To wade into Nile scholarship is no small thing. The various representations of the Nile in poetry, prose, public monuments, domestic wall-paintings, technical maps, or itineraries have all been given their fair share of attention. Merrills, in a stimulating and ambitious work, addresses them all. He chooses the Nile as a test case to look at “different modes of geographical representation that were known within Roman Italy, and crucially how they related to one another” (p. 5). In so doing, he offers a less homogenous set of geographies than Claude Nicolet’s L’inventaire du monde, which focuses mostly on painted maps and the Res Gestae. Merrills shows in each chapter how a different type of Nile geography creates a unique relationship between geography and political power, from the late Republic through the Flavian period. By juxtaposing different media in one work, Merrills offers a richer, more variegated picture of the Nile’s contributions to (and undermining of) the ideologies of the principate and broadens Nicolet’s otherwise narrow definition of authoritative, Augustus-sanctioned geography.