Nile exploration by Roman emperor Nero

Nile exploration by Roman emperor Nero was a Roman expedition undertaken around 61 AD that aimed to reach the sources of the Nile.

History
Emperor Nero sent a small group of Praetorian guards to explore the sources of the Nile in Africa around 61 AD. He did this in order to obtain information for a possible conquest of Ethiopia, as equatorial Africa was called by the Romans.

The Roman legionaries navigating the Nile from southern Egypt reached the city of Meroe and, later, the Sudd, where they found it difficult to go further.

"From Meroe the Roman party travelled 600 miles up the White Nile, until they reached the swamp-like Sudd in what is now southern Sudan, a fetid wetland filled with ferns, papyrus reeds and thick mats of rotting vegetation. In the rainy season, it covers an area larger than England, with a vast humid swamp teeming with mosquitoes and other insects. The only large animals in the Sudd were the crocodiles and hippos that occupied the muddy pools within its vast expanse. Those who entered this region had to endure severe heat and risk disease and starvation. The Sudd was discovered to be too deep to be crossed safely on foot, but its waters were also too shallow to be explored any further by boat. The Romans ‘reached an area where the swamp could only bear a small boat containing one person’. At this point the party despaired of ever finding a definite source for the Nile and turned back reluctantly to report their findings to the emperor in Rome. They had probably reached a position nearly 1,500 miles south of the Roman-Egyptian border."

- Raoul McLaughlin

Seneca the Younger's De Nubibus in Naturales Quaestiones documents the expedition to "explore the top of the world" (caput mundi investigandum). In this book he recounts what two legionaries told him about their discovery of the source of the Nile:

""There we saw two huge rocks, from which the power of the river went out in a powerful way.....[The Nile] comes from a very large lake of the [African] lands.""

Furthermore, Seneca wrote that the legionaries told him that the water of the Nile river, that jumped through two huge rocks, was coming from a very big lake inside the African lands. This lake - according to Vannini and others - could only be Lake Victoria, the biggest African lake. And the only river that goes out from this huge lake is the White Nile (named "Victoria Nile" when exits the lake), that in Jinja (Uganda) goes north toward the "Murchison Falls".

Historian Giovanni Vannini argues that this place is Murchison Falls in northern Uganda, meaning that the Romans reached Equatorial Africa. Vannini wrote in the magazine Nigrizia in 1996 that the legionaries made an exploratory journey of more than 5,000 km from Meroe to Uganda, a remarkable feat undertaken with small boats in order to bypass the Sudd, a vast swamp full of dangerous Nile crocodiles. According to Vannini, the Nero expedition from Roman Egypt reached the area of Jinja in present-day Uganda; he believes that the legionaries were able to reach Lake Victoria, based on the description of waterfall. Vannini noted that the falls described in Seneca's interview with the legionaries cannot be found in the "Sudd" area, but are very similar to Murchison Falls, where the Nile forces its way through a gap in the rocks, only 7 metres (23 ft) wide and falls 43 metres (141 ft) before flowing west into Lake Albert. Furthermore, according to Vannini, the lake described by the legionaries could only be Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa and the source of the White Nile (known as the "Victoria Nile" when exits the lake), which only flows north from Jinja toward Murchison Falls and the Sudd.

However it is noteworthy to pinpoint that the legionaries, according to Seneca (who is the only to have written in full detail about this expedition/exploration discovery), saw the Nile water coming with enormous power from a big lake behind the huge rocks that are described as the Murchison Falls, but they never declared failure in finding the Nile sources (as was mistakenly stated by McLaughlin): the same Nero declared to have "found" the 'Caput mundi' from where the Nile river comes.

Subsequently, historian David Braund wrote in 2015 that Nero's expedition to the Nile's sources probably opened a new route toward the Indian Ocean, bypassing the dangers of piracy in the Red Sea area while allowing future Roman trade with India and Azania:

"What begins to emerge is an on-going process under the early emperors, whereby Roman imperium was indeed stretching towards the rubrum mare in every sense of the term, embracing the Red Sea, Indian Ocean... No provincia Aethiopia was ever established or seriously attempted, but Roman imperium could be said to have reached across Nubia to the Red Sea. David Braun"

However, the death of Nero prevented further exploration of the Nile as well as Roman conquest south of Egypt.