Egypt and The Desert

Darnell
Deserts, the Red Land, bracket the narrow strip of alluvial Black
Land that borders the Nile. Networks of desert roads ascended
to the high desert from the Nile Valley, providing access to the
mineral wealth and Red Sea ports of the Eastern Desert, as well
as the oasis depressions and trade networks of the Western
Desert. A historical perspective from the Predynastic through Ancient Egypt
the Roman Periods highlights how developments in the Nile
Valley altered the Egyptian administration and exploitation of in Context
the deserts. For the ancient Egyptians, the deserts were a living
landscape, and at numerous points along the desert roads,
the ancient Egyptians employed rock art and rock inscriptions
to create and mark places. Such sites provide considerable
Egypt and the
Egypt and the Desert

evidence for the origin of writing in northeast Africa, the
religious significance of the desert and expressions of personal
piety, and the development of the early alphabet.
Desert
About the Series Series Editors
The aim of this Elements series is to offer Gianluca Miniaci
authoritative but accessible overviews University of Pisa
John Coleman Darnell

of foundational and emerging topics in Juan Carlos
the study of ancient Egypt, along with Moreno García
comparative analyses, translated into CNRS, Paris
a language comprehensible to non-
Anna Stevens
specialists. Its authors will take a step
University of
back and connect ancient Egypt to the
Cambridge and
world around, bringing ancient Egypt to
Monash University
the attention of the broader humanities
community and leading Egyptology in
new directions.
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Elements in Ancient Egypt in Context
edited by
Gianluca Miniaci
University of Pisa
Juan Carlos Moreno García
CNRS, Paris
Anna Stevens
University of Cambridge and Monash University
EGYPT AND THE DESERT

Yale University
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DOI: 10.1017/9781108900683
© John Coleman Darnell 2021
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Elements in Ancient Egypt in Context
DOI: 10.1017/9781108900683
First published online: May 2021

Yale University
Author for correspondence: John Coleman Darnell, [email protected]
Abstract: Deserts, the Red Land, bracket the narrow strip of alluvial Black
Land that borders the Nile. Networks of desert roads ascended to the
high desert from the Nile Valley, providing access to the mineral wealth
and Red Sea ports of the Eastern Desert, as well as the oasis depressions
and trade networks of the Western Desert. A historical perspective from
the Predynastic through the Roman Periods highlights how
developments in the Nile Valley altered the Egyptian administration
and exploitation of the deserts. For the ancient Egyptians, the deserts
were a living landscape, and at numerous points along the desert roads,
they employed rock art and rock inscriptions to create and mark places.
Such sites provide considerable evidence for the origin of writing in
northeast Africa, the religious significance of the desert and
expressions of personal piety, and the development of the early
alphabet.
Keywords: Egypt, deserts, writing, administration, roads
© John Coleman Darnell 2021

ISBNs: 9781108820530 (PB), 9781108900683 (OC)
ISSNs: 2516-4813 (online), 2516-4805 (print)
Contents
1 The Red Land 1
2 The Deserts and Their Administration 17
3 Desert as Numinous Space 40
4 Writing and Drawing in the Desert 63
5 Self-Presentation of Foreigners in the Egyptian Deserts 70
6 Conclusion 74
Bibliography 76
Egypt and the Desert 1
1 The Red Land

The ancient Egyptians conceptualized their world as a series of balanced pairs,
even opposites, held in equilibrium by the force of maat, cosmic order and
rectitude. The duality of the diurnal and nocturnal solar cycle corresponded to
the annual opposites of the north to south and south to north journey of the sun,
and the yearly round of the high and low Niles. Geographically, the major
divisions of the ordered world could appear as Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt,
the southern and northern realms over which the king ruled as “Lord of the Two
Lands”; the Nilotic world could also take the form of eastern and western
divisions as the Two Banks. An equally significant pairing was Kemet, the
Black Land, the extent of the rich alluvial soil, and Deshret, the Red Land, the
vast deserts that stretched east and west of the Nile Valley. One could be a short
distance out in the desert, with a clear view of the green ribbons of cultivation
flanking the shimmering blue band of the Nile (Figure 1), and still describe
a walk to that cultivation as “going down to the Black Land” – as “hill country”
was synonymous with “desert” and “foreign land,” an immense and conceptu-
ally outer realm was but a stone’s throw from the waters of the Nile flood.
In the fifth century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus applied to Egypt the
now hoary designation “the gift of the Nile.” Indeed, ancient Egyptian civiliza-
tion would never have attained attained the heights of achievement to which it
rose without the reliable water source and relatively predictable flooding of the
river. Herodotus was correct that the black alluvial soil – the substance of which
the Black Land is composed – was a literal gift of the Nile inundation. Modern
historians and Egyptologists alike sometimes take Herodotus’s characterization
too far, however, assuming that ancient Egypt was all but exclusively the narrow
strip of alluvium bordering the Nile. Some have suggested that the ancient
Egyptians avoided the deserts except when mining or military expeditions
forced them reluctantly into the rocky and sandy barrenness. In the minds of
some recent authors, the deserts bordering the Nile Valley were realms of terror
and chaos for the ancient Egyptians.1 As archaeology and epigraphy have
revealed, with increasing clarity over the past several decades, the truth of
ancient Egypt’s relationship with the Eastern and Western Deserts was far
from random, insignificant, or fearful.
Marching along the outer edges of Middle Kingdom hunting scenes at Beni
Hasan, griffins and other imaginary creatures mark the outer edges of the
already outer desert regions (Gerke, 2014). At the rim of the world that the far
corner of the tomb wall mirrors, the desert beasts that are the hunter’s quarry
eventually become the mythical creatures that might populate the twilight lands
1
Keimer, 1944; Aufrère, 2007: 139; Quack, 2010: 349; Lazaridis, 2019: 129.
2 Ancient Egypt in Context
Figure 1 At the site of Moalla, looking across the Nile and its narrow bands of
cultivation to the western escarpment
at the rims of the horizons. Yet fantastic fauna are relatively rare at desert rock
inscription sites (Darnell, 2013a: 68–69) – even at a remote desert pass the
Egyptians apparently did not feel themselves to be approaching a dangerous
liminal region, nor do they seem to have feared such creatures as aspects of real
desert travel. Even in those Beni Hasan scenes in which the hunter – through the
presence of desert monsters – might appear to brag about hunting at the ends of
the earth, the monstrous beings wear collars. The desert might eventually
become truly uncanny if one journeyed far enough, but the desert prowess of
the ancient Egyptians seems to have led them to believe that any such monsters
could be incorporated into a rational and practical, inhabited desert environ-
ment. Desert monsters, like the deserts themselves, could be domesticated.
Most of the mobile hunter-gatherer groups who roamed the seasonally moist
eastern Sahara, accompanied by expanding herds of cattle and caprids by ca.
6000 BCE, began to settle down to lives of farming and herding under the
influence of a drying climate around 5000 BCE (Riemer, 2007). Although the
deserts went from center to periphery, the Nile Valley dwellers never entirely
left the drying hinterlands of the river and oases. Ancient Egyptians exploited
the vast geological and mineralogical wealth of the Eastern Desert, and utilized
the oases of the Western Desert of Egypt and Nubia as hubs for far-flung caravan
travel. Far from being empty terra incognita, the ancient Egyptian deserts were
highly interconnected regions crisscrossed by well-marked and intensively
traveled tracks, with numerous oasis settlements and high desert campsites
revealing evidence of the products of Mediterranean and North African com-
merce. During the three millennia of pharaonic history, the Egyptians main-
tained a desert infrastructure of varying complexity, with bureaucratic offices to
oversee the smooth functioning of inhabited desert areas and the caravans
passing through them. A history of Egypt or Nubia that excludes the Red
Land is but a fragment of the entire story of Egyptian and Nubian cultures.
The formal self-presentation of a late Old Kingdom administrator illustrates
some of the derring-do and remarkable achievements of ancient Egyptians in
the Western Desert, and demonstrates how the results of recent archaeological
and epigraphic work have improved our understanding of Egyptian desert
activity. The Sixth Dynasty governor of the First Nome (district) of Upper
Egypt, Harkhuf, commissioned an “autobiography” for the façade of his tomb
on the west bank of modern Aswan, site of his capital city and the traditional
border between pharaonic Egypt and Nubia. Harkhuf served under kings
Merenre (ca. 2287–2278 BCE) and during the boyhood of his successor, Pepi
II (who would reign an unprecedented 94 years, ca. 2278–2184 BCE). In his
text, Harkhuf relates his journeys south into Nubia; in two of his exploratory and
trading expeditions, Harkhuf’s goal was a now-obscure southern territory called
Yam, ultimately linked to Egypt by two routes: the Elephantine Road, departing
from Gebel Tingar on the west bank of Aswan, just south of Harkhuf’s tomb,
and the Oasis Road, whose Nile terminus was in the Thinite Nome (the district
of Abydos, the terminus to the road being close to modern Girga).
The length of his itinerary, and the Lower Nubian toponyms that Harkhuf lists
for his return journey, have led to an Egyptological equation of Yam with the
region of the Third Cataract of the Nile or further south, near the Fifth Cataract
(O’Connor, 1986). For over two decades, the Theban Desert Road Survey (Yale
University) has mapped and studied much of the Oasis Road, called the Girga
Road after its major Nilotic terminus, and the ACACIA Project (University of
Cologne) has traced Old Kingdom activity along the Abu Ballas Trail, connect-
ing Dakhla Oasis with Gebel Uweinat to the southwest, near the juncture of the
modern states of Egypt, Sudan, and Libya, roughly 580 kilometers southwest of
Balat in Dakhla Oasis and 650 kilometers due west of the Nile. Combining
archaeological work and epigraphic recording, these surveys have revealed
physical evidence for Old Kingdom expeditions utilizing the Oasis Road and
branches thereof leading to the far southwest, offering clues to Harkhuf’s
ultimate destination in Yam. Harkhuf departed the region of Abydos via the
Girga Road, on a Theban branch of which is a rock inscription of the cartouche
of a Sixth Dynasty king Pepi. He then traveled on to Kharga Oasis, past

campsites now known to have functioned during the Fifth Dynasty; Harkhuf
may have continued westward in his journey, arriving at the Old Kingdom
outpost of Balat in Dakhla Oasis, ultimately traveling to the southwest along the
Abu Ballas Trail toward Gebel Uweinat.
An inscription from the reign of Montuhotep II (ca. 2055–2004 BCE) at
Gebel Uweinat, discovered in 2008, depicts the enthroned Eleventh Dynasty
ruler receiving tribute from the lands of Yam and Tekhebet. While not neces-
sarily in the territory of Yam itself, the inscription suggests that Yam was not
exclusively a Nilotic location, but rather at least to some extent a region of the
Western Desert, perhaps beyond Kharga and Dakhla Oases (Cooper, 2012). The
inscription of Montuhotep II indicates that Egyptian missions to Uweinat
received snṯr – incense – from Yam. Increasing aridity in the Sahara ultimately
restricted the movements of pastoral groups, perhaps contributing to the ultim-
ate obsolescence of the toponym. Ongoing archaeological surveys, new epi-
graphic discoveries, and a resulting reappraisal of long-known hieroglyphic
texts offer exciting insights into Egypt in the Eastern Sahara.
1.1 Desert Roads

The common Egyptian term for the desert, ḫꜢs.t, was written with the hiero-
glyphic sign of three desert hills, with valleys in between. Most of Egypt is in
fact a desert, cut through by dry water courses, wadis in Arabic. Wherever water
was plentiful, in the Nile Valley or a desert oasis, that water source was for the
most part in a valley or depression, since the vast region of northeast Africa is
otherwise a high desert. The ancient Egyptians could therefore encapsulate the
essence of a desert journey in the phrase “going up and going down” (Darnell,
2003: 82–84). The desert terrain frequently necessitates steep ascents, suitable
for human travelers and the donkeys that served as the main pack animals of the
pharaonic era (Förster, 2015: 385–406) (Figure 2). Donkeys carry the greatest
load per pound of any beast of burden available to the ancient Egyptians, and are
particularly well adapted for desert travel, able to tolerate both moderate
dehydration and poor quality forage (Förster, 2015: 428–434). The introduction
of the camel as a major means of transport around the middle of the first
millennium BCE required roads with more gradual ascents, but the camel’s
ability to go without water for extended periods allowed for more widely spaced
water sources. Desert roads of pharaonic date presupposed the existence of
frequent food and water depots, even cisterns or wells, with the associated
administrative oversight of traffic, systems of fortifications (Vogel, 2004; Vogel,
2013), and the patrolling of roads.
Figure 2 Ancient track from Aswan descending into Kurkur Oasis; inset: rock
inscription of a donkey carrying a pack, from the Wadi Hilal (east of Elkab)
The Nile was not an ideal route of travel and transport year round. During the
low Nile, sandbanks would have barred all but those vessels with the shallowest of
drafts, while the season of the inundation would have seen the channel of the river
lost beneath the muddy waters that stretched out like an inland sea from desert edge
to desert edge (Bonneau, 1964). A series of rocky cataracts beginning at Aswan and
continuing at intervals to just south of Meroe, and bends of the river in which both
current and wind might oppose a voyage, could also discourage a total reliance on
the river as a corridor for trade (Darnell, 2013a: 40–42). Although a vessel could be
dragged around a cataract – and indeed an ancient slipway for hauling boats
through the desert bordering the Second Cataract is known from Mirgissa2 –
a donkey caravan could more easily transport cargo past a cataract or other
obstruction. Any north-south track in the cultivated land would have encountered
a bewildering array of larger and smaller irrigation canals, making travel difficult.
A caravan on a desert road, paralleling the Nile in the near desert, might be
preferable to a trip on or near the Nile. For journeys to the east or the west, desert
roads alone provide access.
2
Vercoutter, 1970: 13–15, 173–180, 204–214. The tomb of Amunhotep, called Huy (Theban Tomb
40), depicts boats being hauled over a muddy surface, perhaps a similar use of a slipway (Davies,
1926).
An ancient Egyptian road is most often a set of slightly meandering, parallel

tracks, where the traffic of human feet and donkey hooves has pushed aside the
rocks and pebbles of the desert surface (Bubenzer & Bolten, 2013: 69–71).
Those grooves remain visible for millennia, and are further marked by pot
sherds, the remains of broken ceramic storage containers and cooking vessels
(Figure 3).3 The desert surface normally required no further human augmenta-
tion, with some exceptional cases. The ancient Egyptians could engineer
impressive built roads to access quarries, providing an even surface for the
transportation of large stones (Shaw, 2006; 2010: 109–124). A twelve kilometer
long paved road, consistently two meters wide, connects the basalt quarry at
Widan el-Faras (at the northern edge of the Fayum depression) with a now
vanished lake (Harrell, 2002: 235–336). A built roadway accessing the Hatnub
quarry also employed dry-stone causeways to maintain an even grade when
crossing wadis (Shaw, 2013). Cleared tracks could connect desert locales:
a route between Dashur and the Fayum may have served as both a quarry
road and military highway (Shaw, 2010: 118–19); an eighty kilometer cleared
road connected the Gebel el-Asr quarries with the Nile at Toshka (Murray,
1939); paved and cleared tracks are also associated with quarries in the First
Cataract region (Storemyr, et al., 2013).
Travelers, from kings and their retinues to police patrols to priests and
scribes, recorded their names, and often much else, when roads passed an area
of stone suitable for carving. Rock art and rock inscriptions complement
Figure 3 Ancient caravan tracks west of the Wadi Abu Medawi ascent; inset:
“broken ceramics on the road,” two views of the dense ceramics on the Wadi
Alamat Road
3
The ancient Egyptians recognized the dichotomy between desert surface and the broken ceramics
on the roads as “gravel of the desert and broken pots in the road” (D. Darnell, 2002: 156).
ceramic evidence from the roads, allowing a combination of archaeology and

epigraphy to plot changes in desert administration. Desert rock inscriptions also
reveal historical episodes otherwise unattested in Nile Valley sources, from an
early Dynasty 0 ruler’s defeat of an enemy, to the interactions between Middle
Kingdom Dakhla and desert tribes, to Montuhotep II’s far-flung expedition to
Gebel Uweinat. The deserts preserve considerable evidence for religious prac-
tices, from the transformation of natural features into sacred spaces to some of
the earliest attested expressions of personal piety. The uninhabited desert
allowed individuals to transcend standards of decorum expected in monuments
along the banks of the Nile.
1.2 Geographic Overview of the Egyptian Deserts and Road

