Горы Луны: Легенды об истоках Нила

Legendary mountain range in east Africa

Mountains of the Moon (Latin: Montes Lunae; جبال القمر, or Jibbel el Kumri) is a legendary mountain or mountain range in east Africa at the source of the Nile River. Various identifications have been made in modern times, the Rwenzori Mountains of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo being the most celebrated.

People of the ancient world were long curious about 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 had traveled inland from Rhapta in East Africa for twenty five days and had found the source of the Nile. He reported that 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 most Greek and Roman geographers, most notably by Ptolemy, who produced maps that indicated the reported location of the mountains. Late Arab geographers, despite having far more knowledge of Africa, also presumed the report was fact, and included the mountains in the same location given by Ptolemy.

It was not until modern times that Europeans resumed their search for the source of the Nile. The Scottish explorer James Bruce, who travelled to Gojjam, Ethiopia, in 1770, investigated the source of the Blue Nile there. He identified the "Mountains of the Moon" with Mount Amedamit, which he described surrounded the source of the Lesser Abay "in two semi circles like a new moon  and seem, by their shape, to deserve the name of mountains of the moon, such as was given by antiquity to mountains in the neighborhood of which the Nile was supposed to rise". James Grant and John Speke in 1862 sought the source of the White Nile in the Great Lakes region. Henry Morton Stanley finally found glacier capped 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 Rwenzori Mountains, the peaks are the source of some of the Nile's waters, but only a small fraction, and Diogenes would have crossed the Victoria Nile to reach them. 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 (despite Kilimanjaro being a solitary mountain rather than a mountain range and not feeding the Nile at all), and "was subsequently ridiculed in J. Oliver 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. O. G. S. Crawford identified this range with the Mount Abuna Yosef area in the Amhara Region of Ethiopia.

The 1965 film based on the H. Rider Haggard novel She is set in a lost Egyptian colony located in The Mountains of the Moon. The feature film Mountains of the Moon (1990) relates the story of Sir Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke seeking the source of the Nile in the 1850s. The Mountains of the Moon were featured in the television documentary series Africa by David Attenborough on BBC 1, shown in January 2013. A film based on the novel Chander Pahar, directed by Kamaleshwar Mukherjee, was scheduled to begin shooting in February 2013. The film is produced by Shree Venkatesh Films and was shot on locations in Africa. The film was released on 20 December 2013.