The Bride of the Nile, Arus al-Nil, is the legendary maiden said to have been given to the river each year so that its waters would rise and flood the fields. The tale is widespread in Egyptian and Nubian oral tradition, and in Nubia it has become a favoured theme of modern writers, who revisit and rework the image of the girl surrendered to the water. Sources differ sharply on its origins: Egyptologists and folklorists hold that no evidence supports an ancient practice of drowning a virgin, and that only ritual offerings to the personified river are attested, so that the sacrificial version is largely a later and orientalist elaboration. Whatever its history, the figure endures as a powerful literary and folk emblem of the bond, at once nurturing and devouring, between the Nubians and their river.