Networks
No matter how level the plateau across which an ancient Egyptian desert road
traveled, inevitably almost all desert arteries would focus on a narrow pass at the
escarpment leading to or from one of the water-rich depressions in which most
major settlements would be situated. These passes connected the high desert
plateau with the low desert border of the Nile Valley, the floor of the oasis
depressions of the Western Desert, a mining or quarrying site within a valley of
the Eastern Desert, or the shore of the Red Sea far to the east. Such points for
ascending and descending the plateau were more easily controlled than the
broad expanses of high desert, across which the parallel paths of a desert track
might spread for a width of a kilometer or more. Termed a “narrow door” by the
ancient Egyptians (Darnell, et al., 2002: 35–36), the desert choke point of a road
pass could be open, or it might be blocked by human agency4 as well as a lack of
water.5 Although the Satire of the Trades (Jäger, 2004: 144–145) suggests that
the state of a pass or the security of a longer stretch of road could be one of the
concerns that troubled the traveling courier (sḫꜢḫ.ty), a properly administered
road could be safe (Brunner, 1937: 43–44).
Mapping the desert roads of ancient Egypt is a process still in its initial phases.
The ancient Egyptians themselves mounted exploratory missions to seek out new
routes, yet only one significant desert map survives. Not all tracks on which ancient
remains are present were in use at all periods of Egyptian history, and several texts
reference the ancient Egyptians’ own exploration of routes, blazing new trails for
trade, with officials securing oasis territory and searching out its populations
(Darnell, et al., 2002: 73; Förster, 2015: 269–276). A unique Twentieth Dynasty
4
Cf. Wadi Hammamat inscription no. 17, ll. 11–13 (Couyat & Montet, 1912: pl. 5 and p. 40);
Darnell, 2008: 89–90.
5
An inscription of Seti I at Kanais (in the Wadi Mia) states that prior to the well dug under Seti’s
orders, the route was blocked (Schott, 1961: text A, ll. 2–3).
papyrus (reign of Ramesses IV, ca. 1153–1147 BCE) with a map of a portion of the
Wadi Hammamat shows how the ancient Egyptians recorded tracks, water sources,
and their own monuments (e.g., a stela of Seti I, ca. 1294–1279 BCE) in the
landscape (Harrell & Brown, 1992).6
Maps of principally the nineteenth and twentieth centuries CE show a number
of routes then in use in the Egyptian and Nubian deserts, and some more detailed
descriptions of itineraries were published before all of those routes passed out of
use (an excellent example is Gleichen, 1905). More recent travelers and
researchers have mapped and described desert roads (Riemer & Förster,
2013), and remote sensing techniques are being developed to combine historical
map data with satellite imagery to identify the most promising areas for desert
road surveys (Bubenzer & Bolton, 2013; Gasperini & Pethen, 2018).
Ultimately, however, ancient tracks can be securely identified only through
the physical collection of artifacts, and the recording of rock art and inscriptions
requires intensive survey followed by photography and epigraphic drawings.
Digital techniques have streamlined the epigraphic process, enabling entire sites
and their hinterlands to be recorded in a season of work (Darnell, Darnell, &
Urcia, 2018); in combination with three-dimensional modeling, such recording
techniques provide a better understanding of inscription sites within the broader
context of desert road archaeology.
Although a definitive description of ancient roads in Egypt is not possible,
several important networks of routes and associated sites are known. The maps
accompanying this Element (Maps 1–5) focus on major road networks, and
include all of the major routes and toponyms mentioned herein. Many other
tracks and important passes – such as those at the eastern escarpment of Kharga
Oasis (Giddy, 1987: map 2) – have been omitted altogether. The following
sketches of roads, and the maps that illustrate them, should provide a broad
overview, and a background for more detailed study.
The Western Desert of Egypt – the Eastern Sahara from an African perspec-
tive – is bounded on the north by the Mediterranean Sea. By the reign of
Ramesses II (ca. 1279–1213 BCE), fortresses guarded the desert roads that
paralleled the coast (see Section 2.5). The waterless expanses of the Qattara
Depression were a barrier to desert travel, so that the next viable route to the
south that leads into the Nile Valley began in Siwa Oasis. During the second half
of the first millennium BCE, Siwa became the latest of the Western Desert oases
to be incorporated into the pharaonic state. Although Siwa may be mentioned as
part of the trajectory of a combined Libyan and Sea Peoples invasion during the
reign of Merneptah (ca. 1208 BCE), it was at the very edge of the “oasis ring,”
6
https://collezionepapiri.museoegizio.it/en-GB/document/9/ (accessed 10/1/2020).
Map 1 Map of Egypt and Nubia with key desert roads and toponyms mentioned in this Element (map layout and design by Alberto Urcia)
Map 2 Map of Upper Egypt, Lower Nubia, and the Western Desert oases, with key desert roads and toponyms mentioned in this Element
(map layout and design by Alberto Urcia)
Map 3 Major roads, military installations, caravansaries, inscription sites, and

Nilotic settlements in the Qena Bend of the Nile (map layout and design by Alberto
Urcia)
interconnected caravan routes that traveled through well-watered depressions

(Willeitner, 2003). From Siwa, a long route to the south passes through Kufra
Oasis to Gebel Uweinat, and thence past a string of wells to el-Fasher, and on to
the White Nile south of Khartoum (compare the route of Hassanein Bey, 1925:
map opposite p. 8; for the trans-Saharan routes, see Thiry, 1995).
The “oasis ring” links the Fayum, Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla, and Kharga
Oases with points in the Nile Valley. From the Delta or northern Middle Egypt,
a traveler beginning in the Fayum could use a desert road that led southwest to
Bahariya Oasis; from Bahariya, routes continued on to Farafra Oasis, the major
oasis farthest from the Nile; from Farafra, travelers could make a southerly arc
through Dakhla and Kharga Oases. From Dakhla, the Abu Ballas Trail accessed
points to the far southwest; alternatively, passing through Kharga, a traveler
could return to the Upper Egyptian Nile Valley along the Girga Road or head
south, along a network of desert roads that connected small oases and accessed
the Nubian Nile Valley.
Routes in Middle Egypt linked that region of the Nile Valley with both the
Western and Eastern Deserts, although the periods during which certain tracks
functioned await further archaeological confirmation. The famous Darb el-
Map 4 Map of Nubia, including Nilotic sites and important desert roads, along
with oases and smaller areas of wells (map layout and design by Alberto Urcia)
Arba‘in, the “Forty (Days) Road,” connected Asyut, via Kharga and smaller
wells and oases, with el-Fasher in Darfur. By the Middle Ages, this road was
essential to trade in northeastern Africa, the route for caravans transporting salt,
luxury goods, and slaves (Riemer & Förster, 2013: 52–53). The entire route of
a pharaonic Darb el-Arba’in remains uncertain, although a north-south track
through Kharga, active from ca. 1700 to 1100 BCE, reveals that at least
Map 5 Map of the Eastern Desert of Egypt, with key sites and roads in use
during the Roman Period (map layout and design by Alberto Urcia)
a portion of the Darb el-Arba’in functioned by the time of the Second

Intermediate Period (Darnell & Darnell, 2016: 63–64). Provincial leaders in
Middle Egypt, particularly in the region of Beni Hasan and Deir el-Bersha,
exploited routes into the Eastern Desert that provided further connections north
to the Levant and south to Nubia (Moreno Garcia, 2017). Even without identi-
fying specific routes into Middle Egypt, textual and pictorial records in Middle
Kingdom tombs highlight how trade with pastoral populations in the Western
Desert enhanced the wealth of those provinces (Moreno Garcia, 2017:
116–117).
The region known as the Qena Bend, roughly stretching from Nag Hammadi
to Armant, is the cynosure of desert roads in southern Egypt. The shortest route
linking the oases of the Western Desert with the Nile Valley is the Girga Road –
Harkhuf’s Oasis Road – that ascends the northern escarpment of Kharga Oasis
and descends into the Nile Valley north of the Qena Bend, with branches cutting
across that bend and continuing on to Naqada and Thebes (Darnell, with
D. Darnell, 2013). The shortest road between the Red Sea and the Nile Valley
enters the latter in the vicinity of Coptos, passing through the Wadi Hammamat,
from which the track derives its most common name (Gasse, 2016). As with the
Girga Road, the Wadi Hammamat Road has a Theban terminus, with a branch of
the Wadi Hammamat Road – via the well of Laqeita – leading further south to
Khozam, on the northern border of Thebes. During the First Intermediate
Period, Upper Egyptian nomarchs attempted to exploit numerous local routes,
whereas the later, central administration would prioritize a development of
fewer routes with higher traffic and more intensive economic functions.
In the southwestern desert of Egypt, the small oasis of Kurkur was the hub of
roads that connected the region of Aswan with southern Kharga Oasis as well as
points to the south (D. Darnell & Darnell, 2013). Two major north-south routes
passing Kurkur Oasis, the Darb Gallaba and Darb Bitan, accessed the Qena
Bend directly, paralleling the Nile and potentially bypassing any Nilotic control
between Aswan and Thebes. The Darb Bitan, ascending the plateau to the west
of Armant and passing through the long Wadi Abu Madawi, could bypass major
Nilotic settlements altogether, and access the Girga Road in the vicinity of
Farshut. Tracks leading from Kurkur and passing through Dunqul Oasis run just
to the west of one of the few major quarries in the Western Desert at Gebel el-
Asr (also known as the “Chephren Diorite Quarries”), where the Egyptians
extracted anorthosite gneiss, carnelian, and jasper (Shaw, et al., 2010).
The desert of the Sinai Peninsula and the Negev was an important source
for copper, malachite, and turquoise. In addition to the land route across the
Sinai – the “Ways of Horus” (see Section 2.5) – harbors on the western shore
of the Gulf of Suez supported sea-borne traffic.7 Quarry roads in the Eastern
Desert accessed the wealth of stones from the Precambrian Basement
exposed in the Red Sea mountains, some quarries in use from Early
Dynastic times, others exploited predominantly in the Roman Period (e.g.,
7
Archaeological work at Ayn Soukhna and Wadi el-Jarf, and Mersa/Wadi Gawasis has revealed
further information about the Red Sea in the pharaonic period; summaries of the results of those
missions are Tallet, 2016; Tallet and Mahfouz, 2012; Bard and Fattovich, 2018.
Mons Porphyrites and Mons Claudianus) (Klemm & Klemm, 2008:

269–314). The Wadi Hammamat road accessed the mineral resources of
that wadi system and provided a route for the transportation of ship parts
for Red Sea trade.
The great valley network of the Wadi Abbad/Wadi Mia, which leads from the
Eastern Desert highlands into the region of Edfu, was the avenue for accessing
the gold mines of the southeastern Egyptian desert, and provided another route
to the Red Sea. In the Eastern Desert of Nubia some of the most important road
networks were those that accessed the gold mining region of the Wadi Allaqi.
During the Napatan and Meroitic period, the “King’s Road” cut across the
Bayuda Bend of the Nile, connecting the capitals of Napata and Meroe
(Lohwasser, 2013). By the Roman Period, a dense network of roads in the
Eastern Desert connected the Nile Valley with mines, quarries, and the Red Sea
coast, with an infrastructure of watch-towers, wells, and fortresses
(Sidebotham, 2011: 125–174).
1.3 Water Resources

In any desert travel, water was of perennial concern. Old and Middle Kingdom
water depots along desert roads (Figure 4) consisted of large, ceramic storage
jars that could be regularly replenished with donkey-borne leather water skins
(Förster, 2015: 435–447; Köpp-Junk, Riemer, & Förster, 2017). In the Eastern
Desert, Middle Kingdom rulers ordered the excavation of wells along the Wadi
Hammamat road (Couyat & Montet, 1912: 83 and pl. 31, ll. 13–14), while New
Kingdom pharaohs opened wells in wadis accessing the southeastern gold
mines (Franzmeier, 2010). In the Western Desert, a large cistern occupied the
midpoint of the Girga Road between the Nile Valley and Kharga Oasis, during
the Seventeenth Dynasty, a hydraulic installation that continued in use through
the New Kingdom (Darnell, with D. Darnell, 2013: 247–251). The innovative
underground qanat irrigation system, introduced by the time of the Persian
Period (Twenty Seventh Dynasty, 525–404 BCE), revolutionized cultivation in
the oases (see Section 2.6).
Around the cusp of the Third and Fourth Dynasties, the ancient Egyptians
began construction of a massive reservoir dam (the Sadd el-Kafara) in the Wadi
Garawi, east of modern Helwan (Garbrecht & Bertram, 1983). This structure,
one of the earliest known monumental dam constructions in the world, appears,
in spite of its over-engineering, to have been abandoned before completion. No
other remains of similar dams are known from the Eastern or Western Desert,
and the combination of water depots, wells, and cisterns fulfilled the needs of
desert travelers, caravans, and military expeditions.
Figure 4 View (from aerial photography kite) of the Middle Kingdom desert
outpost, Abu Ziyar, along the Girga Road; insets: dense concentration of sherds
from water storage jars, as in the reconstructed vessel (ca. 1950 BCE)
1.4 About This Element

Egypt and the desert – each is a topic of supreme interest and immense scope.
The desert was not a blank space, bounded by inhabited areas. The study of
Egypt stretches over a vast expanse of time from its cultural origins in the North
African Neolithic through its rise, floruit, and entry into the realm of legend. An
investigation of the Eastern and Western Deserts encompasses an immense
space bordering the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and Indian Oceans, and
a desert stretching west toward the Atlantic, a great inland sea of sand and
rock linking cultures on a global scale. In order to approach such a grand
subject, one that defies easy simplification, this Element will emphasize the
Predynastic and Pharaonic Periods of Egypt, stressing the intersection of epi-
graphic and archaeological evidence. An in-depth analysis of all the cultures,
ethnicities, and interconnections across the Egyptian and Saharan realms is
impossible in such a concise format; this Element focuses on how the
Egyptian state integrated desert territories into its political and economic
spheres of influence, and examines how the ancient Egyptians viewed the desert
as a living entity in their cosmology, and a participant in rituals. Much work
remains to be done regarding the interconnections between the farther,
“Libyan” Western Desert and Nubia (Moreno Garcia, 2018), a topic but briefly
addressed here. In order to limit references, the current work cites many of the
author’s own works, for the most part as sources for additional bibliography.
Dates given in the current work are based, for consistency, on Shaw, 2000.
Section 2 provides a chronological overview of Egyptian interactions with
the desert frontiers, from the Predynastic through the late Roman Period,
emphasizing administrative developments, especially the repeated appearance
of dual systems of oversight, and the incorporation of outer regions into the
Egyptian state. Four millennia of ancient Egyptian desert policy provide fruitful
avenues of comparison for scholars of other ancient civilizations and associated
frontier regions. Section 3 turns to the ontological status of the desert, its
identity as a numinous landscape, and its liminal state as a conduit for commu-
nion with the divine. In Section 4 the extensive corpora of Predynastic rock art
in the Eastern and Western Deserts reveal an evolution of iconographic syntax
that culminates in the nascent hieroglyphic script. Section 5 examines the self-
presentation of foreigners in the deserts of Egypt, including the expression of
a persistent Nubian identity, and the development of the Early Alphabetic script
through interactions of Egyptians and their neighbors to the northeast.
2 The Deserts and Their Administration

Rather than providing merely an ever expanding and changing gazetteer of sites
and toponyms, the history of ancient Egyptian activities in the Eastern and
Western Deserts reveals the development of a bureaucratic approach to admin-
istering and integrating areas beyond the Egyptian Nile Valley. Following the
earliest expressions of royal authority in the deserts during Dynasty 0, the Early
Dynastic Period sees the application of sigillographic imagery to official control
of the desert economy. By the late Old Kingdom, apparently highly centralized
authority over desert activities developed into a bipartite system of administra-
tion, in which royal representatives oversaw expeditions in cooperation with
officials of a relevant bureaucratic office. As the early Middle Kingdom began
to incorporate formerly outer regions into the central state, inhabitants of the
oasis regions of the Western Desert and Lower Nubia became increasingly
important agents of control.
The Egyptian approach to desert regions never relied on defined border
fortifications, although forts and fortified towns guarded entry points into the
Nile Valley (Morris, 2005). The expression of royal authority and state control
traveled along the linear structures of roads, and the administration of nodes
along itineraries was dominant in the expression of Egyptian hegemony
outside of the Nile Valley. The “Wall of the Ruler” in the northeastern Delta
(Vögel, 2004: 19, 39, 161ff., 167ff.) designated a constellation of outposts,
and a reference on a stela of Tutankhamun to a “Western Wall” in the region of

the Sinn el-Kiddab appears to allude to a system of patrols rather than any
major structure (see Section 2.5).
Through the first millennium BCE, the several – often non-Egyptian –
dynasties that controlled the Nile Valley maintained and even expanded on
earlier desert road networks. Following an apparent diminution of official
activity during the late Ramesside Period, the Twenty-First Dynasty sees an
increased emphasis on the oases of the Western Desert; the oases will remain
important foci of official attention, especially following innovations in irri-
gation during the Persian Period. The Eastern Desert quarries are intensively
exploited during the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, with Red Sea ports
linking Egypt with the increasing trade of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.
During the Late Roman Period, innovation continues, with the appearance of
a new sort of desert settlement in the central Eastern Desert, apparently an
economic and administrative counterpart to the monastic communities of the
Western Desert, both systems of desert control replacing earlier oversight
based at the once powerful temple establishments. In the Eastern Desert the
Blemmyes (an important desert-dwelling group that controlled much of
Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia during the Late Roman Period) created
a built environment far greater than any previous groups indigenous to the
Egyptian deserts.
2.1 Protodynastic and Early Dynastic Organization of the Desert

