Fig. 1.—Sketch-Map of Egypt.
The shaded area shows the district treated of in this book.
The district treated of in this volume constitutes the extreme south-east corner of Egypt, lying between the parallels of 22° and 25° of north latitude, and between the meridian of 34° E. and the Red Sea coast. It comprises an area of about 56,000 square kilometres, and includes some of the most mountainous and least accessible portions of the Khedive’s dominions.
The district has been comparatively little visited by travellers, and the literature concerning it is not very extensive. Berenice (Jh)[1] was founded by Ptolemy II (285-247 B.C.), who named the town after his mother, as a station at one end of the road for transporting goods from the Red Sea to the Nile at Koptos (Quft). The emerald mines in the Zabara area were worked at least as early as Ptolemaic times, and gold mines in the south at a much earlier date.
References to this part of Egypt occur in the writings of Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and Pliny, as well as in Ptolemy’s Geography and the Antonine Itinerary. Both Strabo and Pliny state that in Berenice, as in Syene, the sun cast no shadow at the summer solstice from which they inferred the town to be on the tropic of Cancer, though in reality it lay in their day some twenty-five kilometres, and is now about 28′, or some fifty-two kilometres, north of the tropic, the difference being caused by the secular change in the obliquity of the ecliptic since the beginning of the Christian era. Ptolemy gives the latitude of Berenice as 23° 50′, which is only 5′ too low; the Smaragdus mons, or emerald mountain, he places in latitude 25°, which is about 15′ higher than the true position of Gebel Zabara (Ec). Diodorus gives a very clear description of the working of gold mines in the Eastern Desert in his day, by miserable convict labour. The road from Koptos to Berenice is mentioned, with lists of stations and water reservoirs and their distances from each other, both by Pliny and the writer of the Antonine Itinerary; and though Pliny gives fewer stations than the Itinerary, the two accounts agree very closely in estimating the total distance at about 258 Roman miles, which, so far as can be judged from a partial identification of the stations marking the route, is pretty correct. The island of Zeberged (Ok), on which occurs the green gem called peridot, is probably the Topazos Insula of Diodorus, and the Agathon of Ptolemy; but Diodorus gives its length as eighty stades (about twelve kilometres), which is three times greater than its present size, and Ptolemy’s latitude of 23½° is some 16′ too low. Ptolemy states that the coast was inhabited by the Ichthyophages, or fish-eaters, while the Troglodytes, or cave-dwellers, of Strabo, were probably the workers in the mines.
The books of the Arab geographers, Edrisi and Abu el Feda, contain some references to the roads and mines of the Eastern Desert, but their descriptions are unimportant and contain frequent palpable errors.
D’Anville, in his Mémoires sur l’Egypte, Paris, 1766, pp. 230-235, attempted to construct a map of the coast of the Red Sea by combining the classical records with some early Portuguese and other charts, but the latter were too crude to enable any approach to be made to an accurate map.
It has been thought that Bruce discovered the island of Zeberged and the emerald mines of Zabara in 1769, but it is tolerably certain that he saw neither of these places. He estimated the latitude of the island he saw “pretty exactly” as 25° 3′, and its distance from the coast as three miles,[2] whereas Zeberged is really in latitude 23° 36′, and is over thirty miles from the nearest coast. The mines he saw were so close to the coast that he could walk to them from his boat and back in less than a day (in fact he states that they were only three miles from the coast), while both the Sikait and the Zabara mines are over a day’s journey from the sea. Nor could the mines have been the sulphur workings near El Ranga (He), unless Bruce made a large error in his observation for latitude, for the sulphur mines are about in latitude 24° 25′, and, moreover, Bruce states that he found “brittle green crystals,” not sulphur.
It is to the French traveller Cailliaud[3] that we owe the first modern account of Berenice and the emerald mines. Cailliaud was a mineralogist, in favour with Mohammad Ali Pasha, who sent him on two expeditions in 1816 and 1817 to search for mines in the Eastern Desert. On his first expedition, starting from Redesia (near Edfu), he discovered the rock temple of Seti I, forty-five kilometres east of the Nile, and several ancient stations on his route, and proceeded to the emerald mines of Zabara and the sulphur mines of El Ranga. On his second expedition he took with him sixty Albanian workmen to exploit the mines, and led them by nearly his former route to Zabara, where they extracted ten lbs. weight of emeralds (beryls) for presentation to the Pasha. On this second expedition Cailliaud discovered the mines and ruins of Sikait, and also other ruins in the Wadi Nugrus (Ed). Cailliaud’s drawings of the ruins of Sikait greatly exaggerate their size and elegance.
Jomard, in notes prefaced to Cailliaud’s account of his travels, made a careful study of the probable positions of the ancient roads and mines in this part of Egypt; he thought that Wadi Gemal Island (Hd) was Zeberged.
In 1818, Belzoni,[4] fired by Cailliaud’s discoveries, set out to discover the ancient Berenice. Starting from Edfu, he travelled eastward for some days over Cailliaud’s route, then marched via Bir Samut (where he discovered the ancient station) and Wadi Ghuel to the Zabara mines, where he found Cailliaud’s miners still at work. From Zabara he journeyed through the Wadi Sikait, passing the mines and ruined temples which had been discovered by Cailliaud, and down the Wadi Gemal to the sea. Proceeding then southward along the coast, he examined the sulphur mines at El Ranga near the mouth of the Wadi Abu Ghusun, and then made his discovery of the ruins of the temple and town of Berenice, near the peninsula of “Cape Galahen” (Ras Benas). The ruins were so inconspicuous as to be only found with difficulty, and the temple was so buried in sand that Belzoni could only make a very imperfect plan of it. The ancient town he estimates to have covered a space near the temple 1,600 feet broad and 2,000 feet long. Leaving Berenice the same day on which he made his discovery, Belzoni returned to Sikait by way of Abu Greia, Haratreit (where he discovered ancient stations), Hefeiri well, and the spring of Um Sueh. After copying some Greek inscriptions at Sikait, he returned to Edfu by way of Wadis Hafafit (Dc), where he found an ancient station, Abu Had, and Samut.