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For mountains on the Moon see list of mountains on the Moon.

Mountains of the Moon is also a song by Robert Hunter, most famously performed by the Grateful Dead.

The Mountains of the Moon or Montes Lunae was a mountain range in central Africa that was long believed to be the source of the White Nile. The ancient world had long been curious as to the source of the Nile, especially Ancient Greek geographers. A number of expeditions down the Nile failed to find the source.

Eventually a merchant named Diogenes reported that he has traveled inland from Rhapta in East Africa for twenty-five days and had found the source of Nile. He reported 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 taken as true by Ptolemy and other Greek and Roman geographers. Late Arab geographers, despite having far more knowledge of Africa, also accepted the report.

It was not until the nineteenth century when Europeans resumed the search for the source of the Nile. James Bruce and John Speke in 1862 found that the source was not primarily in the mountains but rather in the Great Lakes. Henry Morton Stanley finally found the mist surrounded mountains in 1889. Today known as the Ruwenzori Range the peaks are the source of some of the Nile's waters, but only a small fraction.

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, and "was subsequently ridiculed in J. Olver 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 central Ethiopia.

In film

• Mountains of the Moon (1990) (starring Patrick Bergin as Sir Richard Francis Burton) related the story of the Burton-Speke controversy. IMDB entry.

Notes

1. G.W.B Huntingford, Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, p. 175 (London: the Hakluyt Society, 1980).

• African history
• Nile