(ca. 3250–2686 BCE): The Deserts Become Outer Regions
From the fifth millennium BCE, Badarian and Tasian cultural material is known
from desert sites in the Western Desert in the environs of Dakhla, at Kurkur
Oasis, in the Qena Bend, in the central Eastern Desert, and at Bir Umm Tineidba
east of Elkab.8 The Badarian-Tasian culture, with its own desert connections,
finds a more distant counterpart in the Bashendi Culture in Dakhla Oasis. As the
Nile Valley of Egypt and Nubia became an increasing focus of social, economic,
and political developments during the late fifth millennium BCE, the rise of the
Naqada cultures in Upper Egypt and the A-Group in Lower Nubia saw the
beginning of cultural and iconographic features that ultimately lead in a direct
line of development into what we recognize as pharaonic Egypt. The Sheikh
Muftah culture, also focused on Dakhla Oasis and apparently associated with
a nomadic lifestyle, persisted through the time of the Predynastic Period and
8
For the Badarian-Tasian culture and the late Neolithic in the Egyptian deserts, see the discussions
and references in D. Darnell, 2002, 156–169; D. Darnell and Darnell, 2013; Wuttmann, et al.,
2012; Gatto, 2013; Horn, 2017; Dachy, et al., 2018.
through the Old Kingdom, finally becoming fully subsumed in an Egyptian

oasis culture by the beginning of the Middle Kingdom (Riemer, 2011; Warfe &
Ricketts, 2019).
As cultures based in the Nile Valley came to dominate northeast Africa during
the fourth millennium BCE, official interest in the desert hinterland of the Nile
Valley and its routes is in evidence from the time of the creation of an Upper
Egyptian state. While regional power centers are in evidence from the Naqada II
Period (ca. 3500–3250 BCE), a line of rulers, commonly called “Dynasty 0,”
appears to have overseen a unified Upper Egypt from ca. 3250 BCE until ca.
3100 BCE. One of these Dynasty 0 rulers inscribed a monumental hieroglyphic
inscription on a desert cliff at el-Khawy, near Elkab (see Section 4.3). The rising
dominance of tableaux of royal ritual power in the rock art of Upper Egypt
already during the late Predynastic Period (see Section 4) may be evidence of an
attempt to bring desert activities increasingly under the control of local rulers,
and later, a nascent kingship.
The nature of Early Dynastic expeditions in the deserts remains uncertain
(Wilkinson, 1999: 162–176; Hamilton, 2016; 2019). Rock inscriptions from the
First and Second Dynasties at Wadi Ameyra in south Sinai reveal that officials
administering foreign territories and those representing the palace were both
directly involved in exploiting the resources of Sinai (Tallet, 2015a: 38–42;
Tallet, 2015b). On Upper Egyptian desert roads the abundance of Early
Dynastic serekhs – each the hieroglyphic representation of a quadrangular
enclosure in which the Horus name of a ruler was written – suggests royal
economic oversight of the deserts, their products and trade (see Section 4.4).
2.2 The Old Kingdom in the Egyptian Deserts (ca. 2686–2160 BCE):
Expressions of Egyptian Domination in the Outer Regions
A number of rock inscriptions and archaeological sites attest to mining and
military expeditions moving through the deserts during the Old Kingdom, with
more general trade and travel also occurring along several defined routes.9
Some early officials bore naval titles, revealing a connection between nautical
navigation and traveling the seas of rock and sand bordering the Nile Valley
(Tallet & Sauzeau, 2018). A number of Old Kingdom titles describe control of
roads and desert outposts, indicating the construction of a physical infrastruc-
ture in the deserts (Eichler, 1993: 202–203; Moreno Garcia, 2013: 101). On the
Red Sea littoral, the Old Kingdom constructed a harbor at Wadi el-Jarf, with
a corresponding circular fortification on the coast of Sinai (Tallet & Marouard,
9
For overviews of Old Kingdom activity in the Eastern and Western Deserts, see Tallet, 2018:
85–138; Sweeney, 2014; Förster, 2015: 462–476.
2016). Old Kingdom inscriptions in the well-inscribed landscape of Sinai

further assert Egyptian royal domination (Bestock, 2018).
Old Kingdom Egyptian administrators in Lower Nubia (O’Connor, 2014)
and in the region of Dakhla Oasis governed the areas as occupied foreign
territories. Economic activities in those regions suggest a slow move toward
integration of Lower Nubia into the larger Egyptian state. Dakhla Oasis became
the main center of Old Kingdom power in the Western Desert, with the Early
Dynastic Period through the Fourth Dynasty abundantly in evidence at Mut el-
Kharab (Hope & Pettman, 2014).
The site of Balat was the base of the governors of Dakhla by the time of the
Sixth Dynasty (Pantalacci, 2013a), home to a governor’s palace from the reign
of Pepi II (ca. 2278–2184 BCE) and a necropolis with large mastabas (Jeuthe,
2018). The palatial architecture and decorated tombs demonstrate the ability of
oasis governors to recreate an Egyptian urban landscape far removed from the
royal residence (Moeller, 2016: 175–182). Desert patrols monitored the out-
skirts of the Egyptian settlements in Dakhla, and textual and archaeological
sources illustrate interactions, both hostile and pacific, between Egyptians and
groups indigenous to the oasis region (Pantalacci, 2013b; Hope, Pettman, &
Warfe, 2019). The main route between the Nile Valley and Dakhla was appar-
ently the Darb et-Tawil, with its Nilotic terminus near Asyut. Expeditions from
Dakhla explored regions to the southwest, along the Abu Ballas Trail (Förster,
2015).
Titles of officials engaged in desert activities during the late Old Kingdom
reveal a decrease in direct royal control over expeditions and a rise in the visible
importance of Nubians in the oversight of the desert hinterlands (Diego Espinel,
2014; Raue, 2019). This decentralization of desert oversight appears to have
occurred during the reign of the Sixth Dynasty king Merenre (ca. 2287–2278
BCE), when the title “sealer of the god” cedes prominence in desert bureaucracy
to officials known as “overseers of Egyptianized Nubians” (ỉmy-r ỉꜥꜢ.w), with
royal oversight continuing in the person of the “royal messenger” (wpwty-nswt)
(Darnell, 2013b: 788–789). This bipartite administration of desert activity
would continue through the New Kingdom.
2.3 The Deserts during the First Intermediate Period and Early
Middle Kingdom (ca. 2160–1870 BCE): Incorporation of the Outer
Regions
During the late Old Kingdom, governors in the northern portion of the Qena
Bend adopted titles consistent with control over the desert hinterlands of Upper
Egypt. Trade and mineral resources that flowed through the Wadi Hammamat
granted power and wealth to leaders of Coptos in particular (Moreno Garcia,

2017: 100). Only Thebes, however, relatively insignificant during the Old
Kingdom, could directly control roads into both the Eastern and Western
Deserts. The geopolitical advantages of the city’s location contributed to the
rise of Thebes during the First Intermediate Period (ca. 2160–2055 BCE), a time
of warring southern districts and weak northern kings, based at the city of
Heracleopolis.
Control of the desert filling the Qena Bend was of strategic significance, as
Theban governors began to move against the Heracleopolitan power and its
southernmost bulwark of Coptos. In response to an opposing governor taking
control of the Western Desert hinterland of Coptos, the governor of the Coptite
district, Tjauti, improved an earlier Western Desert road (Figure 5). A rock
inscription on that route, the Wadi Alamat Road, references how the “ruler of
another nome” – perhaps a circumlocution for the Theban governor – had
annexed, “sealed,” the escarpment (Darnell, et al., 2002: 30–46; Mostafa,
2014). By the reign of Theban king Antef II (ca. 2112–2063 BCE), the rulers
of Antef’s Eleventy Dynasty had extended their control over the entire Qena
Bend. Positioned to control the Wadi Hammamat road – shortest road between
the Upper Egyptian Nile Valley and the Red Sea – and the Girga Road – shortest
Figure 5 Wadi Alamat Road ascending the escarpment at Gebel Tjauti; inset:
the road building inscription of the Coptite governor Tjauti (a white mark indi-
cates the location of the inscription on the rock shelf)
route between the Nile Valley and the southern oases – Thebes emerged
triumphant from the wars of the southern governors.
Consistent with annexation of the desert hinterland, the First Intermediate
Period Theban general Djemi claims to have “subjected Lower Nubians to
bꜢk-status for each governor who arose in this nome”; the bꜢk-status references
tax labor, expected of Egyptians and foreigners integrated into the Egyptian
economy. King Antef II forged military and political alliances with Nubia
(Wegner, 2017/2018), and at roughly the same time, other sources describe
desert dwellers bringing inw-tribute (Clère & Vandier, 1948: 15, §20).
This situation changed with Montuhotep II (ca. 2055–2004 BCE), during
whose reign Lower Nubia and the oases transitioned from occupied outer
regions into integrated and regularly tax-paying elements of the Upper
Egyptian state (Darnell, 2008; Marochetti 2010: 135, fig. 27b). Montuhotep II
established Theban control of all of the Egyptian Nile Valley, ushering in the
Middle Kingdom, and annexed Lower Nubia and the southern oases to the
Upper Egyptian administration (Darnell, 2013b: 792–793). The great rock
inscription of Montuhotep II at the mouth of the Wadi Schatt er-Rigal (see
Section 3.9), the terminus of a branch of the Darb el-Gallaba desert road, is
further evidence of the importance of desert roads in integrating the oases and
the Nubian deserts into the burgeoning Middle Kingdom state. Already before
the end of his reign, Montuhotep may also have installed a governor in Dakhla
Oasis (Hope & Kaper, 2010).
To assist in administering these newly incorporated outer areas Montuhotep
II employed rwḏw-agents (probably corresponding to the later rwḏw ḥqꜢ, “agent
of the ruler”), who combined economic and military responsibilities and resided
where they exercised authority. Archaeological evidence for the immediate
implementation of Montuhotep II’s plan survives in the oasis of Kurkur,
where a small structure may represent the official seat of such an agent. The
square dry-stone construction (5 m x 5 m), surrounded by C-Group Nubian and
early Middle Kingdom ceramic material (roughly at a ratio of 2:1), in an area of
circular Nubian huts and tent bases, would be a modest but unmistakable
statement of Egyptian presence in the midst of an expansive Nubian settlement.
The burgeoning Middle Kingdom was interested in the human population of
desert regions (Darnell, 2004a: 23–37), as well as the trade products of the
areas, however modest they may have been. Rock inscriptions in the area of
Abisko, of a Nubian soldier named Tjehemau, attest to Montuhotep II’s per-
sonal recruitment of Nubian auxiliaries in the area (Darnell, 2004a). An inscrip-
tion of Montuhotep II from the region of Gebel Uweinat in the far southwest
(Clayton, de Trafford, & Borda, 2008; Förster, 2015: 479–487), mentioning two
otherwise unknown toponyms and depicting them as bringers of tribute,
suggests that the founder of the Middle Kingdom may have gone farther than his
predecessors in extending the direct influence of the Egyptian state in the
southern deserts.
Following a period of internal conflict during the middle portion of the reign
of Amenemhat I, the reinvigorated pharaonic state of the Twelfth Dynasty
established a physical infrastructure for supporting pharaonic hegemony in
the deserts of Egypt and Nubia. The Middle Kingdom continued to exploit the
mineral resources of the Eastern Desert and the Sinai Peninsula, and created
a base for maritime expeditions to Punt at the Red Sea harbor of Mersa Gawasis
(Bard & Fattovich, 2018). At least one expedition of the Middle Kingdom may
have stopped at the site of Berenike (Kaper, 2015), which would become
a significant Red Sea harbor during the Graeco-Roman Period (see Section 2.7).
Expanding upon the plans of Montuhotep II, Twelfth Dynasty rulers oversaw
the construction of a sprawling and complex network of fortresses, towers, and
walls along the Second Cataract in Nubia (Vogel, 2004; Kemp, 2006: 231–235;
Monnier, 2010: 118–159; Knoblauch, 2019). The Nubian fortresses in the south
complemented more modest border outposts on the edges of the eastern
(Quirke, 1989; Monnier, 2010: 77–78) and western (Fakhry, 1940) Nile Delta.
Although constructed near the margin of the narrow Nubian Nile Valley,
Senwosret I’s network of Nubian fortresses had as one of its purposes the
protection of major desert roads.
Five of Senwosret I’s seven major fortifications were situated to guard
approaches to mining regions and caravan routes: a drystone fort overlooked
the Wadi el-Hudi amethyst mines; settlements at Aniba and Areika monitored
the road from Toshka to the carnelian mines and anorthosite gneiss quarries;
Ikkur sat opposite the re-envisioned Qubban at the mouth of the Wadi Allaqi,
which accessed rich gold mines. This group of fortifications, each a cog in
a great machine of border control, projected Egyptian authority over the pro-
cessing of raw material and goods at nodes of contact with native Nubians, and
ensured Egyptian oversight of the provisioning of expeditions and the move-
ment of goods and services from the Nubian deserts into Egypt (Gratien, 2004).
The day-book of a scribe based at the fortress of Semna West, found in a late
Middle Kingdom tomb on the west bank of Thebes, demonstrates the import-
ance of desert patrols operating out of the Second Cataract fortresses, and the
careful surveillance of Egypt’s southern border (Smither, 1945; Kraemer &
Lizka, 2016).
During the Middle Kingdom, traffic on the desert roads appears to have
concentrated on a smaller number of correspondingly more heavily used routes.
A police presence is in evidence, in the form of personal names with titles, and
even the occasional depiction of a patrolman, at inscription sites (Darnell, et al.,
2002: 56–65, 70, 73–74, 123–124, 137–138, 141, and 143; Darnell, 2002b:
145). The administration of Middle Kingdom Egypt also established patrol
routes and smaller installations in the Western Desert, apparently bases of
perambulating patrols monitoring traffic on the desert roads (Darnell, D.,
2002: 172; Darnell & Manassa, 2007: 85–89, 96). The remains of a consistent
pottery kit accompanying most of the assemblages of dry-stone, early Middle
Kingdom hut bases on the Theban branches of the Girga Road are physical
evidence of official management.
Middle Kingdom Dakhla, former base of Old Kingdom Egyptian control in
the west, continued to oversee activities in the hinterlands of that distant oasis
(Förster, 2015: 269–276), and Bahariya as well took part in the increased desert
traffic of the time (Castel & Tallet, 2001). An additional focus of Middle
Kingdom desert activity was the development of the Girga Road between the
Nile Valley and Kharga Oasis. Providing some of the best physical evidence for
the early Twelfth Dynasty’s increased efforts to realize Montuhotep II’s plan to
attach the southern oases to Upper Egypt is a site now known as Abu Ziyar,
located approximately one third of the way out from the Nile Valley on the
Girga Road (Darnell & Darnell, 2013). The remains of hundreds of storage jars
around a rectangular dry-stone structure – along with other ceramic remains,
sigillographic material, and a 14C date – indicate provisioning from the royal
residence at Itjy-Tawy during the early Twelfth Dynasty (ca. 1985–1911 BCE).
The one administrative unit appearing in the sealings from Abu Ziyar is the
treasury, the institution most consistently present in the directorship of mining
expeditions. A small ostracon references a group of probably 300 men, under
the command of a work foreman (ṯsw), a crew probably dispatched by the
Nilotic administration to provision the site, on a road previously traveled and
now more fully patrolled.
2.4 The Late Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period

(1870–1550 BCE) in the Deserts: Bipartite Administration and an
Urban Population in the Southern Oases
The Middle Kingdom’s efforts to incorporate the oases into the Egyptian
state correspond to increased governmental oversight of desert expeditions.
Eleventh Dynasty expeditions into the Nubian deserts appear to have been
collaborative enterprises between local desert dwellers and Egyptians, the
latter including relatively few administrators, chief of whom was an “over-
seer of Egyptianized Nubians” (Darnell, 2013b: 799–800). During the
Twelfth Dynasty, at least some desert missions were larger, with a more
complex administration.
By the late Middle Kingdom reign of Amenemhat III (ca. 1831–1786 BCE),
a time of particularly intensive mining and quarrying activities in the deserts of
Egypt, Nubia, and Sinai,10 a bipartite system of oversight was in place for desert
expeditions. Stelae from the Nubian Gebel el-Asr quarries (for their religious
significance, see Section 3.8) indicate that Late Middle Kingdom expeditions
were under a dual command, one official reporting along normal lines of
established command (“interior overseer of the treasury”), the other having
a direct royal appointment (“trustworthy seal bearer”), and both being originally
treasury officials (Darnell & Manassa, 2013). Such a system of dual reporting
finds later parallels in a stela of the reign of Tutankhamun, from the desert
southwest of Aswan (see Section 2.5).
The goal of the early Middle Kingdom travelers and work crews stopping at
Abu Ziyar would initially have been Kharga Oasis, even if they were continuing
on to the well-established site of Balat in Dakhla Oasis. During the late Middle
Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period (ca. 1750–1550 BCE), two hubs of
activity developed in Kharga and Dakhla Oases, respectively: the sites of Umm
Mawagir and Ain Asil, which flourished when the Thirteenth through
Seventeenth Dynasties ruled in the Nile Valley (Darnell & Darnell, 2019).
The two sites share several characteristics. At Umm Mawagir in Kharga
Oasis, excavated portions of the settlement indicate that grain processing and
baking was taking place there on an industrial scale, in excess of normal
household production (Darnell & Darnell, 2016; Darnell & Darnell, 2019).
The excavated portion of Umm Mawagir’s ‘sister-city’ of Ain Asil in Dakhla
Oasis reveals dozens of silos (Marchand & Soukiassian, 2010), suggesting that
Ain Asil may have served a similar supply depot function as that of Umm
Mawagir. In the light of the specializations of the Second Cataract fortresses of
Twelfth Dynasty date, in which the southern fortress of Askut became a major
supply depot (Kemp, 2006: 236–41), Umm Mawagir – the oldest major urban
site thus far known in Kharga Oasis – may represent part of an as yet to be fully
uncovered network of Middle Kingdom settlements in that oasis.
A small percentage of the population at both Umm Mawagir and Ain Asil
consisted of Nubians who maintained contact with Nilotic Nubian groups
throughout the late Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period floruits
of the sites. The Nubian material at the sites shows affinities to both the Kerma
and Pan-Grave cultures (Darnell & Darnell, 2016: 62; also Le Provost
10
Tallet, 2016/2017; González-Tablas Nieto, 2014. The Eastern Desert galena mines at Gebel Zeit
continued in use from the late Middle Kingdom through the New Kingdom, and a group of stelae
mentioning royal names of the Thirteenth through Seventeenth Dynasties is of historical
significance (Régen & Soukiassian, 2008; Marée, 2009).
2016).11 As at the Nubian fortress of Askut (Smith, 2003), ceramic remains

