Mountains of the Moon (Africa)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For mountains on the Moon see list of mountains on the Moon.
The term Mountains of the Moon or Montes Lunae referred to a mountain range in central Africa that was long believed to be the source of the White Nile, but whose actual location was – and remains – uncertain. (Nyungwe Forest Park, Rwanda - )
The ancient world had long been curious as to the source of the Nile, especially Ancient Greek geographers. A number of expeditions up the Nile failed to find the source.
Eventually a merchant named Diogenes reported that he has traveled inland from Rhapta in East Africa for twenty-five days and had found the source of Nile. He reported it flowed from a group of massive mountains into a series of large lakes. He reported the natives called this range the Mountains of the Moon because of their snowcapped whiteness.
These reports were accepted as true by Ptolemy and other Greek and Roman geographers, and maps he produced indicated the reported location of the mountains. Late Arab geographers, despite having far more knowledge of Africa, also took the report at face value, and included the mountains in the same location given by Ptolemy.[1]
It was not until the colonial period, in the nineteenth century, that Europeans resumed the search for the source of the Nile. James Bruce and John Speke in 1862 found that the source was not primarily in the mountains but rather in the Great Lakes. Henry Morton Stanley finally found glacier-caped mountains possibly fitting Diogenes's description in 1889 (they had eluded European explorers for so long due to often being shrouded in mist). Today known as the Ruwenzori Range, the peaks are the source of some of the Nile's waters, but only a small fraction.
Many modern scholars doubt that these were the Mountains of the Moon described by Diogenes, some holding that his reports were wholly fabricated. G.W.B. Huntingford suggested in 1940 that the Mountain of the Moon should be identified with Mount Kilimanjaro, and "was subsequently ridiculed in J. Olver Thompson's History of Ancient Geography published in 1948"; Huntingford later noted that he was not alone in this theory, citing Sir Harry Johnston in 1911 and Dr. Gervase Mathew later in 1963 having made the same identification.[2] O. G. S. Crawford identified this range with the Mount Abuna Yosef area in the Amhara Region of Ethiopia.
[edit] In film
- Mountains of the Moon (1990) (starring Patrick Bergin as Sir Richard Francis Burton) related the story of the Burton-Speke controversy.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Ralph Ehringford, Mapping the World : An Illustrated History of Cartography (National Geographic, 2005)
- ^ G.W.B. Huntingford, Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, p. 175 (London: the Hakluyt Society, 1980).
