are apt to be exaggerated, owing to their great contrast to the surrounding deserts. “The fair appearance then of this oasis is in a great measure fictitious; and has chiefly its origin in the relief afforded to the mind, wearied by the monotony and dreariness of the surrounding wastes. It seems to me therefore, that the only rational way of accounting for the exaggerated epithets which the ancient writers and some modern travellers have applied to this district, is to attribute them to their surprise, at finding in such a fearful region any verdure, any habitable spot, and to the exhilarating effect on the spirits of this agreeable contrast to the dreary deserts which they have just crossed. But comfortless as was my journey through the wilderness, and beautiful as the woods of palm-trees, doums, and acacias in the Oasis certainly are, still the vivid recollection of the superior loveliness of the banks of the Nile, prevents my consenting to call these regions ‘the Gardens of the Hesperides’; and sadly must the oasis have diminished in beauty, if it ever merited the praise which Herodotus bestowed upon the place, in calling it ‘the Island of the Blessed.’”
Hoskins, who was accompanied by two other Englishmen, made splendid use of the fortnight spent in the oasis, although unfortunately, just before the termination of his visit, he sustained a violent attack of fever. Their departure is thus described: “After ascending the mountain which bounds the Oasis, we lingered some time at the summit, to take, I may certainly say, our last view of the place; for having, as the Arabs say, got all its antiquities on paper, and having providentially once escaped its pestilential atmosphere, we shall never, I think, by any possibility, have the slightest inclination to revisit such a baneful region.”
Most of these early explorers found time to cut their names on the walls of the temple of Hibis, and Cailliaud must have spent hours in this occupation, as he has left a long and neatly executed inscription recording himself as the original and genuine discoverer of that noble edifice. The names of these explorers, who in some cases suffered considerable hardships in visiting the oases, are, however, quite overshadowed by the numberless scrawls made in recent years by a host of otherwise unknown petty officials of the Government, who have had to take their turn of duty and banishment in the greatly dreaded desert. The dated names cut in the walls of the temple are of some value, as an examination of them frequently yields reliable evidence of the rate of weathering of the stone since the time at which they were inscribed.
It was not until after the winter of 1873-74, when the great German expedition, under the leadership of Rohlfs, with Zittel, Jordan, and Ascherson as geologist, topographer, and botanist respectively, visited all the chief oases of the eastern portion of the Libyan Desert, that any connected scientific observations of importance, other than those dealing with archæology, were published. The Rohlfs expedition astronomically determined the positions of selected points in each oasis, and produced a map on which the principal villages and the approximate limits of the depressions were correctly shown. Zittel at the same time worked out the general relations of the different geological formations found in the country, described their main divisions, and indicated approximately the areas occupied by them. So thoroughly, indeed, did this expedition accomplish its mission that its results have formed a sound basis for all later scientific work in this part of Egypt.
As the voluminous memoirs recording the observations of the members of the Rohlfs expedition are easily obtainable at the present day, it is unnecessary here to do more than briefly refer to a few of their more general remarks on the oasis of Kharga. In his ‘Three Months in the Libyan Desert,’ Gerhard Rohlfs states that he and his companions travelled from Dakhla Oasis by the Ain Amûr road, and were greeted at Kharga village by Schweinfurth, who was for the time being residing in a disused alum factory. Rohlfs spent only two or three days in the neighbourhood of Kharga, and remarks that the expedition did not undertake detailed work on the antiquities, as the latter had already been so competently described by Hoskins and other previous explorers; a few corrections and amendments of published accounts of the temple were, however, made. The splendid preservation of the Christian necropolis, with its mausolea of unburnt brick, is remarked upon, and Rohlfs adds that, in beauty and ingenious arrangement, this burial-ground can only be excelled by the necropolis of Cyrene.
Rohlfs describes Kharga village as being pretty from a distance, but remarks that the narrow dirty alleys are the pictures of laziness and poverty; the streets are covered in for protection against the rays of the sun, a common practice throughout the Sahara.
The word ‘oasis’ is old Egyptian, as also is the Arabic ‘wah,’ the latter word being also found in Coptic, and signifying an inhabited place; nevertheless, the word ‘wah’ was never used by the ancient Egyptians to designate the oases. These they called ‘otu,’ which means a place where bodies are embalmed. ‘Otu’ has its origin in the Theban myth, according to which Seth, the murderer of Osiris, was pursued by Horus to Koptos, where he was captured and thrown into a dungeon. His corpse was afterwards found by his friends, and taken to the oases for burial.[1] The inscriptions on the temple of Hibis in Kharga refer to the oases under the comprehensive name ‘Set-ament,’ the ‘Western Lands.’
About the same time Dr. Schweinfurth, whose services to Egypt in so many branches of science stand pre-eminent, published important contributions on some of the archæological remains. Two or three years later Brugsch Bey brought out an account of the antiquities of the oasis, with translations of a number of the inscriptions on the temples of Nadûra and Hibis. The antiquities will be briefly referred to in my account of the history of the oasis under the Persians and the Romans, and for fuller details the reader is referred to the publications of Cailliaud, Hoskins, Schweinfurth, Brugsch, and some still later writers.
In 1893-94 Captain H. G. Lyons, R.E., in the course of a military patrol, undertaken in order to ascertain the measures necessary to protect the inhabitants of the oasis from possible Dervish raids, made valuable geological observations on the Eocene and Cretaceous systems, especially in relation to the connection of folding and water-supply. These he discussed in a paper read before the Geological Society of London in 1894, and it was mainly due to the interest it aroused, and to his initiative in pointing out to the Egyptian authorities the importance of having a comprehensive examination of the country carried out, that the Geological Survey of Egypt was established in 1896.
The detailed survey of the Libyan Desert was taken up in October, 1897, and completed in June of the following year, the four oases being mapped on the scale of 1 to 50,000 by plane-table triangulation, checked and adjusted by numerous astronomical observations. Direct measurements by measuring-wheel were also employed to a considerable extent. Baharia Oasis was the first to be taken in hand, Mr. Leonard Gorringe and I taking the western side, and my colleagues, Messrs. Ball and Vuta, the eastern. This plan of splitting up an oasis-depression between two surveying parties was not, however, found satisfactory, and on the completion of Baharia it was decided that Ball should take up the oasis of Kharga, while Farafra and Dakhla fell to my lot. The results of this survey are published in the Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Egypt.