offer insights into parallel Egyptian and Nubian foodways.
Pottery from the two sites in Dakhla and Kharga indicates cultural affiliations
with Upper Egypt existing alongside oasis traditions. Egyptian families that had
lived in the oases for generations might have fostered a hybrid culture – even
identity – much as some Egyptians who garrisoned the fortress of Buhen
revealed allegiance to the ruler of Kush during the Second Intermediate
Period (Kubisch, 2008: 86–88, 166–78). Without the discovery and analysis
of archaeological remains at Umm Mawagir and Ain Asil, the existence of such
a culturally complex population in the southern oases during the late Middle
Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period might have remained a mystery.
The Umm Mawagir and Ain Asil settlements appear to have been abandoned
for other sites in the oases around 1550 BCE.12 At the same time, the desert
roads connecting the Nile Valley and the western oases assumed a new promin-
ence. During the Seventeenth Dynasty, Thebes established an outpost on the
Girga Road, halfway between Kharga and the Nile Valley, at a site now called
Tundaba after the tundub trees (Capparis decidua) that once grew there in some
numbers. The small garrison that manned the site from two dry-stone structures
could have monitored traffic along the Girga Road, overseeing the large cistern
that supplied water to the outpost and any military patrols or trading caravans
that passed along the road (see Section 1.4).
The cistern at Tundaba appears to have been an officially controlled water
source, the ceramic remains at the site revealing not a push out from the Nile,
but rather an interaction at the site of caravans originating almost equally in the
Nile Valley and the oases (Darnell & Darnell, 2013: 251–56). An early
Eighteenth Dynasty ostracon from one of the dry-stone structures appears to
record the calculation of a well tax (Darnell & Darnell, 2013: 250–51). The
Tundaba ostracon suggests that the Seventeenth Dynasty and New Kingdom
provisioning outposts had become economic entities in their own rights.
Seventeenth Dynasty (Theban) control of the Upper Egyptian Western desert
roads provided a strategic check on the power of the Fifteenth Dynasty (Hyksos,
centered in the Delta and Middle Egypt) and the kingdom of Kush (a Nubian
empire whose capitol, Kerma, was near the Third Cataract). On a stela, the
Theban ruler Kamose (ca. 1555–1550 BCE) states (for hieroglyphic text, see
11
Re-examinations of the traditional association of ‘Pan Grave’ burials and artifacts with the
people that the Egyptians call MḏꜢy stress a more nuanced approach (Cooper & Barnard, 2017;
Lizka, 2015).
12
In addition to scattered ceramic remains of Seventeenth Dynasty date at Umm Mawagir and Ain
Asil, necropoleis in Dakhla (Hope, 1980: 287–88; 1983: 142–44) and Kharga (see Darnell &
Darnell, 2019: 173–74) attest to the oases’ inhabitants in that period.
Habachi, 1982: 39, 41): “I captured his [the Hyksos ruler’s] messenger in the
high desert of the oasis region, while he was traveling south to Kush with
a letter.” Later in the stela, the episode with the messenger is said to have taken
place “on the road.” The Girga Road is a plausible candidate for the road in the
high desert of the oasis region to which Kamose refers, and an outpost like
Tundaba would be a likely base for a patrol that apprehended the Hyksos
messenger. In the captured missive, Apepi complains of not being informed
about the accession of the new king of Kush, which further supports a model of
Theban domination of the Western Desert road network. The Hyksos might
have attempted to expand their own territory westwards, using desert roads
from Middle Egypt to reach Bahariya Oasis (Colin, 2005). After his forces
captured the Hyksos messenger along the oasis road, Kamose dispatched troops
to Bahariya, either to attack an existing Hyksos outpost or to prevent the Hyksos
from using the oasis as a back-door into Theban territory.
The Seventeenth Dynasty also exploited road networks across the Qena Bend
and the Wadi Hammamat road, connecting Coptos with the Red Sea (Polz,
2018: 220–222). Nubkheperre Antef, who built at Coptos and Abydos, appears
to have constructed a modest chapel at the Theban terminus of the Farshut Road,
overlooking what would become the Valley of the Kings (Polz, 2018: 220–227;
Darnell & Darnell, 2019: 178–79). At the southeastern terminus of the Wadi
Alamat Road, northwest of Thebes – apparently on the border of the Fourth and
Fifth Districts – the Second Intermediate Period Thebans erected two towers, of
a roughly cylindrical form, representing a type of defensive construction that
persisted virtually unchanged from at least the Early Dynastic Period through
the early modern period (Darnell & Darnell, 2019). Control of desert roads
leading out of Thebes allowed the Seventeenth Dynasty to bypass sites along the
Qena Bend of the Nile, giving Theban patrols access to the Girga Road and
Kharga Oasis, and maintaining at least limited access to the mining regions of
the Eastern Desert. Ceramic evidence at the Wadi Alamat towers suggests that
Nubians as well as Egyptians were stationed at the towers, in keeping with the
involvement of Nubian soldiers in Egyptian desert policies from the Old
Kingdom onwards.
2.5 Desert Activities during the New Kingdom (ca. 1550–1069

BCE): Expanding Horizons and the Importance of the King’s Son
of Kush
During the New Kingdom, the southern deserts came under the centralized
authority of the Egyptian administration in Nubia. Oversight of military activ-
ities to the south, and of pharaonic mining activities in the deserts of Nubia and
southern Egypt (Hikade, 2001), became a major responsibility of the King’s

Son of Kush (sꜢ nswt nἰ Kš), an office that was itself a creation of the early
Eighteenth Dynasty. The Western Desert oases and the routes that connected
those regions to the Nile Valley reveal a continued association with Upper
Egyptian officials. Egyptian administrators of the oasis region are attested,
including bearers of the title “governor of the oasis,” sometimes specified as
the southern oasis (Kharga and Dakhla) or the northern oasis (Bahariya) (Giddy,
1987: 81–83).
An interconnected oasis ring ultimately linked the Western Desert oases to
both the Theban and Memphite centers of power, allowing the Egyptian state to
incorporate the Western Desert regions of Egypt and Nubia into a much broader
economic sphere. Officials centered in Thebes or Abydos might also have had
authority over areas of the Western Desert (Boozer, 2015: 18–19; Bryan, 2006:
100, 104; Giddy, 1987: 82–83; Rossi & Ikram, 2014), and by the reign of
Thutmose III (ca. 1479–1425 BCE), the official Puyemre received products
from Bahariya and the southern oases as royal donations to the temple of Amun
at Thebes (Giddy, 1987: 70), activities suggesting a north to south flow of goods
through the oasis ring of the Western Desert.
During the New Kingdom, archaeological sources in the oases and represen-
tations in Nilotic tombs illustrate the chief products of the oasis regions. Oasis
wine was popular from the Eighteenth through Twentieth Dynasties (Marchand
& Tallet, 1999), vintages from the Western Desert being consumed during the
jubilee of Amunhotep III (Hope, 2002: 102). Dockets on amphorae from the
jubilee city of Malqata (western Thebes) mention Pr-wsḫ, the ancient name for
Gebel Ghueita in Kharga Oasis.
As in earlier periods of Egyptian history, Egyptianized foreigners were active
agents of New Kingdom desert policies, with men such as the royal butler
Ramessesemperre acting as a direct representative of Ramesses III (ca.
1184–1153 BCE) at the Timna mines (Sweeney, 2018). A road across the
northern Sinai Peninsula, named in ancient Egyptian sources as the “Ways of
Horus,” provided access to the Egyptian provinces and allies to the northeast,
including mineral resources such as the Timna mines (Monnier, 2010: 78–91;
Hoffmeier & Moshier, 2013: 487–90; Hoffmeier, 2013).
Medjoy, derived from an earlier designation for a region of Nubia, trans-
formed into a New Kingdom title following the successful employment of
Medjoy and other Nubian troops as auxiliaries during the Middle Kingdom
and Second Intermediate Period (Liszka, 2010). Captains of Medjoy and their
patrolmen were responsible for desert patrols and policing, especially in the
Theban necropolises (Vogel, 2015: 438–441). During the New Kingdom fewer
titles are associated with the deserts and preserved in rock inscriptions, which
may represent to some extent a consolidation of earlier titles and duties

(Darnell, 2013b: 819) under the auspices and designation of officers of Medjoy.
During the reign of Thutmose I (ca. 1504–1492 BCE), the military office of
commander of Buhen transformed into the truly imperial office of King’s Son of
Kush, often translated as “Viceroy of Nubia,” an attempt to capture how the
position was the southern equivalent of the pharaoh in the Egyptian administra-
tion of Nubia. Thutmose I also reached beyond the southern border of the
Second Cataract, heavily fortified during the Middle Kingdom, apparently
incorporated into the Kerma state during the Second Intermediate Period, and
recaptured by the late Seventeenth Dynasty. Egypt’s newly expanded territory
in Nubia stretched as far as Karoy in the south, probably the area of Thutmose
I’s inscription at Hagar el-Merwa near Kurgus, between the Fourth and Fifth
Cataracts (Davies, 2017). By incorporating the Bayuda Desert into the Nubian
administration, Thutmose I took control of desert roads that formed the back
door to the Second Cataract, firmly establishing the Nubian administration as
one focused on both desert and Nilotic routes rather than fortresses (Morris,
2005: 195–199).
In addition to military campaigning and construction activities, one of the
chief responsibilities of the King’s Son of Kush was the supervision of the
tribute of the south, much apparently presented during the great celebrations
during which offices were confirmed. Of overweening significance in this
wealth of the south was gold mining, an activity under the direct control of
the King’s Son of Kush. Already under Amunhotep III (ca. 1390–1352 BCE),
the King’s Son of Kush Merymose adopted the title Overseer of the Gold Lands
of Amun (Mahfouz, 2005).
Because desert arteries of mining and trade were more important in deter-
mining areas of administrative control than theoretical geographic divisions
between districts, the King’s Son of Kush exercised authority as far north as the
area of Elkab (Davies, 1926: pl. 6). Viceregal subordinates are well attested as
far north as the gold-mining region of Wadi Barramiya, east of the area of Edfu
(see Section 2.6). The King’s Son of Kush might endow religious monuments in
the Wadi Hilal east of Elkab (Gabolde, 2015: 240, 256 [Huy under
Tutankhamun]; Derchain, 1971: 5–7 [Setau under Ramesses II]), revealing
a conjunction of religious, economic, and administrative significance of the
desert roads that connected often widely separated regions. The viceregal
control of desert activity in the Elkab region probably finds an echo in the
Twenty-Fifth Dynasty fortress at Nag Abu Eid, south of Edfu (see Section 2.6).
The number of rock inscriptions in the Eastern Desert increases between the
reigns of Thutmose II and Tutankhamun, the peak in this epigraphic effusion
occurring during the reign of Amunhotep III. The same period sees an increase
in viceregal rock inscriptions, and the number of sites at which pharaonic

inscriptions appear (Brown, 2015: 310–316). An expanded bureaucracy under
the aegis of the King’s Son of Kush, including native Nubians, developed during
the reign of Amunhotep II (Darnell, 2014: 272–275), and the final form of the
highest levels of the administration – the King’s Son of Kush, with two
lieutenants representing Lower Nubia (Wawat) and Upper Nubia (Kush) –
came into being during the reigns of Amunhotep III and Tutankhamun (Klotz
& Brown, 2017).
The reign of Tutankhamun (ca. 1336–1327 BCE) saw considerable atten-
tion directed to the patrolling of the Nubian desert roads. The viceroys of
Amunhotep III and Akhenaten (ca. 1352–1336 BCE) warred with groups
threatening the gold mines of the Wadi Allaqi, and Tutankhamun himself
may campaigned against hostile forces to the west of the Nile (possibly the
group known as Irem) (Darnell & Manassa, 2007: 119–125). A stela of the
reign of Tutankhamun from Kurkur Oasis (Figure 6) refers to the “Western
Wall of Pharaoh.” Although this Eighteenth Dynasty defensive line might
suggest an earlier, southern predecessor of the chain of fortresses Ramesses
II constructed in the northern portion of the Western Desert (see Section 2.5),
no surviving fortifications hint at any considerable architectural embodiment
of this wall.
The “Western Wall” on the Tutankhamun stela from Kurkur probably refer-
ences a line of outposts and patrol routes along the Sinn el-Kaddab Plateau,
extending at least as far as Kurkur Oasis in the north (Darnell, 2003). Dry-stone
walls and small structures, perhaps augmented by brush and thorn fences (often
called zeriba, from Arabic), may well have formed part of this defensive
ensemble, but the most important elements would have been the soldiers who
patrolled Tutankhamun’s “Western Wall.” More recently, during the late nine-
teenth century, local Ababde tribesmen garrisoned Kurkur Oasis without leav-
ing evidence of any massive fortifications (Butzer & Hansen, 1968: 334–335).
Fortunately, the Tutankhamun stela from Kurkur provides unexpected informa-
tion as to how such a patrol functioned.
In the stela’s lunette, the king offers incense to the ram-headed god Khnum,
while below the Deputy of Wawat (Lower Nubia), Penniut, rebukes a Medjoy
patrolman “who guides on the Western Wall.” According to Penniut, the patrolman
did not “come to take the seal,” presumably a signet indicative of his status. The
Medjoy responds to this criticism with an overview of his daily duties: “How great
are they, the four iteru of travel which I make daily; five times going up [the
mountain], five times going down [the mountain]; so do not let me be replaced by
another!” This description of a patrolman’s daily routine of four iteru, correspond-
ing to approximately 42 kilometers, is in fact a reasonable albeit long distance for
Figure 6 Stela from the reign of Tutankhamun from the Sinn el-Kaddab
between Kurkur and Dunqul oases
a group to cover in a day.13 A chain of such patrols, based at the small wells and
oases of the Nubian deserts, might well form a human wall for pharaonic Nubia. In
the text of the Kurkur Oasis stela of Tutankhamun, the Deputy of Wawat, Penniut,
appears to reference a “changing of guard” ceremony, in which he handed a seal
directly to a Medjoy patrolman. If indeed a patrolman had a direct link with the
Deputy of Wawat via a badge of office, then the Kurkur Oasis stela may provide
evidence for a dual system of border monitoring, which may echo the similar
system of oversight for Middle Kingdom expeditions (see Section 2.4).
13
According to Herodotus VI 116, the Athenian army returned rapidly to Athens from Marathon
after defeating the Persian forces, apparently on the same day of their victory, covering
approximately the same distance as that of the Kurkur patrolman’s daily round. For running in
Egyptian military training in the desert, compare the text of Taharqa in Moussa, 1981: ll. 4 and
12–15.
The suggestion of the Kurkur stela of Tutankhamun is that a Nubian patrol-

man without a title placing him high in the administration might have an
appointment with a high official, such as the Deputy of Wawat, to collect
a seal of office. Such an arrangement, with a direct representative of official
authority operating in a border region, apparently reporting directly to a high
official rather than along a chain of command, may find a parallel in the Roman
beneficiarius consularis. Those officials, military veterans who oversaw the
functions of border outposts, particularly military roads, reported directly to the
cognizant local governors, providing a view of border situations parallel to that
of the normal chains of military and bureaucratic command (Darnell, 2003:
81–82).
Some New Kingdom desert tracks appear to have been monitored by
mounted patrols, capable of covering even greater daily distances than the
Medjoy of the Kurkur Oasis stela (Darnell, et al., 2002: 143–144, 152 n. 8).
At the Wadi el-Hol – an important caravan stop with extensive rock art and rock
inscriptions on the Farshut Road, located roughly in the middle of the Qena
Bend – a late Nineteenth Dynasty stable master left his name, and by the
Twenty-First Dynasty, the Farshut Road was known as the “Road of Horses”
(Darnell, et al., 2002: 139; Darnell, 2002b: 132–135). Mounted couriers may
have functioned like an ancient pony express. Centuries later, Diodorus Siculus
(Bk. I, Ch. 45.7) states that in pharaonic times one hundred horse relay posts
were strung out between Memphis in the north and the “Libyan mountains” of
western Thebes to the south. A letter carried across the Farshut Road from
Thebes to Hou, either on foot or on horseback, may in fact survive. P. Berlin
10463 is a brief, hieratic letter sent by Sennefer, mayor of Thebes under
Amunhotep II (ca. 1427–1400 BCE), to the farmer Baki of Hou, near modern
Farshut (Caminos, 1963a: 32). The letter announces a visit that will occur in
three days, suggesting that Sennefer gave his note into the hand of a courier who
would have traveled by land, a shortcut across the Qena Bend.
On the Farshut Road, archaeological remains at the Gebel Roma caravansary,
on the high plateau above the Wadi el-Hol rock inscription site, may provide
evidence for a hoarding economy during the late New Kingdom, which com-
plements contemporaneous Nilotic sources describing internal unrest.
Extensive stratified deposits of ceramic material, animal dung, and botanical
remains formed at the caravansaries (Cappers, Sikking, Darnell, & Darnell,
2007; Darnell, 2007: 43–46). Analysis of botanical material from the late New
Kingdom levels shows that the grains in those deposits are undigested, indicat-
ing that they were not primarily animal fodder, but most probably destined for
Thebes. The Gebel Roma caravansary suggests that officially outfitted caravans
transported large amounts of grain – seemingly into the great magazines of the
estate of Amun at Thebes – even as famine and civil war rocked late Ramesside
Egypt (Darnell, et al., 2002: 154).
Officials involved in the accounting of grain and the oversight of official
weights are attested in the rock inscriptions in the Wadi el-Hol. With the name of
the second prophet of Amun of Karnak, Roma-Roy – later to become high priest
of Amun of Karnak – inscribed on a boulder at the Gebel Roma caravan deposit,
these inscriptions support the possibility of a customs center or at least routine
checks at the caravansaries on the Farshut Road (Darnell, et al., 2002: 92, 155,
159–160). Even high officials might take personal charge of a grain shipment by
boat (Janssen, 2004: 34–36, 66–67), and the material at Gebel Roma and in the
Wadi el-Hol provides tangible evidence for this practice for land transport as
well.
At a time when the oases were producing desirable wine, the Libyan tribes
who inhabited the Eastern Sahara became an increasingly serious threat. The
New Kingdom represents a fundamental transformation in the interaction
between the Egyptian state and peoples inhabiting the Sahara Desert. Nubian
and Libyan auxiliary troops appear in the royal bodyguard of Akhenaton and in
processions of military personnel depicted in the Opet Processions scenes of
Tutankhamun in the Colonnade Hall of Luxor Temple (Darnell & Manassa,
2007; Darnell, 2010b). Both Libyan and Nubian participants revealed the
universality of New Kingdom pharaonic power, and at the same time served
to represent the peoples of the southern deserts in festivals associated with the
return of the distant goddess (see Section 3.4). Already by the time of
Akhenaton, however, we have evidence for conflict involving Egyptians,
Libyans, and probably Mycenaeans (or Sea Peoples wearing helmets of
Mycenaean style) (Parkinson & Schofield, 1995).
Libya’s rise to prominence in the late second millennium BCE emphasizes
the overall significance of caravan routes of the Western Desert. Mersa Matruh/
Bates Island is a late Bronze Age harbor and trading depot with connections to
the wider Mediterranean world, as abundant imported ceramics indicate (Hulin,
2015). Libyans could trade the wealth of caravans traveling the Eastern Sahara
routes with both Egyptian and Mediterranean merchants, and the later highly
coveted medicinal plant silphium may have already played an economic role at
this early date (Richardson, 1999).
Threats to the western Delta from Libyan groups became increasingly appar-
ent during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties. Ramesses II constructed
a fortress at Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham to control the northwestern desert road
passing between the coast of the Mediterranean and the Qattara Depression,
connecting Egypt with Libya proper (Morris, 2005: 621–645; Snape, 2003:
98–105; Snape & Wilson, 2007). Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham was key to
guarding the main water sources in the region, and denial of those wells to
invading Libyan armies, apparently migrating with both families and livestock,
was a key element of Egyptian strategy (Snape, 2013: 447–448). The fortress at
Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham was particularly effective, because it could be sup-
plied from transport ships rather than relying on overland routes (Snape, 2013:
450–452).
Nineteenth Dynasty textual sources mention “fortresses” on the Libyan
marches of the northern Western Desert, although the identification of sites
with the presumed series of fortresses remains difficult (Monnier, 2010:
106–116; Snape, 2013); like Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham, these fortresses
would have served as trading centers as much as military bases (Moreno
Garcia, 2018: 171–173). By the reign of Merneptah (ca. 1213–1203 BCE),
these threats appear in a more sinister and ominous form, as a coalition of
Libyans and Sea Peoples used routes between Farafra Oasis and the Nile Valley
to mount an invasion of the western Delta (Manassa, 2003). In spite of
Merneptah’s success in defeating the Libyan threat, numerous Libyan groups
appear to have settled in Lower Egypt. Ramesside Egypt ultimately appears to
have been unable to stop entirely the raids of Libyan desert “pirates,” who made
life difficult for those in the Nile Valley, particularly in Late Ramesside
Thebes.14
2.6 Desert Activities during the First Millennium BCE: Expansion

