Over a period of many months, both before and since the abdication of King Farouk, responsible heads of government in Egypt have been voicing a claim to the entire Nile Basin, although practical measures to convert the claim into control have been pointed chiefly toward that part of the Basin included in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

It is the fashion nowadays, especially in the United States, to assume that river basins are coherent, nature-given units of the earth's surface, without questioning their fitness for unified political administration or sovereignty. According to that fashion, even the extreme Egyptian claim seems cogent. The Nile Basin is a drainage unit and clearly appears so on the map (Fig. 1)