Travels in the Upper Egyptian deserts

by Arthur E. P. Brome Weigall

Throughout what is known as the old kingdom, gold was used in ever-increasing quantities, but an idea of the wealth of the mines will best be obtained from the records of the Empire. About 250,000 grains of gold were drawn by the Vizir Rekhmara in taxes from Upper Egypt, and this was but a small item in comparison with the taxes levied in kind. A king of a north Syrian state wrote to Amonhotep III., the Pharaoh of Egypt, asking for gold, and towards the end of his letter he says: “Let my brother send gold in very large quantities, without measure, and let him send more gold to me than he did to my father; for in my brother’s land gold is as common as dust.” To the god Amon alone Rameses III. presented some 26,000 grains of gold, and to the other gods he gave at the same time very large sums. In later times the High Priest of Amon was made also director of the gold mines, and it was the diverting of this vast wealth from the crown to the church which was mainly responsible for the fall of the Ramesside line.

A subject must here be introduced which will ever remain of interest to the speculative. Some have thought that the southern portion of this desert is to be identified with the Ophir of the Bible, and that the old gold-workings here are none other than “King Solomon’s Mines.” In the Book of Kings one reads, “And King Solomon made a navy of ships in Ezion-geber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom. And Hiram sent in the navy his servants, shipmen that had knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon. And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon.” Ophir cannot be identified with Arabia, since there is no gold there; and hence one may seek this land of ancient wealth at the southern end of the Eastern Egyptian Desert. If it is argued that the Hebrews would have found difficulties in carrying on mining operations unmolested in Egyptian territory, it may be contended on the other hand that King Solomon may have made some bargain with the Pharaoh: for example, that the former might mine in a certain tract of desert if the latter might cut timber in the Lebanon. The purchase of cedar-wood by the Egyptians is known to have taken place at about this period, payment in gold being made; and therefore it does not require an undue stretch of the imagination to suppose that the Hebrews themselves mined the gold. Again, at the time when King Solomon reigned in all his glory in Palestine, the short-lived Pharaohs of Egypt sat upon tottering thrones, and were wholly unable to protect the Eastern Desert from invasion. The Egyptians often state that they encountered hostile forces in this land, and these may not always have consisted of Bedwin marauders.

No savant has accepted for a moment the various theories which place Ophir at the southern end of the African continent; and the most common view is that Solomon obtained his gold from the land of Pount, so often referred to in Egyptian inscriptions. This country is thought to have been situated in the neighbourhood of Suakin; but, as Professor Naville points out, it is a somewhat vague geographical term, and may include a large tract of country to the north and south of this point. One cannot imagine the Hebrews penetrating very far over the unknown seas to the perilous harbours of Middle Africa: one pictures them more easily huddled in the less dangerous ports of places such as Kossair or Berenice, or at farthest in that of Suakin. It is thus quite probable that some of the gold-workings in the desert here described are actually King Solomon’s Mines, and that the country through which the reader will be conducted is the wonderful Ophir itself. Certainly there is no one who can state conclusively that it is not.

Work continued with unabated energy during the later periods of Egyptian history, and the Persian, Greek, and Roman treasuries were filled consecutively with the produce of the mines. Several classical writers make reference to these operations, and sometimes one is told the actual name and situation of the workings. Diodorus gives a description of the mines in the Wady Alagi, and tells how the work was done. The miners wore a lamp tied to their forehead. The stone was carried to the surface by children, and was pounded in stone mortars by iron pestles. It was then ground to a fine powder by old men and women. This powdered ore was washed on inclined tables, the residue being placed in earthen crucibles with lead, salt, and tin for fluxes, and was there baked for five days. Agatharchides describes how the prisoners and negroes hewed out the stone, and, with unutterable toil, crushed it in mills and washed out the grains of gold. The Arabic historian, El Macrizi, states that during the reign of Ahmed ben Teilun there was great activity in the mining industry throughout the Eastern Desert, and Cufic inscriptions of this date found in the old workings confirm this statement. From then, until modern times, however, little work was done; but in recent years, as the reader will no doubt know, many of the ancient workings have been reopened, and one must admit that if these are really to be regarded as King Solomon’s Mines, that potentate must have had a somewhat lower opinion of Ophir than tradition indicates.

One of the riding-camels.

One of the camels.

Pl. iii.

The other cause for the ancient activity in the Eastern Desert was, as has been said, the need of ornamental stone for the making of vases, statues, and architectural accessories. From the earliest times bowls and vases of alabaster, breccia, diorite, and other fine stones were used by the Egyptians, and the quarries must have already formed quite a flourishing industry. Soon the making of statuettes, and later of statues, enlarged this industry, and with the growth of civilisation it steadily increased. The galleries of the Cairo Museum, and those of European museums, are massed with statues and other objects cut in stone brought from the hills between the Nile and the Red Sea. The breccia quarries of Wady Hammamât were worked from archaic to Roman days; the Tourquoise Mountains, not far from Kossair, supplied the markets of the ancient world; white granite was taken from the hills of Um Etgal; there were two or three alabaster quarries in constant use; and in the time of the Roman Empire the famous Imperial porphyry was quarried in the mountains of Gebel Dukhân. One may still see blocks of breccia at Hammamât, of granite at Um Etgal, or of porphyry at Dukhân, lying abandoned at the foot of the hills, although numbered and actually addressed to the Cæsars. The towns in which the quarrymen lived still stand in defiance of the years, and the traveller who has the energy to penetrate into the distant valleys where they are situated may there walk through streets untrodden since the days of Nero and Trajan, and yet still littered with the chippings from the dressing of the blocks.