of the Oasis Ring Road
During the reign of the Twenty-First Dynasty high priest of Amun, Menkheperre,
the southern administration sought to neutralize criminal elements in the perhaps
lawless western oases. Just as Montuhotep II and his immediate successors had
earlier exerted control over the oases following a period of reduced administrative
control, so Menkheperre attempted through the pardoning oracle of Amun to
reconcile the Nilotic government with exiles and others who peopled the oases.
Stelae on the Farshut Road, connecting Thebes with the Girga Road and the ring
of western oases, fortresses at the Nilotic termini of several desert routes, and
inscriptions in the Wadi Hammamat, bear witness to the energy of Menkheperre
in reopening the Western Desert to Theban endeavors (Lull, 2006: 227–240;
Klotz, 2013: 901–902).
The Nubia-based Twenty-Fifth Dynasty appears to have maintained the
Twenty-First Dynasty’s focus on fortified control of desert roads by extending
a version of the Second Cataract fortresses in Nubia north into Upper Egypt,
constructing a major fortification atop a desert crag on the east bank of the Nile
14
See Moreno Garcia, 2018: 159–160; Darnell, 2007: 45–46; Darnell, 2002b: 132–136.
south of Edfu, at a site now called Nag Abu Eid (Aston, 1996). The Twenty-
Fifth Dynasty also expanded control of the desert hinterlands of Nubia as well,
constructing – or perhaps expanding – a fortress far to the southwest in the Wadi
Howar (Jesse, 2019).
Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (664–525 BCE) rulers maintained a series of fort-
resses in northwestern Sinai, successors to some of the fortresses that guarded
the earlier Ramesside “Way of Horus,” looking east toward the threat of Persia
(Hussein & Alim, 2015). The Persian state would later occupy and augment that
string of fortresses. The Saite Period also witnessed considerable exploitation of
the greywacke quarries in the Wadi Hammamat (Figure 7), and an expedition
appears to have taken the same track between Coptos and the Red Sea, en route
to Punt (Betro, 1996).
With the rulers of the first Persian Period in Egypt (the Twenty-Seventh
Dynasty, 525–404 BCE), we again see considerable resources devoted to the
development and exploitation of the Egyptian deserts. In the Eastern Desert, the
Persian rulers of Egypt continued to exploit the mineral wealth of the Wadi
Hammamat, with a statue of Darius I at Susa deriving from those quarries
(Yoyotte, 2010). Darius I also connected the Nile, and ultimately the
Mediterranean, with the Red Sea via a canal in the area of Suez (Klotz, 2015).
Figure 7 Rock inscription of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty pharaoh Amasis

(Ahmose) worshipping the god Min of Coptos (photo by J.-G. Olette-Pelletier)
The Persian Period saw increased activity in the Western Desert, beyond the
already energetic Saite attention.15 Throughout pharaonic history, temples are
nodes of economic activity, and Persian temple construction in Kharga Oasis
coincides with the introduction of underground aqueducts, the qanat irrigation
systems, that allowed greater agricultural development of the oases (Newton,
et al., 2013). Even during the time of Egyptian independence between the first
and second periods of Persian domination, the Twenty-Eighth through Thirtieth
Dynasties (404–343 BCE), activity in the oases continued, particularly at Hibis
in Kharga Oasis, and farther out at Bahrein and Siwa Oases (Klotz, 2013:
907–908).
Under the energetic attention of the early Achaemenid rulers of the Twenty-
Seventh Dynasty, the disparate oases of the Egyptian Western Desert became an
integrated network, an archipelago of trade entrepots linking Egypt and Nubia
with Cyrenaica and points beyond. Even as late as the time of the final pre-
Ptolemaic dynasties, an administrator could combine broad duties in Upper
Egypt with oversight in the oases (Darnell 2013b, 818). When Alexander the
Great wrested Egypt from Persian control in 332 BCE, he visited the temple of
Amun in Siwa Oasis, both establishing himself as the son of Amun and proper
pharaoh, and asserting a desire to continue what may have been already the
Persian drive to extend into Cyrenaica and perhaps beyond into the
Carthaginian realm (Müller, 2016). Eventually, with the marriage of Ptolemy
III to the princess Berenike of Cyrene, the apparent Persian Period Egyptian
goal of control of Cyrenaica was accomplished.
Ptolemaic rulers continued both the building program of their predecessors in
the Western Desert oases and the economic integration of those areas with the
Nile Valley (Gill, 2016). Three short inscriptions of Persian Period and
Ptolemaic date at Ghueita Temple, in Kharga Oasis, demonstrate how temple
economies created far-reaching connections with points in the Nile Valley, and
others farther north and west in the Western Desert (Darnell, et al., 2013). In
a bandeau inscription of the sanctuary of Ghueita Temple and in a parallel text
on the exterior of Hibis Temple, Darius I refers to the importation of “coniferous
wood of the Western Desert.” These texts are epigraphic evidence for the
importation of cedar (or perhaps juniper) from the west into Kharga Oasis,
and suggest a desire by Darius I to connect Egypt to the trade of Cyrenaica via
the oases of the Western Desert.16 Kharga would then be a link in a chain of
oases stretching west and northwest to Kufra, Augila, and even beyond.
15
See Klotz, 2013: 906–907; Boozer, 2015: 21–25 (and references therein); Hubschmann, 2019.
16
Liverani, 2000: 512–513; compare Herodotus, Histories, III 17; for the question of North
African coniferous wood in ancient Egypt (although he is not aware of the Ghueita text), see
Bardinet 2008.
A bandeau text of Ptolemy III within the hypostyle hall of Ghueita Temple
states that building activities at the site were carried out “in order to direct divine
offerings to Thebes,” perhaps a reference to the agricultural products of Kharga
Oasis. In additional bandeau texts in the same hypostyle hall, both Ptolemy III
and Ptolemy IV claim to provision Ghueita Temple with “all good things of
Bahariya Oasis.” Together these inscriptions reveal the importation of products
from Bahariya Oasis to Ghueita in Kharga Oasis. The export of Ghueita’s
bounty – perhaps including some if not all of her Bahariyan imports – to
Thebes demonstrates the importance of Gebel Ghueita, and Kharga Oasis as
a whole, to commerce in the Western Desert during the Ptolemaic Period. The
earlier functioning of an oasis ring road may be supposed; the Twenty-Fifth
Dynasty ruler Piye summoned vintners from Bahariya to help with the wines for
Amun of Gempaaton, modern Kawa in Sudan (Klotz, 2013: 903), perhaps a way
of demonstrating Nubian control of the oasis ring road.
With equal if not greater vigor, the Ptolemaic state exploited the Eastern Desert
as well. In addition to continuing in the footsteps of their pharaonic predecessors
of three preceding millennia in continuing and even expanding the mining of
mineral resources, the Ptolemies continued to pursue the Red Sea interests of the
Persian Period rulers (Sidebotham, Hense, & Nouwens, 2008). Initially an
interest in procuring elephants for use in the wars of the Diadochoi may have
dominated Ptolemaic interests in the Red Sea, but long distance Red Sea and
Indian Ocean trade was a major aspect of Eastern Desert activity that the
Ptolemies bequeathed to their Roman Period successors (Sidebotham, 2011).
2.7 Roman Egypt and Indigenous Desert Groups (30 BCE – 600 CE)
The Roman Period saw intensification of agriculture in the oases of the Western
Desert, and the creation of a line of fortifications, often with associated settle-
ments, in Kharga Oasis during the third and fourth centuries CE (Rossi & Ikram,
2018). The southern oases shared a vibrant culture, independent of the Nilotic
world, that appears to have built upon a Ptolemaic base, attaining a particularly
Roman-Egyptian character around the middle of the first century CE (Kaper,
2012). Mining and quarry settlements, many with temple complexes, expanded
in the Eastern Desert under Roman rule, with fortified wells established along
several important roads (Sidebotham & Gates-Foster, 2019; Sidebotham,
Hense, & Nouwens 2008: 37–94, 118–143, 213–256). Red Sea trade also
appears to have increased during the Roman Period, the southeastern port of
Berenike becoming an emporium linking Egypt with the Indian Ocean and
points beyond (Sidebotham, 2011), ultimately connecting the Red Sea and
Mediterranean worlds with southeast Asia and China (Young, 2001: 32–34).
The later third century CE was a time of considerable turmoil in Egypt, with
a resulting drop in Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade. Much of this disruption
may result from raids of a desert group known as the Blemmyes, who took
control of Coptos from 268 to 270 CE, and the Palmyrene invasion from
270–272 CE. The subsequent war of Diocletian against the usurper Domitius
Domitianus sees the destruction of the city of Coptos, Nilotic emporium for
most of the southern routes of the Eastern Desert. Following these crises, the
fourth century CE witnessed the resumption of activity at the Red Sea ports
and elsewhere in the Roman Egyptian deserts (Young, 2001: 80–88;
Sidebotham, 2011: 259–282). During this time of resurgent desert trade, we
see a new type of settlement appear in the southern Eastern Desert (Figure 8),
in spite of continued Blemmye raids, and perhaps even associated with the
compatriots of those desert people.
After millennia of the Eastern Desert being primarily a goal of mining and
quarrying expeditions, and the region of corridors of long distance trade linking
Egypt to the Red Sea, a new type of settlement site appeared in the southern
Eastern Desert during the Late Roman Period (ca. 400–600 CE). Dating to
a roughly two century period centered on ca. 500 CE, these settlements –
frequently termed “Enigmatic Sites” – share a distinctive style of dry-stone
architecture, a fairly standardized Late Roman ceramic corpus, and a similar
approach to adapting dry-stone architecture to the wadi landscape. Most of the
sites are along desert roads, with some of the larger sites associated with
smaller, satellite settlements of usually less complex structures. In association
Figure 8 View (from cliff opposite the wadi) of structures at the Late Roman
site of Umm Buyut (for location, see Map 5)
with several of these Late Roman sites are cairn tombs and tumuli (Lassányi,
2012: 262–265; Krzywinski, 2012: 152–153).
In terms of number of sites, size and density of structures, and richness of
associated archaeological material, these settlements center on the area to the
east of Moalla (Darnell & Darnell, 2020; Sidebotham, Barnard, & Pyke, 2002:
189; Sidebotham, Hense, & Nouwens, 2008: 371–375; Vasáros, 2010:
201–202). Unlike campsites or barracks for quarrying and mining, the struc-
tures at the desert sites include some large multi-room complexes, and none of
the sites reveals any evidence for associated quarrying or mining activities
(Lassányi, 2010: 601). Eastern Desert Ware is attested in association with the
Enigmatic Sites at Umm Buyut, east of Elkab, and with the Late Roman sites
near Moalla. Whether Eastern Desert Ware can be identified as a cultural marker
for the Blemmyes, as has been suggested (Edwards, 2004: 208–209), remains
a matter of debate (Barnard, 2008).
Most likely, these sites are settlements of indigenous Eastern Desert dwellers
(Lassányi, 2012: 253–269; Darnell & Darnell, 2020; unconvincingly rejected in
Sidebotham, Barnard, & Pyke, 2002: 222–223). Both the geographical extent and
chronological range of the settlements correspond to the general area and time in
which Greek and Egyptian documents place a group called the Blemmyes, who
exerted some political and economic control over the Eastern Desert. By the end
of the third century CE and especially during the fourth and fifth centuries CE,
historical and documentary sources provide increasingly specific information
about the Blemmyes (Pierce, 2012). One document (P. Köln ägypt. 13) refers to
a woman dwelling in either a city or a komerkion, the latter a term derived from
Latin and meaning a “place for trade.” While Gebelein on the Nile would be
a traditional city, the rare term komerkion may refer to one of the desert settle-
ments, such as Wadi Mahmiyyet ad-Debabiya (M10-11/S1), due east of Gebelein
(Darnell & Darnell, 2020).
In Lower Nubia, the Blemmyes prioritized interactions with the Isis Temple
at Philae; further to the east, Blemmyes engaged in mining, specifically the
extraction of emeralds (the unnamed location is probably Mons Smaragdus:
Dijkstra, 2012: 244). Textually attested Blemmye raiding of Nile Valley settle-
ments – at odds with the lives of more settled Blemmyes – may represent
attempts to augment the precariously balanced ecology of desert dwelling
elements of the Blemmye population. Though profiting from trade and perhaps
even overseeing much of it, the desert Blemmyes would have remained subject
to occasional shortfalls of both material income and the products of hunting,
husbandry, and the occasional and widely scattered cultivation opportunities in
the Eastern Desert (Kuznar & Sedlmeyer, 2008). By the end of the sixth century
the Blemmyes were an at least partially desert dwelling population, well
established in the region of Moalla, a perhaps semi-autonomous and semi-

sedentary group owing taxes to the Eastern Empire (Dijkstra, 2012: 246–247;
Faraji, 2011; Dijkstra, 2008: 162–163).
A comparison of the monastic economy of the Western Desert, with its
diverse architectural manifestations, to the Late Roman sites of the Eastern
Desert may offer some insight into the possible functions of the latter. Similar
“Enigmatic Sites” do not occur elsewhere in the northern Eastern Desert, nor do
they appear in the Western Desert, but they are present in Nilotic Lower Nubia
(Krzywinski, 2012: 152–153; Lassányi, 2012: 256–258), also consistent with
a Blemmye association. Although such sites are absent in the Western Desert, an
architectural phenomenon of similar date and perhaps corresponding function
does appear in the desert hinterland of Naqada, Thebes, Armant, and Esna.
A number of generally modestly sized monastic settlements appear in the
middle and high desert, often well beyond the larger monastic communities
generally settled at the very edges of the desert (compare the map in Doresse,
1949: 506).
The deep-desert monasteries of the Theban Western Desert and the Late
Roman sites of the southern Eastern Desert may represent similar responses
of different but interconnected societies to a similar need – the projection of
economic authority into marginal areas. The rise of both approaches to control
of the deserts corresponds to a period of diminished efforts of the Nilotic
government to administer desert regions. The period of the Enigmatic
Settlements in the east and the network of monastic sites in the west also
corresponds to the great increase in the use of the camel, and the concomitant
social and economic implications thereof.
3 Desert as Numinous Space

The desert could be a sacred landscape for the ancient Egyptians, both as a home
to certain deities, and more generally as the stony womb of the blocks and
statues that continually embellished and enlarged the temples of Egypt and
Nubia. Desert associations with deities might be geographically specific, such
as Sopdu as lord of the east (Valbelle & Bonnet, 1996: 38–39), and Min of
Coptos (Figure 7) as a god of the Eastern Desert and the roads thereof (Darnell,
et al., 2002: 122–123; Darnell, 2013a: 73; Olette-Pelletier, f.c.). In the west, the
deity Igay, lord of the oases (Hope & Kaper, 2010: 227–229), and the Libyan
divinity Ash (Willeitner, 2003: 146 n. 51) shared the desert expanses with the
obscure Ha, divine personification of the Western Desert (Leitz, et al., 2002:
10–11). One deity above all others bore a more conceptual association with the
deserts: Seth as god of the Red Land, one of a number of characteristics setting
him in opposition to his counterpart, the god Horus as lord of the Black Land.
Nevertheless, desert travelers appear most frequently to have invoked Seth in
the hinterlands of his main cult sites, such as Naqada and Dakhleh Oasis
(Darnell, 2013a: 126–127; Polkowski, 2019).
The deities most prominent at the greatest number of pharaonic desert sites
are neither the specific divine manifestations of the Eastern and Western
Deserts, nor Seth as representative of the Red Land, but rather Hathor and
Horus, the latter deity frequently present in the form of the deified ruler (Darnell
& Manassa 2013: 57). Mines and quarries might have their own divinities
(Meeks, 1991), including the goddess Hathor, to whom authors of graffiti
might address themselves. The reason for the sacred nature of such places, as
well as the religious significance of sites such as desert crossroads, is connected
with an Egyptian approach to the landscape, one in which the deserts played
a vibrant part.
3.1 Being-in-the-Landscape
Especially at the crossroads, junctures, and termini of desert roads, on the
surfaces of rocks overlooking the points where the often broad tracks of
a road across flat desert would converge at a desert pass – at such places the
ancient Egyptians, both those of the pharaonic age and their Predynastic
predecessors, were wont to carve images and inscriptions on the desert surface.
Rock art and inscription sites represent points of human engagement with the
desert landscape, an interaction between humans and desert landforms creating
places in the vastness and thereby socializing the desert (Darnell, 2009: 85–87;
Riemer & Förster, 2013: 42; Brown, 2017). The ancient Egyptian creators of
these inscribed places, and the later visitors who literally wrote their presence
into the desert landscape, sought both to memorialize themselves, and to
interact with the memorials of their predecessors, resulting in abundant inscrip-
tional evidence of ancient activities in the Eastern and Western Deserts.
The modern epigrapher must reconstruct long vanished conjunctions of
artist/writer, concept, iconography/script, and environment that produced each
example of ancient rock art and each rock inscription (Lovata, 2015). An
anthropological approach to such locations views landscape as an element in
human practices (Fowler, 2008; Waterton, 2013), with rock art and inscription
sites representing the results of activities – even performances – that structured
and interrelated the human body, perception, and the landscape itself (Wylie,
2007: 166). All human senses engage in the personal experience of landscape,
through which a human actor may merge with both the event and the landscape
(Crouch, 2010: 14). The desert is neither merely a theater of action nor an object
of attention, but an element in a sensual encounter between both human and

landscape. Graffiti in Egypt interact with man-made “landscapes” of temples
and tombs, as well as with the deserts themselves, becoming examples of
“performative” texts.17
One class of graffiti, carved images of human feet or sandals, is present both
in desert rock art (Figure 9) and on the roofs and pavements of temples. These
outlines of feet (vestigia) represent the visual echoes of such interactions of
people, objects, and landscapes, and reveal at least some rock art and rock
inscriptions to be vestiges of human actions more than independent visual
impositions on objects and places. The outlines of feet appear as rock inscrip-
tions at a number of desert sites (Váhala & Cervicek, 1999: no. 45 et passim;
Darnell, 2002a: 121; Kaper & Willems, 2002: 85–88; Polkowski, 2018), and are
even more prominent in temple graffiti, the outlines often containing the name
of the carver, with perhaps filiation (Jacquet-Gordon, 2003). Although some
may have the appearance of footprints, or of feet viewed from above, others
depict unlaced sandals. Third Intermediate Period texts accompanying some of
the foot outlines on the roof of Khonsu Temple at Karnak designate the carvings
as dgs (Jacquet-Gordon, 2003: 41), a term for “footprint” deriving from the verb
dgs, “to step,” and referencing each image as a record of a body once in motion
at the site. At a rock art site in the eastern portion of the Wadi Hilal (east of
Elkab) are dozens of Old Kingdom vestigia that appear alongside carvings
of hands, which are much rarer in rock art (Darnell, in press c). Other items of
personal equipment sometimes appear in rock art (Kaper & Willems, 2002: 85,
88), and these may as well serve a similar function to that of the vestigia –
reflections onto the desert body of human bodies once in motion in the
landscape.
For the ancient Egyptians, the landscape through which they moved, and on
which they left the visual and textual records of their activities, was an active
presence, another body. When the ancient Egyptians engaged with the desert
hinterlands of the Nile Valley, they interacted with an entity, a “you” rather than
an “it.”18
3.2 The Desert Landscape as Entity

