The Nour El Nil boats sail along the Nile from Esna, south of Luxor, to Aswân.

Peak Egypt

For a once-in-a-lifetime experience, there’s really only one way to travel up the Nile—on a 19th-century sailing vessel

By Marcia DeSanctis

In the fifth century B.C., a hundred years before another Greek, Alexander the Great, conquered Egypt, the geographer Herodotus journeyed to the Nile.

He hoped to learn why annual floods ripped across the land, nourishing it with black silt. A boon to agriculture and the populace’s well-being, the deluges prompted generations of pharaohs to adorn the walls of their temples and tombs with images of the god Hapi, who represented this phenomenon. Although his quest was unsuccessful, Herodotus concluded that Egypt itself was “a gift of the river.”