BY ARTHUR E. P. WEIGALL INSPECTOR-GENERAL OF UPPER EGYPT, DEPARTMENT OF ANTIQUITIES AUTHOR OF ‘A REPORT ON THE ANTIQUITIES OF LOWER NUBIA,’ ‘A CATALOGUE OF THE WEIGHTS AND BALANCES IN THE CAIRO MUSEUM,’ ‘A GUIDE TO THE ANTIQUITIES OF UPPER EGYPT,’ ‘DIE MASTABA DES GEMNIKAI’ (WITH PROFESSOR VON BISSING), ETC. SECOND IMPRESSION William Blackwood and Sons Edinburgh and London 1913 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TO SIR GASTON MASPERO, K.C.M.G., ETC., ETC., ETC., DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTIQUITIE

Some of the chapters in this book have appeared as articles in ‘Blackwood’s Magazine.’ The various journeys here recorded have been made in the ordinary course of the work of inspection, and have been reported in the usual official manner. These less technical descriptions have been written in leisure hours, and the illustrations here published are selected from a large number of photographs and drawings rapidly made by the wayside. The journey to Wady Hammamât and Kossair was made in the compan

I know a young man who declares that after reading a certain explorer’s description of a journey across the burning Sahara, he found to his amazement that his nose was covered with freckles. The reader will perhaps remember how, on some rainy day in his childhood, he has sat over the fire and has read sea-stories and dreamed sea-dreams until his lips, he will swear, have tasted salt. Alas, one’s little agility in the art of narration is wholly inadequate for the production, at this time of life,

The so-called Breccia Quarries of Wady Hammamât are known to all Egyptologists by name, owing to the important historical inscriptions which are cut on the rocks of the valley. In reality the stone quarried there was mainly tuff, or consolidated volcanic ash; and the real name of the locality is Wady Fowakhîeh, “the Valley of the Pots”; but such niceties do not trouble the average archæologist. Many of the inscriptions were copied by Lepsius, the late German Egyptologist, and further notes were

In the reach of the Nile between Quft and Keneh, a few miles below Luxor, the river makes its nearest approach to the Red Sea, not more than 110 miles of desert separating the two waters at this point. From Quft, the ancient Koptos, to Kossair, the little seaport town, there runs the great highroad of ancient days, along which the Egyptians travelled who were engaged in the Eastern trade. It happened by chance that this route led through the Wady Fowakhîeh in which the famous quarries were situa

Those who have travelled in Italy, and, in the museums and in the ruins there, have studied the sculpture and the architectural accessories of the Roman Imperial age, will be familiar with that magnificent purple stone known as Imperial Porphyry. It was one of the most highly prized of the ornamental stones employed by the great artists and architects of that age of luxury; and the great distance which it had to be brought, over parched deserts and perilous seas, must have sent its price up beyo

In the previous chapter an account was given of a journey made to the Imperial porphyry quarries of Gebel Dukhân in the month of March 1907. These quarries are to be found about a score or so of miles from the Red Sea at a point in the Eastern Desert opposite the southern end of the Peninsula of Sinai. From Gebel Dukhân I returned to the Nile by way of the white granite quarries of Um Etgal, the ancient Mons Claudianus, and thence past the old gold workings of Fatireh to Keneh. My caravan was co

The small shrine in the Eastern Desert, which I have here called the Temple of Wady Abâd, is known to Egyptologists as the Temple of Redesiyeh, although it is thirty-seven miles or more from the village on the Nile, five miles above Edfu, which bears that name. Redesiyeh seems to have been the point from which Lepsius, the German archæologist, and other early travellers set out to visit the desert shrine; and hence the name of this wholly unimportant village was given to the ruin, and nobody has

Opposite the town of Aswân, a short distance below the First Cataract of the Nile, there rises an island known to travellers by its Greek name of Elephantine. The river sweeps down from the cataract to east and west; southwards one may watch it flowing around a dozen dark clumps of granite rocks, which thrust themselves, as it were, breathless above the water; and northwards almost without hindrance it passes between the hills and palm-trees of the mainland. Nowadays should one stand upon the mo