The Egyptians could identify the minerals and stones of the deserts as concret-
ized exudations of a celestial goddess, who in Pyramid Text Utterance 350
17
Note Plesch, 2015, concerning the performative aspect of graffiti on frescoes in fifteenth century
Italian churches; she also observes (p. 53), “It could be argued that graffiti, to varying degrees
perhaps, but always to some extent, interact with their support, and that the support is part of the
message.”
18
For additional references to this section see Darnell, 2020a.
Figure 9 Rock inscription site in the eastern portion of the Wadi Hilal (east of Elkab), with insets of three inscriptions with multiple carved
feet and sandal outlines (Panels 4 and 9), and two hands (Panel 7)
“strews greenstone, malachite, turquoise – the stars” (Sethe, 1908: 292–293,

§567a-c; Berger-El Naggar, et al., 2010: 196). Mining expeditions, seeking and
extracting the mineral glory shed by the goddess, therefore engaged in activities
of cosmic significance. An inscription from the reign of Senwosret I (ca. 1990
BCE) in the amethyst quarries in Wadi el-Hudi (Sadek, 1980: 84, ll. 5–9)
describes mining activities in an epic mode:
For him (the ruler) has Geb (the earth god) decreed his hidden things,
hill lands presenting, mountains being kind.
Every place has given what it conceals,
his emissaries numerous in all lands,
messengers doing what he has desired – that which is in his sight –
on coasts and in deserts.
To him belongs what the sun disk encircles,
what the eye brings to him from what is in her,
the mistress of transformations from all that she creates.
The cosmic goddess Hathor, “the eye” (of the sun god), yields to the Egyptian
ruler the minerals of which she is composed. In essence, the mineral wealth of
Egypt’s desert hinterlands is consubstantial with the body and bodily eman-
ations of the solar eye goddess. The concept of minerals and stones as concret-
ized effluvia may to some extent explain the occasional reverence toward fossils
and natural oddities (Aufrère, 1999b; Welvaert, 2002; von Lieven, 2013).
The landscape can be a divine body, whose functions produce the agricultural
and mineralogical bounty of the Egyptian world. The corpse of Osiris, embody-
ing the fertile black soil of the Nile Valley, could emit the Nile as the product of
putrefying efflux, and the ẖꜢ.t-body of Amun could qꜢꜥ-spew forth the Nile, so
an open-pit mine – also called ẖꜢ.t – could qꜢꜥ-spew forth its stones (Darnell,
2020a). A stone cutter could be termed “one who brings a stone to life” (sꜥnḫ
ỉnr – Aufrère, 1991: 78), and a carved stone might in turn bring some aspect of
the living desert with it, and be called a “living entity” (ꜥnḫ – Hannig, 2006: 541;
Aufrère, 1991: 100). Cut stones might even join other elements of the cosmos in
praising the creator (Aufrère, 2007: 67–77).
As the desert could represent a great cosmic body for the ancient Egyptians,
so the surfaces of rocks and minerals share both the qualities and lexicography
of human skin. A Middle Kingdom inscription recording the mining of
turquoise at Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai (sixth regnal year of Amenemhat III,
ca. 1854 BCE) describes turquoise as the very skin of the goddess Hathor. The
official Horwerre details the problems inherent in mining the blue-green
mineral during the summer, and provides advice to future miners (Gardiner,
Peet, & Cerny, 1952: pl. 26; Valbelle & Bonnet, 1996: 14 [fig. 14] and
119–120 [figs. 141-142b]):
Behold – through the green does Hathor reveal herself.

Even as I have seen so have I done the like myself.
I came from Egypt, my face downcast –

Mysterious in my view was the finding of her (Hathor’s) true color/skin,
when the desert burns during the season of Shomou,
the mountains burning like a brand, the color/skin pale/blistered.
The text describes the pale color of the turquoise in the same way as it might
depict the blistering of skin. The Egyptian words for color (ỉwn) and skin (ỉnm)
can interchange in certain contexts, evoking to the range of meanings of Greek
chroma, “skin, complexion, embellishment” (Darnell, 2010a: 106–107). Thus
Hathor in Sinai may adopt the epithet “lady of the good color/perfect skin” (nb.t
ỉnm nfr). Even the term for engraving on a stone – mṯn – can also apply to
etching a tattoo into human skin (Darnell, 2018: 403).
Human skin is a surface onto which tattooing or painting can project outer
forms, a material onto the surface of which an inherent aspect of the person may
manifest itself (Fleming, 2001: 79–112). Other cultures reveal connections
between the pigments for bodily adornment and the use of the same pigments
in rock art (Taçon, 2004; Robinson, 2004). The malachite applied around the
eyes of a Predynastic female statuette (Metropolitan Museum of Art 02.228.71;
Patch, 2011: 122–123) provides a direct link between the desert mine and the
woman depicted, whose body is also adorned with images of hunting that
appear so often in Predynastic rock art.
The surfaces of rocks and human skin can bear representations that prepare
both for social activities (Darnell, 2018: 407; compare Rainbird, 2008: 266).
Naqada II (ca. 3500–3250 BCE) figurines of women, probably ritualists, can
show the human body decorated with imagery in style and concept parallel to that
of rock art – hunting scenes, and a blending of Nilotic and desert imagery. These
illustrated women foreshadow the use of tattooing to embellish the bodies of later
female musicians and ritualists (Poon & Quickenden, 2006). The bodies of some
desert hunters, in depictions from a rock art site in the Wadi Nag el-Birka, were
also decorated with similar imagery (Darnell, in Hendrickx, et al., 2010:
216–218). The interrelationships of tattoo styles and rock art depictions postu-
lated on the basis of two- and three-dimensional depictions (Darnell, 2018) was
confirmed with the identification of the earliest figural tattoos in ancient Egypt
(Friedman, et al., 2018). Those tattoos on a naturally mummified late Predynastic
man, probably from Gebelein, include a bull and a barbary sheep, images that find
their best parallels in the elite hunting imagery of the Predynastic Egyptian rock
art corpus. The skins of both desert rocks and human hunters or ritualists could
reflect images of human activities that occurred within the desert landscape.
Humans and landscapes could share characteristics (compare Herero and Himba
praise poems in Namibia – Bleckmann, 2007), and even visual characters.
3.3 The Desert as Repository of Sacred Objects in ovo

Early Egyptian rock art occasionally took advantage of the physical appearance
of the rock surface, incorporating boat drawings into natural curving folds of
rock (Figure 10), even interacting with cracks in the stone (compare Darnell,
2009: 91; Darnell, 2011: 1155–1156). Such epigraphic responses to natural
forms may represent iconographic attempts to reveal concepts or shapes latent
within the stone (compare cross-culturally Whitley, 1998; Dowson, 1998). By
virtue of the objects resulting from the stones it provided, a mine might be said
to produce divine offspring – an inscription of the reign of Montuhotep IV in the
Wadi Hammamat refers to a portion of the site as the “divine nest of Horus”
(Couyat & Montet, 1912: 98 [no. 192, ll. 4–5]), home for royal works in ovo.19
Several texts attest to the concept of statues and other objects inhabiting
stones before they are carved – sculptures populate even the unexcavated
quarry. Miners and sculptors removed covering elements of the stony cortex
that shrouded the quarry’s natural gifts, freeing them for their proper purpose.
Even at the time of a quarry’s discovery, stones and images yet to be extracted
and inscribed are already present. According to a rock stela of Seti I at Aswan
(Habachi, 1973), even as the king identified a new quarry, he perceived the
monuments it would yield. Royal perspicacity could even identify elements
from different sites that would come together in a single monument – so the
text of a formal rock inscription of Seti I from Aswan (Kitchen, 1975: 73, 6–13
[citing ll. 11–12]):
Then his majesty found a new quarry,

containing colossal statues of black granite,
their crowns thereof from the red mountain of the mountain of quartzite.
Latent within the images to be released from the quarry at Aswan, discovered
at the same time yet resting in another quarry near Heliopolis, were quartzite
crowns. Similarly, the Manshiyet es-Sadr stela of Ramesses II describes how the
king created a quarry near Heliopolis, at that red mountain that Seti I foresaw
producing the crowns for his statues from Aswan (Kitchen, 1979: 360, 7–362,
12 [citing 361, ll. 8–9]):
During the same time his majesty found another open quarry near it,
with (containing) statues of quartzite resembling cedar wood.
19
Compare also the “miraculous” events in the Montuhotep IV inscriptions and the innate power of
materials – Nyord, 2020: 29–33.
Figure 10 Rock art and inscription site in the Wadi of the Horus Qa-a; inset:
Predynastic carving of a boat with rectangular cabin and multiple oars; the hull
is a partially augmented natural feature of the stone
These Nineteenth Dynasty texts make explicit the ancient Egyptian concept
that quarries are pre-existing, awaiting discovery, already containing the stat-
uary and blocks that need only the skill of Egyptian miners and artists to release
them (Darnell, 2018: 406). The ritual of Opening the Mouth, performed to allow
a spiritual force to inhabit a statue or a mummified corpse, describes the similar
visualization of a statue within an unworked stone (Fischer-Elfert, 1998).
3.4 Worship in the Desert

With the desert a manifestation of divinity, a sentient being in its own right that
delivered into the hands of Egyptian miners and artisans the objects and
treasures slumbering within its stones and minerals, the Egyptian deserts were
well suited to be places of worship. The sacred nature of the objects to which
their stones would contribute, the sacred precincts their stones would build,
made of the mines and quarries themselves sacred sites (Darnell, 2020a).
A number of quarry areas reveal the presence of both formal religious architec-
ture, and more informal manifestations of worship. The Theban Western Desert
and the massif overlooking the west bank of Thebes, in the numerous clefts and
wadis of which were nestled the tombs of kings and officials, was a sacred
landscape as well (Darnell, 2013a: 75–76; Rummel, 2020). Also on the west
bank of Thebes, a high spur of rock to the south of the temple of Montuhotep II
provided priests of the early Twelfth Dynasty with a place of desert vigil while
looking for the beginning of the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, and the
navigation of Amun from Karnak to the west bank (Winlock, 1947: 77–90).
A meaningful perambulation of sacred desert sites is textually attested,
particularly during the New Kingdom (Darnell, 2013a: 78) – a worshipper
might even be compared to a “jackal of your (the god’s) mountains”
(Demarée, 2002: pl. 95, l. 2). An unfinished Middle Kingdom tomb at Deir el-
Bahari (western Thebes) provides some suggestion of what may have occurred
during some of these worshipful walks in the near desert. The tomb, in the cliff
to the north of the temples of Montuhotep II, Hatshepsut, and Thutmosis III, was
visited, inscribed, and “illuminated” by several New Kingdom visitors
(Ragazzoli, 2017). The epigraphic material includes an ink inscription written
within the outline of a formal stela, numerous names, and images including
a representation of a couple engaged in sexual intercourse.
Thus decorated, the unfinished Deir el-Bahri tomb may have assumed the
role of a temporary structure erected for a religious celebration. New Kingdom
love poetry attests to such structures, “beer huts,” places for drinking and
amorous activities (Darnell, 2010a: 129–130). Larger versions of such tempor-
ary shrines, formal versions of the “beer huts,” are the rock-cut shrines of Gebel
Silsilah and Qasr Ibrim (Caminos, 1963b). Although the Gebel Silsilah shrines
are located along the west bank of the Nile, they remain desert shrines, cut into
the rocks overlooking a stretch of the river entirely lacking in cultivable land.
The immediate juxtaposition of Nile and desert at Gebel Silsilah appears to have
called to mind for the Egyptians a perpetual state of inundation (compare
Bommas 2003).
An important object of worship in the desert was the goddess Hathor, about
whom an astronomically based tale of an annual cosmic sojourn arose. As the
sun declines into the southern skies during the winter and the season of the low
water level of the Nile, so the goddess of the solar eye leaves Re, her father, and
Egypt, roaming the southern deserts in her anger. Enticed back to Egypt, by the
god Thoth or her brother Onuris-Shu, she eventually returns at the time of the
summer solstice and the coming of the Nile inundation. The account in mythic
form is known from the Book of the Heavenly Cow, the earliest surviving copies
of which date to the New Kingdom, but earlier texts reference the revels that
might accompany the goddess’s return, and the concept is perhaps much older
(Darnell, 2010a).
The late Book of Traversing Eternity references a communal ritual of travel-
ing “upon the desert together with her majesty on the morning of the Menbit
festival,” the immediate precursor to “going about the region of Asheru when
Mut is pacified” (Herbin, 1994: 157–158, 441, pl. 3 [ll. 2–3]). These
perambulating events appear to have taken place during the month of Tybi, the
returning and yet disquieting goddess of the eye of the sun being escorted by
worshippers, who then disport with her in the Mut complex at Karnak in her
newly adopted form of the pacified goddess (Bryan, 2014: 103–114). Although
the text describing the desert portion of the ritual is of Graeco-Roman Period
date, the architectural setting of the “hall of drunkenness” at the Mut complex –
the “region of Asheru” – dates to the reign of the Eighteenth Dynasty ruler
Hatshepsut (ca. 1473–1458 BCE). A text of Roman Period date at the temple of
Medamûd describes such a revel, with Egyptians and foreigners together
returning with the far-wandering goddess (Darnell, 1995). Such celebrations
would have involved a welcoming of the goddess in the desert, and a return with
her to a Nile Valley temple, involving Egyptians and Nubians in the roles of the
desert dwelling southern groups with whom the goddess dwelt during the
winter. At times, actual representatives of the people from those southern
deserts may have taken part in the ritual.
Hierakonpolis Site 64, an isolated rock outcrop with inscriptions at the
northwest desert edge of the ancient city, provides rare archaeological evidence
of desert ritual activities that linked Nilotic Egyptians and their desert dwelling
neighbors. Nubian groups, probably during the Middle Kingdom, utilized the
leeward side of the outcrop for campfires (Friedman, 1999: 20–23). An adjacent
pit contained a carefully arranged deposit of ostrich feathers and small,
inscribed sandstone flake that may reference the goddess Hathor by her epithet
“Gold” (Darnell, in press a). In the desert of Hierakonpolis, desert dwellers and
Nubians may have joined with Nilotic Egyptians to welcome back the goddess
and exchange objects of cultic value, just as the later hymn from Medamûd
describes (Darnell, 1999: 27–29). Other rock art depictions in Egypt and Nubia
of figures in festal garb or men engaged in ritual combat and wrestling illumin-
ate other events that may have coincided with celebrations at desert sites
(Darnell, 2013a: 75).
3.5 Rock Inscriptions as Records of Religious Activity

