The book presents a ground-breaking view of the navigational landscape of the Nile in medieval Egypt by drawing on a broad range of sources: medieval Arabic geographies; traveler accounts; archaeology; and meteorological, hydrological, and geological studies.
Its first major section charts the changing geography of the Nile waterways, particularly in the Delta, from the eve of Islam to the early modern period, and logs the "rise and fall" of these waterways for natural and/or anthropogenic reasons. The book then presents a new perspective on the Nile: it draws on traveler accounts and environmental data to portray the river as a uniquely challenging and sometimes dangerous navigational environment requiring extensive local knowledge by skilled and hard-working Nile navigators.
Finally, the book looks at how the main Delta and Red Sea ports of medieval Egypt fitted into the navigational landscape described: it explains how these ports were effected by changes occurring to the navigational landscape, and how they reflected the navigational conditions of the Nile and surrounding seas. The book is richly illustrated with maps and images.

Proceedings of Red Sea Project V held at the University of Exeter September 2010. Contents: 1) Travels with Machell in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean: the voyages of Thomas Machell and Jenny Balfour Paul, 1848 and 2010 (Jenny Balfour Paul); 2) The last of the Aden dhows (Antonin Besse); 3) Sailing the Red Sea: Pharaonic voyages to Punt and Min of the Desert (Cheryl Ward); 4) A new Pharaonic Harbour in Ayn Sokhna (Gulf of Suez) (Pierre Tallet); 5) The southern Red Sea in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC: an archaeological overview (Rodolfo Fattovich); 6) Nubians and the others on the Red Sea. An update on the exotic ceramic materials from the Middle Kingdom harbour of Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, Red Sea, Egypt (Andrea Manzo); 7) Ancient Egyptian and allied African navigators' use of space on the Red Sea (K.A. Kitchen); 8) The semiticisation of the Arabian peninsula and the problem of its reflection in the archaeological record (Roger Blench); 9) Sacred places and beings of the Red Sea littoral societies (Oscar Nalesini);