure, 1980). He received the Farouk El Baz Award for Desert Research from the Geological Society of America in 2008.

Preface; Acknowledgments; 1. Introduction; 2. Evolution of the Nile Basin; 3. Climate and hydrology; 4. Geology and soils; 5. Vegetation, land use and human impact; 6. The Ethiopian Highlands; 7. The Ugandan Lake Plateau; 8. The Sudd swamps and the White Nile; 9. Lake Turkana and overflow into the Sobat; 10. The Khor Abu Habl Fan and Kordofan desert dunes; 11. The Gezira alluvial fan and Blue Nile palaeochannels; 12. The Atbara valley; 13. Jebel Marra volcano; 14. The desert Nile; 15. West of the Nile: the Western Desert of Egypt and the Eastern Sahara: part one; 16. West of the Nile: the Western Desert of Egypt and the Eastern Sahara: part two; 17. The Fayum; 18. The Red Sea Hills; 19. The Sinai desert; 20. The Nile Delta; 21. The Nile Cone; 22. Origins of plant and animal domestication in the Nile Basin; 23. Epilogue: 'out of Africa'; References; Index.