Some rock inscriptions provide evidence for otherwise poorly attested desert
rituals (Darnell, 2002a: 112–114). Whereas visitors to religious sites in and near
the Nile Valley tended to leave more or less formulaic inscriptions, worshippers
at remote desert sites appear more frequently to have felt a freedom to innovate.
In spite of their generally informal modes of execution, the visitors’ inscriptions
at the temples of Deir el-Bahari are for the most part formulaic in wording and
content (Pinch, 1993: 356–357). More removed from a major temple, and in
a rocky landscape, albeit within the current of the Nile, rock inscriptions on the
island of Sahel are conservative, few venturing beyond names and titles (Gasse
& Rondot, 2007). These two sites closer to the Nile Valley can be contrasted
with the rock inscriptions at the Wadi el-Hol (Darnell, et al., 2002) and the
literary and iconographic virtuosity of the priest Pahu, who created his own
personal shrine west of Qamula (see Section 3.6).
Nevertheless, even at a desert site amenable to greater innovation, earlier
graffiti could exert influence on those who came later. The reproduction of
earlier images and inscriptional formulae, even augmentation and updating
of earlier carvings, is underway already during the early Predynastic Period.
A process of “iconographic attraction” is well attested at a number of
Predynastic/Early Dynastic rock inscription sites in the Theban Western
Desert, causing specific image types to cluster in particular locations within
a much larger site (Darnell, 2009: 93–94). A Middle Kingdom example of
similar “attraction” is inscriptions at “Hieroglyph Hill” at Abd el-Qadir,
near Serra in Nubia (Hintze & Reineke, 1989: 7–27). The consistency of the
inscriptions’ content – name, title, dedicatory formula, and associated
human figure – suggests that successive visitors intentionally repeated the
pattern.
Hellenistic and early Roman Period inscriptions at el-Kanais (55 km east of
Edfu) evince an awareness of earlier texts and images, both those in the rock-cut
temple and on nearby rock faces (Mairs, 2011). A Graeco-Roman Period
inscription at Gebel Silsilah (Preisigke & Spiegelberg, 1915: pl. 20, no. 282,
ll. 2–4) indicates that as part of a dialog with the inscription, the reader should
raise the hand and perform the ecstatic gsgs-dance (Ashby 2018) in the presence
of the god Monthu.
Sites such as the Wadi el-Hol demonstrate the creativity and diversity of
expression at a major rock inscription site. Several Middle Kingdom visitors to
the Wadi el-Hol vividly describe their visit to the site as “spending the day
beneath this mountain on holiday” (Darnell, et al., 2002: 129–138). In combin-
ation with other inscriptions depicting singers and the goddess in her bovine
form (Darnell, et al., 2002: 93–94, 126–132), the “spending the day” inscrip-
tions provide evidence of Hathoric worship in the remote desert, even a deep
desert aspect of the Theban “going out upon the desert” that ended in drunken
revelry at the temple of Mut. One of the Wadi el-Hol texts includes the detail
that the official is there with his coworkers.
Members of the priesthood left inscriptions at a variety of desert sites, some as
participants in formal expeditions into the deserts (Seyfried, 1981), and others
traveling as part of their religious duties (Darnell, et al., 2002: 95, 102, 120).
Textual and archaeological evidence for royal statues in the desert reveals
a further facet of priestly presence at rock inscription sites (see Section 3.9).
Old Kingdom rock inscriptions in the Wadi Hilal (east of Elkab) predate surviving
temples at the site, but provide information on the functioning and object of the
cult (Vandekerckhove & Müller-Wollermann, 2001: 341–342; Darnell, 2004b:
154–155) – a local Elkab New Year celebration of the return of the regional
goddess Nekhbet. A close reading of the Wadi Hilal inscriptions combined with
new archaeological discoveries even suggests that the large rock that was the
main focus of the priests’ rock inscriptional activity was itself a “temple” (see
Section 3.6) (Figure 11). Middle Kingdom rock inscriptions also reference reli-
gious practices, such as a number of Theban graffiti of Middle Kingdom date that
relate to the early history of the Theban festival cycle (Peden, 2001: 29–32).
As with some tombs and temples, several desert sites became places of
literary activity, with rock inscriptions recording both pieces known and those
otherwise unattested (Darnell, 2013a: 81). Desert, travel, and literature were
associated in the minds of at least some educated Egyptians by the time of the
Middle Kingdom (Darnell, et al., 2002: 147 and pl. 112; Parkinson, 2002: 61
and 73). Rock inscription and rock art sites could be places of spontaneous
literary composition, probably oral, epigraphic, and musical (Morel, 2021).20
A site in the desert hinterland of Qamula represents an elaborate collection of
texts and depictions deriving from a tradition of creativity in the liminal desert
region (see Section 3.6).
Rock inscriptions can include curses against those that would erase or
damage the inscription (Žaba, 1974: nos. 24, 56, 57, 58), evidence for the
importance and memorializing aspects of some rock inscriptions. The per-
manent nature of rock inscriptions at times inspired funerary references, such
as the ḥtp dỉ nswt, “an offering that the king gives,” formulae (Hintze &
Reineke, 1989: 37, passim; Darnell, et al., 2002: 95). Rock inscriptions could
serve apotropaic functions, even recording spells for magical protection, and
simply viewing or reading texts may offer a promise of health and safety (see
Section 3.9). A demotic inscription in the Wadi Hammamat records a magical
spell for protection against scorpions, apparently for the benefit of travelers
who might not have the appropriate text in copy or memory (Vittmann, 2003:
118–119).
3.6 Shrines Natural and Constructed

Some travelers may have ventured into the desert alone in order to have
a personal religious experience in a liminal area. In Theban Graffito No.
20
Darnell, et al., 2002: 107–119 and pls. 85–88 (WHRI 8), inspired by Sinuhe’s praise of
Senwosret I. For a depiction of a singing man playing an asymmetrical lyre, perhaps a record
of a desert performance, see Darnell, et al., 2002: 93–94 (WHRI 3).
Figure 11 The rock inscription site of Vulture Rock within the Wadi Hilal; inset:
an Old Kingdom priest’s inscription, with rectangle highlighting the phrase
“this temple”
1394, in the Wadi Sikket Taga Zeid far to the west on the southern shoulder of
the Qurn, the peak above the Valley of the Kings, a visitor to the site in the Late
Ramesside Period wrote: “Come to me, oh Amun, come and save, while I am in
the mountains.”21 In Theban Graffito No. 904, the supplicant imperatively calls
to Amun: “Turn your heart toward me” (Spiegelberg, 1921: no. 904; Darnell,
2013a: 63). Desert sites with formal temple architecture, like the temple of Seti
I in the Wadi Mia at el-Kanais, could also attract later inscriptions recording
prayers for salvation and thanks for a safe return (Adams, 2011: 153–164).
A far more elaborate place of personal worship and appeal to both deities and
potential later visitors is the rock inscription site in the desert west of modern
Qamula (Figure 12) where a priest named Pahu transformed a rock shelf into his
personal shrine (Darnell, 2013a: 7–82 and pls. 1–73), paleographically and
iconographically datable to about the reign of Amenhotep II (1427–1400
BCE). Pahu’s imagery blends temple-like scenes appropriate to standard temple
iconography with unusual inscriptions of personal recollections and direct
address to those who might visit the site. Pahu records a prayer he spoke to
21
Černý, 1956: pl. 75, no. 1394; also pl. 64, no. 1345; for parallels in other hymns, including Pahu’s
prayer to Amun, see Darnell, 2013a: 31–32.
Figure 12 Inscription site of the priest Pahu (west of Qamula); bottom left:
annotated images of the king Ahmose and goddess Taweret (horizontal text
states that he made it “for himself”); bottom right: Pahu libating and censing
before the goddess Hathor
Amun during a storm at sea, and depicts himself offering to the goddess Hathor
while admonishing any reading his inscriptions to have pure thoughts when they
make offerings in the temple.
Although a number of other New Kingdom rock inscriptions record hymns
and prayers (most addressed to Amun, e.g., Spiegelberg, 1921: nos. 904 and
914; Černy, 1956: nos. 1345 and 1394), and injunctions to personal piety
(Černy, 1956: no. 1396), Pahu’s inscriptions appear to be among the earliest
clear indications of the personal piety that will become such a feature of
Ramesside Period Egyptian religion (Luiselli, 2011). Rock inscriptions in

a desert environment enabled personal expressions of piety, providing an
opportunity for a more formal but idiosyncratic expression of personal religion
that no other space in ancient Egypt provided until considerably later in the New
Kingdom. Pahu refers to a number of his productions as having been made by
him for himself. Nevertheless, he also directly addresses visitors in at least one
inscription. Even within what appears to have been a personal shrine, Pahu
conformed to some extent to the more usual public orientation of ancient
Egyptian rock art and rock inscriptions.
Pahu did not attempt to transform his site, either through the construction of
any dry-stone walls, or the carving of an architectural element at the shelf. Like
the Gebel Agg shrine near Toshka (Van Siclen, 1997: 409–416), the natural
architecture of Pahu’s shrine is a ledge with rocky overhang on a natural desert
eminence. Other features, like the so-called Hathor Rock at Faras, might both
attract inscriptions and apparently become a local cult focus (Pinch, 1993:
28–40). Rock inscriptions of cultic significance may also cluster at an area
providing shade and something of a natural “shrine,” as at the Paneia of the
Coptos to Berenike route (Colin, 1998).
As well as adapting a cave or rock overhang, the creators of natural desert
shrines could also focus on small dry-stone constructions (Williams, 2006;
Darnell & Manassa, 2013). A stone enclosure with associated monuments may
serve as a sanctuary in its own right, augmenting a natural shelf or other feature.
Such a rectilinear dry-stone structure, incorporating as its back wall a rock
overhang, served as a Hathoric temple for the New Kingdom quarry at Timna
in the Arabeh; the site incorporates some more formal architectural elements,
smaller monuments and votive objects, and is associated with a large rock
inscription (Rothenberg, 1988; 1993). At Gebel Tingar on the west bank of
Aswan, a walled courtyard encompassing a large boulder formed a setting for
both free-standing monuments and rock inscriptions (Jaritz, 1981: 241–246).
A similar wall encloses the rock shrine of Gebel Agg, near Toshka, the ceramic
remains and inscriptions of which suggest that it might have been a particularly
important religious site for Medjoy Nubians (Trigger, 1996: 804, 806, fig. 3).
Old Kingdom rock inscriptions in the Wadi Hilal attest to visits by priests to
a desert temple (see Section 3.5). The priestly inscriptions focus on a massive
free-standing segment of the higher rocky desert, known today as “Vulture
Rock,” that rises abruptly from the floor of the Wadi Hilal. At the southeast
corner of Vulture Rock and a lower rocky outcropping to the southeast, the
inscriptions are densest. A small number of inscriptions at both sites mention
“this temple,” although no surviving evidence of any built Old Kingdom temple
survives in the wadi. Considerable ceramic material of Old Kingdom date,
consistent with the remains of festival activities, is present on the eastern end of
the lower outcropping, and similar ceramic material and remains of small
monuments such as offering tables – all of Old Kingdom date – are known
from the wadi below the later Eighteenth Dynasty temple farther to the
southeast.
Stairs cut into the top of Vulture Rock, and steps excavated down into
a natural wadi bed just to the north of the outcropping, mimic Egyptian
temple architecture: steps to the roof of a temple for astronomical observa-
tions on one hand, and steps into a sacred lake for ritual ablutions on the
other. No evidence has thus far been recovered that enables the stairs atop
Vulture Rock to be dated to the Old Kingdom, although such an early date is
possible. The existence of the sets of stairs indicates a temple-like use of the
Wadi Hilal, suggesting an interpretation of the Old Kingdom priests’ refer-
ences to “this temple” as designating the desert landscape, Vulture Rock
itself, as a temple.
A Predynastic depiction of the traditional Upper Egyptian shrine (the Per-
Wer) on Vulture Rock may be evidence for semi-permanent structures in the
Wadi Hilal at an early date, and the ceramic material and small stone objects
of later, Old Kingdom date may have once occupied small tent-like or mud
brick structures located at various points in the wadi. The specification of the
rock as “this temple,” however, suggests that the Wadi Hilal was a sacred
landscape that could be augmented by architecture, but for which the oldest
and most impressive foci were natural elements of the landscape. The Wadi
Hilal continued to be a ritually charged landscape, and by the Eighteenth
Dynasty a small temple structure appears, augmented by a speos of
Ramesside date, with small satellite temple, the small rock-cut temple ultim-
ately becoming a more elaborate hemispeos during the Ptolemaic Period
(Derchain, 1971).
3.7 The Hemispeos

At a number of desert sites, including the temple of Seti I at el-Kanais in the
Wadi Abbad/Wadi Mia in the Eastern Desert (Figure 13), the temple of Smithis
in the Wadi Hilal, and numerous locations in the Kharga and Dakhla Oases, as
far away as the temple of Amun in Siwa Oasis, ancient Egyptian rulers
constructed formal temples. The deities associated with these endowments are
often those connected with the road(s) with which the temple was associated
(Figure 14). So the deities of temples in Kharga and Dakhla are often associated
with a Nile Valley religious center, frequently a temple at the Nilotic terminus of
the desert road with which the oasis temple is itself associated (Darnell, Klotz,
Figure 13 Hemispeos temple of Seti I in Wadi Kanais
& Manassa, 2013). Whereas the major temples of the oases were free-standing
structures, temples on desert roads, such as the temples of Kanais and Smithis,
were partially rock-cut and partially free-standing structures – hemispeoi,
formal versions of the caves and rock overhangs that more private devotional
activities in the desert could transform into places of worship.
The Timna shrine (see Section 3.6) represents an intermediary between rock
shelters and more elaborate religious architecture. Natural features like rock
shelters appear to have been particularly appropriate for worship of the goddess
Hathor. A rock cleft at the head of the Valley of the Queens was apparently
interpreted as a natural representation of the vulva of the goddess Hathor,
receiving only minimal human augmentation, but attracting a number of rock
inscriptions.22 Timna is a smaller and more simplified version of another temple
at a quarry site: the Middle Kingdom Serabit el-Khadim temple – dry-stone
architecture forming the forward architectural elements fronting a rock-cut
shrine (Valbelle & Bonnet, 1996).
Well attested in the temples of Montuhotep II, Hatshepsut, and Thutmose III
at Deir el-Bahari, and in the Ramesside through Ptolemaic temple of Smithis in
the Wadi Hilal to the east of Elkab, hemispeoi are in essence architectural
representations of the returning goddess of the eye of the sun. The hybrid
temple – part cut into the mountain, part free-standing – is the architectural
22
Leblanc, 1989: 12; Desroches-Noblecourt, 1995: 24 and pl. 1. For cross-cultural evidence of
rock shelters as natural yonic symbols in the landscape see Claassen, 2011: 628–641; Hays-
Gilpin, 2004: 65–84.
Figure 14 Plan, view from exterior, and view from interior of the sanctuary of
Ghueita Temple in Kharga Oasis; copy of painted decoration from the reign of
Darius I on the north wall of the sanctuary, in which the Persian king (facing
left) worships Amun, Mut, and Khonsu of Thebes and Min and Isis of
Akhmim, emblematic of the Nilotic termini of desert roads from Kharga Oasis
to the Nile Valley
version of depictions of the cow of Hathor as Mistress of the West, her

hindquarters yet within the slope of the mountain, her forepart emerging into
the riverine world of the alluvial land. In the Wadi Hilal, the temple of Smithis
emerges from the desert hills, perpendicular to the track leading into the wadi
from Elkab; at the juncture of the path from the hemispeos and the roughly east-
west route through the Wadi Hilal stands the small temple of Thoth – the deity
prepared to welcome and hopefully pacify the goddess as she returns out of the
desert into the Nilotic world (Darnell, 1995: 92; 2010: 100–101; 2013: 76–78).
Such interactions of humans, monuments, deities, and landscapes are well
attested for the topography of the two banks of ancient Thebes (Rummel, 2020).
The hemispeos is also an architectural embodiment of the theology of the
returning solar eye goddess – the partially rock-cut temple is the body of the
returning goddess,23 half in the gebel, in the ḫꜢs.t, away and angry in the Red
Land, and half emerging into the near desert, on her way to pacification and the
Black Land. A number of the speoi and hemispeoi of Upper Egypt and Nubia
are also located at the Nile termini of desert tracks (Jacquet, 1967: 91), and
proximity to a desert track was probably another consideration for the location
of rock overhangs transformed into shrines, such as at Gebel Agg in Nubia and
the Pahu shrine near Qamula.
3.8 Cairn Shrines and Cairn Fields

Religious architecture at mines and quarries reveals a continuum of “formality”
in which the Egyptians could express their devotion to the king and the deities
who would grant a successful mission (names of such appear in Sadek, 1980:
84, ll. 12–13; Espinel, 2005: 65–66). The construction of a constellation of
cairns atop a natural ridge defined the sacred space and separated it from the
otherwise monotonous physical landscape. The dedication of stelae within these
cairns transformed an otherwise blank desert into a religiously charged and
inscribed landscape.
Approximately 80 kilometers west-northwest of Toshka in Nubia are the
anorthosite gneiss and chalcedony quarries of Gebel el-Asr, commonly known
as the Chephren Diorite Quarries (Shaw, et al., 2010). Middle Kingdom exped-
itions chose a low ridge in the northern environs of the site – Stela Ridge – as
a focus for a series of commemorative and votive monuments (Pethen, 2017).
These memorials took the form of dry-stone cairns, small arms of which created
rudimentary courtyards, in at least some of which the expeditions set up stelae
and other small stone monuments (Figure 15). In the relatively flat landscape of
the region, the small cairn-shrines atop a low ridge substituted for the rock-cut
shrines present at other quarries. During the late Middle Kingdom and the
Second Intermediate Period, miners at Gebel Zeit, on the Red Sea coast,
constructed similar dry-stone enclosures as foci for votive objects (Pinch,
1993: 73–74; Régen & Soukiassian, 2008: 1–7). In a non-quarry setting, cairn
23
For the temple as body of the deity, see i.a. Finnestad, 1997.
Figure 15 Plan of the “Stela Ridge” cairn shrines at the Nubian quarries of
Gebel el-Asr, with drawings of the four monuments from Cairn VIII (plan after
Engelbach, 1939)
shrines appear atop Gebel Antef, on the Theban West Bank, in conjunction with
a now destroyed sandstone chapel of Seventeenth Dynasty date.
Cairn VIII at Gebel el-Asr (Engelbach, 1939: pl. LIV) may serve as an
example of the material associated with the cairn shrines (Darnell & Manassa,
2013). The four objects at Cairn VIII relate to expeditions during regnal years 4
and 6 of Amenemhat III and differ considerably in size and formality: a round-
top stela of regnal year 4, inscribed with a text in hieroglyphic script with some
hieratic features; a small rectangular stela with a lapidary hieratic script, dated
regnal year 4; a round-top stela of regnal year 6, with a depiction of the goddess
Hathor and the Horus name of the king within the lunette; and a sandstone
offering table. The objects reveal a revisiting of the monuments of an earlier
expedition by later visitors. The offering table, inviting future visitors to pour
a libation for the benefit of those mentioned in the inscriptions, and an “address
to the living” formula on the regnal year 6 stela, demonstrate an expectation of
continued engagement with the cairn shrine and its ensemble of monuments.
Cairn shrines with associated, free-standing monuments, like the ensembles
at Gebel el-Asr, can also appear in the environs of a more formal temple
structure, as at Serabit el-Khadim. Some of the large stelae along the approach
to the temple of Hathor at Serabit el-Khadim were set up within low, circular,
dry-stone enclosures (Valbelle & Bonnet, 1996: 70–71), similar to those at

