River history is reflected in the nature of the sediments carried and deposited over time. Using examples drawn from around the world, this account illustrates how river sediments have been used to reconstruct past environmental changes at a variety of scales in time and space. Problems arising from a patchy alluvial record and from influences external to the river basin can make interpretation difficult. The Nile is treated in some detail because its history is further complicated by tectonic, volcanic and climatic events in its headwaters and by enduring human impacts. It arose soon after 30 Ma. Since that time approximately 100 000 km3 of rock have been eroded from its Ethiopian sources and deposited in the eastern Mediterranean, with minor amounts of sediment laid down along its former flood plains in Egypt and Sudan. From these fragmentary alluvial remains, a detailed history of Nile floods and droughts has been reconstructed for the last 15 kyr, and, with less detail, for the past 150 kyr, which shows strong accordance with global fluctuations in the strength of the summer monsoon, which are in turn perhaps modulated by changes in solar insolation caused by changes in the Earth's orbit and by variations in solar irradiance.

Khartoum is one of the largest cities in Africa, located immediately south of the junction of the Blue and White Nile rivers in central Sudan. The growth of the Greater Khartoum-Omdurman conurbation arose – without a proper urban plan – from the agricultural wealth created through the completion of three dams, and mostly in the last three decades. Urban expansion was enabled by and helped to enhance the major agricultural expansion of the Gezira clay plains located to the south between the lower Blue and White Nile rivers. The region has been a focus of human settlement for at least 8,000 years, initially by semi-sedentary groups with a fishing-hunting-gathering lifestyle and later by Neolithic groups as shown by hundreds of archaeological sites. Today, Khartoum is a desert city, still very vulnerable to floods triggered by intense convectional storms. Such extreme events may become more common in future, representing a major geomorphological hazard. Moreover, uncontrolled urban and agricultural development is threatening most of the cultural heritage of the region.