Before our reconquest of the Sudan I had, as Director of Military Intelligence in Egypt, some connection with the oases of the Libyan Desert and the activities of the Senussi, as well as with the government of the Sinai Peninsula. In those early days of the British occupation of Egypt, Turkish rule prevailed in Tripoli, and the actual frontier between that province and Egypt was often in dispute—whilst a somewhat similar condition existed on Egypt’s eastern frontier in Sinai. It was thought politically desirable at that time to maintain the status quo and to avoid trouble with the Turkish authorities to whom Egypt still owed a nominal Suzerainty—that this was not always feasible is evidenced by the celebrated “Akaba incident” which at one time threatened to disturb the peace between the two countries. The preservation of the status quo to which I refer, meant the maintenance on the extreme eastern and western frontiers of Egypt of the purely Egyptian administrative control which, owing to the almost total absence of supervision, was of the lightest and could hardly be designated as efficient. The necessity of inaugurating some improvement in both directions had frequently been mooted, but it was not until the advent of the Great War and the military operations against the Turks in Sinai, on the one hand, and against the Senussi invasion of Egypt, on the other, that the long-postponed reorganization became possible. By that time Italian had given place to Turkish control in Tripoli, whilst it was also evident that Palestine and Arabia were no longer to remain an integral portion of the Turkish Empire.
These facts made it very desirable to establish a closer Administrative Control in both directions, and it is to me a matter of great satisfaction that an organization known as the Frontiers District Administration materialized, under the able direction of Colonel G. G. Hunter and his efficient staff of British and Egyptian officers and officials, with its well-equipped Camel Corps, its patrolling system, and its more intimate and sympathetic government of the oases and of the somewhat unruly nomad tribes on both western and eastern frontiers.
The mere fact that you, as one of these District Officers, have been resident for nearly two years in the important, though remote and little-known, Oasis of Siwa, and have been able to write a very interesting and useful account of your experiences—together with an admirable survey of its ancient, mediæval and recent history—its customs, superstitions and its social life, is but one proof amongst many others of the value of this new organization which, in spite of the various political changes in Egypt, has, I hope, come to stay.
As an ex-officer and one who was lately in Egypt, you are wise to avoid in your book all reference to recent political events and the complicated situations to which they have given rise. In this letter I shall observe a similar reticence, and the more so having regard to the positions I have held in Egypt and the Sudan. Remarks on so controversial a subject must be complete and detailed if they are to assist the general public in forming a true estimate of the “tangled skein” which the political situation now represents—a situation in which truth and fiction are almost inextricably involved.
The perusal of the proof sheets you have sent me, together with your excellent series of illustrations (and here may I congratulate you on the artistic skill of the charming sketches displayed in the coloured reproductions?), recall that “lure of the desert” which is so fascinating to all of us whose lot has been cast in those countries bordering on the Great Nile waterway and the illimitable stretches of sandy desert beyond. Your apt quotations at the beginning of each chapter show that the “lure” has seized you also, and I can well understand your desire to undertake further service in those regions which so evidently attract you, and in which you have won the sympathy and respect of the nomad Arab and sedentary Berber tribes of the Western Desert.
The title of your book is well explained in Part I, Chapter III, and you are wise to add a bibliography of the various works you have consulted, for there is no subject more debatable than the origin of the Berber tribes of whom you write. “This crossing to Africa by the Northern Mediterranean peoples,” says Professor Breasted in his History of Egypt, “is but one of the many such ventures which in prehistoric ages brought over the white race whom we know as Libyans.” His remarks refer to events in the thirteenth century B.C., when people known as the Tehenu lived on the western borders of the Delta of Egypt, beyond them were the Libyans, and still further to the west were the Meshwesh or Maxyes of Herodotus—all of them doubtless ancestors of the great Berber tribes of North Africa.
In the reign of the Pharaoh Mereneptah, the successor of Rameses the Great, it appears that one Meryey, King of the Libyans, forced the Tehenu to join him, and supported by roving bands of maritime adventurers from the coast (the Sherden or Sardinians, the Sikeli, natives of early Sicily, the Lysians and the Etruscans), invaded Egypt. It is with these wandering marauders that the peoples of Europe emerge for the first time upon the arena of history.
It is probable that not long before this invasion a great Canaanite migration into Libya had taken place, for it is recorded by the historian Procopius, a native of Cæsarea (565 B.C.), how the Hebrews, after quitting Egypt, attacked Palestine from beyond Jordan under Joshua. After the capture of Jericho they advanced westwards, drove out the Gergazites, Jebusites and other tribes inhabiting the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and forced them to flee into Egypt, where they were not allowed to settle, but were obliged to move westwards along the North African coast and into the oases. There is also evidence that some of these emigrants, under Roman pressure, were forced further westwards to Morocco and were called Moors. Later on they, in their turn, were followed by a similar migration of Jews from Palestine.
Thus it would appear that as far back as the thirteenth century B.C. the original Libyans, a warlike race, became co-mingled with maritime adventurers from Southern Europe, with Canaanites, Jews and Egyptians—a truly wonderful admixture of Asiatics, Africans and Europeans, and it is with the ancestors of this international potpourri that you deal so interestingly when you trace onwards, through the ages down to the present day, the history of those desert nomads and those sedentary dwellers of the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon. Surely your story will stimulate interest not only in the archæologist, but in all who desire to trace the manners, customs and characteristics of present-day peoples to their original sources. Those Siwans of whom you make a special study are of all people perhaps the most interesting, for, living, as it were, on an island, in a sea of desert, they—like the Abyssinians on the east—have been less affected by the world-changes than those who inhabit the main highways of the great African continent. The cult of Ammon and the seat of the Great Oracle, it is true, brought countless hordes of strangers to that mystic depression lying some seventy feet below the level of the Mediterranean, but the leading characteristics of the inhabitants have probably altered little, and religion—from Ammon worship to Islam, with an occasional admixture of Christian, Jewish and Pagan rites (the last brought by countless slaves from Central Africa)—has remained the all-absorbing interest of these oases dwellers.
As you truly say, the origin of the branching-horned ram as the fleshly symbol of the great God Ammon, “the King of the Gods,” “the unrevealed,” “the hidden one,” still remains a mystery. We know that the solar god Ra, whose supremacy in the “Old Kingdom” was so marked, from the Fifth Dynasty onwards and was at its zenith in the Twelfth Dynasty, became linked in the religion of the “Middle Kingdom” with Ammon, hitherto an obscure local god of Thebes who attained some prominence in the political rise of the city and was called by the priests Ammon-Ra. His cult gradually spread over the civilized world, and in the Roman period he was worshipped as Jupiter Ammon. He was essentially the god of Oracles, but how he came to have his special sanctuary in the Western Desert is still a mystery, though your account of this in the legends of the Arabic history of Siwa (Chapter III) throws an interesting light on the subject. Herodotus, we know, gave to Siwa the name of Oasis (probably derived from the Coptic word Ouahe, to dwell, from which the Arabic Wa is derived)—that is to say a fertile spot surrounded by desert, and thus from Siwa all other oases have derived their names.