Rivers everywhere gather stories and images, reflecting broader patterns of society and culture. In ancient Sumeria, along the Tigris and Euphrates, dwellings and temples were built from alluvial mud, and floods of fertility raised fields of grain. Egypt was and remains centered on the Nile, and even the gods traveled by boat along that gentle, life-giving artery. The Indus flows with archaeological tales of irrigation, planned cities, and the collapse of a society. The Yangtze flows from afar, as if descending from distant clouds, giving rise to an enormous patchwork of cultivated landscapes, and is now dominated by monumental hydroelectric dams. According to the sinologist Karl Wittfogel, massive irrigation projects entailed the emergence of despotic power. Rivers have also been realms of oblivion: in Greek antiquity, souls crossed the Styx and shed their memories in the Lethe. In the late 19th century, the novelist Joseph Conrad sent Marlow upstream along the Congo to witness the vile truth of colonialism and the ivory trade, a story remade in the 1970s by director Francis Ford Coppola as a journey along the Mekong into the savage heart of American empire. In Hindu tradition, the maternal Ganges flows from the matted hair of Shiva, and still today numerous pilgrims bathe in the sacred waters. In the 1960s, during pogroms that accompanied the rise of general Suharto, Javanese rivers turned the color of blood. Rivers emerge from rain and snow, slithering down from the highlands, connecting past, present, and future. Rivers evoke mud, motherhood, and life, the sacred and profane, mythology and militarism, beauty and horror.
See also: Ethnography