Gebel el-Asr. The enclosures with stelae at Serabit, like the Gebel el-Asr
cairn shrines, presuppose the presence of worshippers. The stela of
Sobekherheb, with offering table on the ground in front, at one side of an
enclosure of stones (Petrie, 1906: 66, ill. 78–80; Valbelle & Bonnet, 1996: 29
et passim), invites visitors to occupy the otherwise empty space within the
enclosure – the ensemble is incomplete without a human visitor. Desert memor-
ials at Serabit el-Khadim, Gebel el-Asr, and elsewhere insert the visitor into the
position and role of dedicator, officiant, and maintainer of the deeds of the
one(s) who made the shrine and those who are memorialized on the monuments
therein. These desert assemblages are not passive memorials, but actuators of
future human activity.
The varying positions of the men who dedicated the monuments at Gebel el-
Asr, and the varying sizes and stylistic features of those monuments, parallel
similar assemblages of stelae from the more formal and Nilotic settings of the
Terrace of the Great God at Abydos (O’Connor, 2009: 92–96; Yamamoto, 2015)
and the Heqaib sanctuary at Elephantine (Franke, 1994). Ranging from palm-
sized stelae with a few names in hieratic, to large and carefully executed
hieroglyphic stelae, the Abydos monuments commemorate both family mem-
bers and the more extended “work families” of professional colleagues, the
latter paralleling the Gebel el-Asr material.24
Ensembles of texts, especially in the combination of “autobiographical”
stelae and offering tables, also appear at all three sites (Gebel el-Asr, Abydos,
and Serabit el-Khadim).25 Each monument both fills a function for the ded-
icant, and at the same time provides a place for coworkers and subordinates to
offer their own votive objects. The stelae and other inscribed monuments
transformed the cairns at Gebel el-Asr from temporary religious structures for
the use of their builders into more permanent religious installations, perpetu-
ally actuated by the presence of the living worshippers who will interact with
them in future visits to the sites. The monuments in the cairn shrines at Gebel
el-Asr created a religious and physical landscape that ensured the continued
commemoration of the miners at the site, and their spiritual participation at
future cultic activities.
Between Stela Ridge, the site of the cairn shrines at Gebel el-Asr, and the
track to Toshka (Shaw, 2006: 253–266), is Twenty-Cairn Ridge, crowned with
numerous small dry-stone cairns, without associated inscribed material. Similar
24
Leprohon, 1978: 33–38; note the ability of work subordinates to fulfill the role of sem-priest on
Thirteenth Dynasty Abydene stelae – see Franke, 2003: 73–75.
25
Hölzl, 2002: 141–142 (to the list add the example from Sinai in Valbelle & Bonnet, 1996: 155,
fig. 180).
clusters of small cairns appear at several sites in the Eastern and Western
Deserts (Darnell & Manassa, 2013: 56–57, 90; Darnell, in press c). Unlike the
intervisible line-of-sight cairns marking a number of desert roads, particularly
in areas otherwise lacking natural landmarks, these clusters of small stone piles
appear at the termini of roads, and at points having particular religious
significance.
Such cairn fields appear to be evidence of votive activities at the termini
of desert roads, perhaps dedicated by travelers thanking the gods for their
safe return. At Gebel el-Asr, the ridge of cairns is devoid of inscribed
material, suggesting that the cairn fields may be anepigraphic markers,
corresponding to the rock art and rock inscriptions of some sites, and the
cairn shrines and inscribed monuments of others. Votive cairns may repre-
sent physical vestigia of both travelers at sites without surfaces suitable for
inscribing, and those visitors without the ability to leave a textual or clear
representational mark. What might be dismissed as a collection of verti-
cally oriented stones is another demonstration of the spiritual significance
of the desert landscape.
3.9 The Ruler as Intercessor in the Desert

Although many may seem informal, the results of anything but official
sponsorship and influence, a number of desert graffiti played roles in sup-
porting the official social and religious order. Already during the Naqada II
Period (ca. 4000–3500 BCE), rock inscriptions record tableaux of royal ritual
power, and reveal the interactions of royalty and divinity (Darnell, 2009). The
formal rock inscription tableau of Montuhotep II in the Wadi Schatt er-Rigal
(Figure 16) may provide evidence for the existence already during the
Eleventh Dynasty of the “Theban version” of the doctrine of the divine
birth of the king, well before the earliest explicit text referring to the same
(Darnell, 2004a: 26–28). Rock inscriptions also represent some of the most
distant memorials of pharaonic Egyptian power, including an inscription of
Montuhotep II in the environs of Gebel Uweinat at the southeastern corner of
modern Egypt (Förster, 2015: 479–487) and an inscription of Ramesses III
near the oasis of Tayma, in the northeastern portion of modern Saudi Arabia
(Sperveslage, 2016: 305–306).
A rock inscription could indicate that the viewing of an image or reading of
an inscription would benefit other travelers. A Middle Kingdom inscription in
the Wadi el-Hol (possibly made by the priest who carved a lengthier and
adjacent inscription) depicted the statue of a ruler (standing atop a transport
sledge) above a horizontal line of text: “As for the one who will read these
Figure 16 Shatt er-Rigal inscription of Montuhotep II
writings, he will reach (home) in peace” (Darnell, et al., 2002: 103). A king
could also set up an actual statue on a desert road, inscribed with magico-
religious spells, the reading of which will help travelers, and such a traveler
might carve a similar spell (against scorpions), in order to provide the same
benefit. Ramesses III set up a healing statue to the east of Gebel Ahmar
(Drioton, 1939), now subsumed in the sprawl of modern Cairo, at a point
where a traveler on the desert road would catch a first or last glimpse of the
Nile Valley proper. A later traveler on the Wadi Hammamat road in the Eastern
Desert carved a text against scorpions, apparently with a similar purpose
(Vittmann, 2003: 118–119).
The Middle Kingdom depiction in the Wadi el-Hol and the statue of
Ramesses III from Gebel Ahmar share the concept of the beneficence of royal
statuary, and representations of the divine ruler, at desert sites. By the time of the
Middle Kingdom, both two- and three-dimensional depictions of the ruler were
important elements of devotion at desert sites. At Shatt er-Rigal, a towering
sunk relief image of Montuhotep II, visually evoking the concept of the divine
birth of the king, has the scale and technical sophistication of a temple relief,
and a commensurate ritual function. In the Gebel el-Asr cairn shrines, small
stone images of falcons bear the Horus names of Senwosret II and Amenemhat
III (Darnell & Manassa, 2013: 57), and similar statues were deposited at the
quarry sites of Serabit el-Khadim and Gebel Zeit (Pethen, 2014). The chief
deities in the material from Gebel el-Asr, Gebel Zeit, and Serabit el-Khadim are
the goddess Hathor and the god Horus, with the ruler, most prominently as
a manifestation of the latter.26
4 Writing and Drawing in the Desert

The late Paleolithic art of the Kom Ombo-Aswan region (the Qurta images have
a minimum age of approximately 15,000 calendar years – Huyge, 2013; Huyge &
Claes, 2012) and the considerably later Epipaleolithic depictions of probable fish
weirs at el-Hosh (perhaps as early as 5600 BCE – Huyge, 1998) are remarkable
earlier examples of inscribing the desert landscapes bordering the Nile Valley, but
they do not appear to influence the art of the later Predynastic Period and Dynasty
0. The rock art traditions of Gebel Uweinat and the Gilf Kebir (Förster, Riemer &
Kuper, 2013; Kuper, et al., 2013) in the far southwest, the abstract iconography of
Abka, Bir Nakheila, and Rayayna (Darnell, D., 2002: 160–161), and the painted
handprints of Farafra (Huyge, 2003: 67–68) and Rayayna (Darnell, D., 2002: 161,
pls. 90–91; Darnell 2009: 86–87) appear equally unrelated to the later and
continuous iconographic traditions of Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia.
Many concentrations of early rock art occur in the Eastern Desert, associated
with routes between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea,27 and in the Western
Desert, located near the Nile Valley and the western oases, and along the routes
interconnecting those areas.28 As important as the Predynastic rock art of the
Egyptian deserts is in its own right, it holds a special significance for the light it
sheds on the origins of writing. The numinous deserts of Egypt and Nubia,
attracting rock art and later rock inscriptions, became crucibles for the develop-
ment of writing systems in northeast Africa.
The earliest writing in Africa, perhaps the earliest fully developed writing
system incorporating phonetic indicators of a specific language, appears in its
developmental stage in Upper Egypt about 3250 BCE, at the cusp of the
Predynastic and Protodynastic Periods. That time, the beginning of Dynasty
0, is a period of increasing administrative complexity and cultural unity in
Upper Egypt (Campagno, 2013). The first attestations of the nascent Egyptian
writing system appear on small objects from an early ruler’s burial (Tomb U-j)
at Abydos, and in a large-scale early hieroglyphic inscription on the surface of
a rock face at el-Khawy (7 km north of Elkab) (Figure 17). The origins of this
script begin already during the Naqada II Period, as an essentially cosmographic
imagery, in a development best in evidence in the decorated ceramics of Upper
26
Darnell and Manassa, 2013. For Hathor at Gebel Zeit, see the remarks of Régen and Soukiassian,
2008: 51–54; Pinch, 1993: 73.
27
See Winkler, 1938, 1939; Rothe, Miller, and Rapp, 2008; Judd 2009; Morrow, et al., 2010;
Lankester, 2013.
28
See Darnell, et al., 2002; Darnell, 2013a; Förster, 2015; Lazaridis, 2019; Polkowski, 2018, 2019.
Figure 17 Rock inscription site of El Khawy; inset: early hieroglyphic

inscription, ca. 3250 BCE
Egypt, and in the rock art of the Eastern and Western Deserts of Upper Egypt
and Lower Nubia.29
4.1 Upper Egyptian and Lower Nubian Rock Art of the Fourth
Millennium
Beginning around 4000 BCE, rock art proliferates in the deserts of Upper Egypt
and Nubia, the iconography concentrating on a limited range of images and
themes. The zoomorphic and other images appearing in the art reveal that the
ancient artists drew not so much what they were seeing, but more often what they
were thinking. During the Naqada II Period (ca. 3500–3250 BCE), both rock art
tableaux at desert sites, and the iconography of painted ceramics (Petrie’s
Decorated Ware) and small decorated objects, frequently juxtapose desert and
Nilotic imagery. Balancing the desert and riverine worlds of the Egyptian cosmos
through iconography, Predynastic artists at desert sites could Niloticize and
socialize the desert hinterlands of the Nile Valley (Darnell, 2007; Riemer &
Förster, 2013), reconciling the two biomes of the Egyptian and Nubian worlds in
potent symbiosis (Darnell, 2009: 87–88). Already during the Predynastic Period,
earlier rock art images attracted similar works by later visitors, in a form of
iconographic attraction.
29
This section is a summary of Darnell, 2020b.
One focus of the predominantly zoomorphic imagery of early Egyptian rock

art is on animals representing aspects of the cosmic cycle (Huyge, 2002).
Essentially supplanting earlier zoomorphic images in importance, depictions
of watercraft become increasingly common over the course of the Naqada II
Period. The image of a boat may appear as an addition to an earlier zoomorphic
representation, and a combination of boat with animal depiction, all of a single
carving event, also occurs (Darnell, 2009: 90–91). Standards and deck struc-
tures, more consistent with ritual barks than with mundane water craft, fre-
quently appear in rock art depictions of vessels.
Hunting, especially of animals either dangerous or difficult to hunt (e.g.,
barbary sheep and hippopotami), and those rare at best in the actual landscapes
of Upper Egypt (e.g., giraffes and elephants) are often more ubiquitous in the
iconography than representations of the gazelle and other small game that
would have been more abundant in the Upper Egyptian and Lower Nubian
desert landscapes (Hendrickx, et al., 2010). Rock art thus focuses on animals
with cosmic meaning (e.g., the giraffe may possess a solar significance) or
prestige game animals who would then become ritual offerings at Nilotic sites
(Graff, Eyckerman, & Hendrickx, 2011). Although not always directly
depicted, hunters are frequently present in the form of ropes attached to
captured animals, in the presence of other objects of human manufacture, or
in the appearance of canids whose hunting activities can represent human
society (Darnell, 2011: 1171–1173; 2014: 122–123).
The motifs of the elite hunt and ritual meat offering also appear as decor-
ation on the bodies of the hunters, and the female ritualists who oversaw the
translation of the animals of the hunt into the victuals of the gods at early
temple sites. These graffiti-related images appear as tattoos and perhaps body
painting that linked the human actors in both the desert and the Nile Valley to
the cycle of events in which they participated, a ritual hunt that connected
desert and Nile (Darnell, 2018; see reference section 3.2). As the desert skin
could reflect the events that occurred in the two biomes of elite activity, so the
skins of some of those elite actors could reflect the desert and Nilotic foci of
their ritual cycle.
4.2 The Proto-history of Hieroglyphs: The Development

of Iconographic Syntax
Depictions of watercraft, animals, ostriches and ostrich feather fans, female
ritualists and their male associates, and a plant-like image that substituted for
the female ritualist dominate the iconography of Naqada II Period Decorated
Ware vessels (Graff, 2009: 122–124). In the iconography on the Decorated
Ware vessels, predictable associations of images occur. The often large female
figure, arms curving up and over the head or lowered to the sides, elbows out,
frequently occurs in association with an apparent addax; a vegetal figure
representing a female human (Hendrickx & Eyckerman, 2012: 44–46) occurs
in conjunction with an animal skin, forming an opposite, inanimate pair to the
woman-addax group (Graff, 2009: 91–99).
Other syntactic arrangements appear in late Predynastic iconography.
A saddle-billed stork with a serpent rearing beneath its beak represents
a composite sign, apparently an icon of “victory,” that may appear as the first
of a pair of signs, the second apparently qualifying the nature of the victory
(Darnell, 2013a: 102, 121). On a late Naqada III (ca. 3200–3100 BCE) decor-
ated comb (Metropolitan Museum of Art, MMA 30.8.224), a giraffe follows the
stork and serpent icon, probably an early statement of “solar victory.” At the
rock inscription site of Gebel Tjauti, a tableau depicts a ruler (perhaps Horus
Scorpion of Abydos tomb U-j) brandishing a mace above a bound prisoner; the
stork and serpent icon to the right of the group labels the image as
a representation of “human victory.” Such syntactic arrangements represent
the prehistory of writing (Stauder, 2010), a phase rarely in evidence elsewhere,
but remarkably well attested in the rock art and proto-inscriptions of the Eastern
and Western Deserts of Egypt.
Upper Egyptian and Nubian rock art sites preserve tableaux of a cycle of
scenes that may be precursors of the later royal jubilee, a series of rituals ideally
celebrated after thirty years of a pharaoh’s rule (Darnell, 2009; 2011). Originally
identified on decorated objects, textiles, and in the decoration of the important
late Naqada II Period Tomb 100 at Hierakonpolis, the images depict a cycle of
scenes of hunting, combat, and ritual navigation, ultimately associated with
Egyptian kingship (Williams & Logan, 1987; Hendrickx, 2014/15), and repre-
senting in essence a ritual realization of the imagery of the early rock art motifs.
In some of these rock art tableaux of royal ritual power, artists employed
zoomorphic imagery, nautical iconography, and standard icons from earlier
zoomorphic imagery to annotate and explain the depictions those annotations
accompany. In one such tableau in the Western Desert (Wadi of the Horus Qa-a,
a branch of the Wadi Alamat – Darnell, 2011), bulls as symbols of royal power
(Hendrickx, 2002) and canids controlling other animals as images of properly
ordered human society triumphing over chaos (Hendrickx, 2006) intermingle
with the motifs and iconographic syntax of Decorated Ware vessels. In the Wadi
of the Horus Qa-a tableau, a carving of an addax – symbol of meat offerings on
Decorated Ware vessels, often paired with the image of a female ritualist –
follows and labels the representation of an arrow-pierced human. The resulting
image is a syntactically formal statement of the equation of hunting and warfare
in Egyptian iconography, already iconographically linked in imagery of the

Naqada I Period (Hendrickx, et al., 2010).
The rock art iconographies of Niloticization of the desert and elite hunting
practices have combined with the iconographic syntax of Decorated Ware
imagery and the icons of nascent royal power to produce annotated depictions
of rituals that realize the earlier iconography within human ritual practices. The
iconographic corpus of rock art may interact with the iconography and syntax of
Decorated Ware ceramics, allowing a syntactic dialog on the surface of the
Egyptian deserts.
4.3 Rock Inscriptions and the Earliest Writing in Egypt

Shortly after the development of iconographic syntax, and the use of such
imagery to label elements of a larger tableau – as in the Wadi of the Horus
Qa-a – the earliest proto-hieroglyphic writing appears in Upper Egypt on small
labels from tomb U-j at Abydos, and in the el-Khawy early hieroglyphic rock
inscription. Occurring in the burial goods of an early Dynasty 0 royal tomb, the
U-j labels demonstrate a use of the nascent script for bureaucratic purposes, and
suggest already a ceremonial, ritual, or magico-religious function for early
writing in Egypt (Stauder, 2010; Wengrow, 2011), with the colored paste filling
the incisions of the signs on the tomb U-j labels giving those objects
a prestigious materiality (Stauder, f.c.). The el-Khawy rock inscription demon-
strates the importance of the script as demonstrative of power, exerted in the
control of prestige goods.
At el-Khawy, on the east bank of the Nile seven kilometers north of Elkab,
a large scale rock inscription in early hieroglyphic script (Figure 18) reveals
a paleography identical to that of the Abydene labels (Darnell, 2017), indicat-
ing a date ca. 3250 BCE. The shared paleography of the el-Khawy inscription
and the signs from tomb U-j demonstrates that the inscriptions from both sites
represent the beginning of a standardized paleography of the signs that we
know from the developed hieroglyphic script. The el-Khawy inscription
provides evidence for a public, non-bureaucratic application for the develop-
ing script. Incorporating signs from both the ivory label and ceramic annota-
tion corpora in Tomb U-j, the el-Khawy inscription reveals a geographically
widespread use of the nascent script, and suggests important connections
between Abydos and Elkab/Hierakonpolis at the dawn of Dynasty 0. At el-
Khawy, the size (the tallest signs are just over 50 cm) and visibility of an early
hieroglyphic inscription support an apotropaic force for the early script, the
mere presence of hieroglyphic signs imparting an aura of authority and
control, a glamour of prestige.
Figure 18 Rock inscriptions with serekhs of king Qa-a from the region of Elkab
The el-Khawy inscription especially reveals the final stage in a development

from zoomorphic icons of ritual significance to hieroglyphs writing the words
and sounds of the ancient Egyptian language. The bucranium on a pole at the
right end of the inscription may represent a symbol of royal power, although as
a sign it passes out of general hieroglyphic use by the dawn of the Dynastic
Period. In the left portion of the inscription, a bald ibis (probable identification)
appears between and slightly above two addorsed storks. Later hieroglyphic
texts give us the value Ꜣḫ “to be luminous” and bꜢ “power, soul,” respectively,
for the ibis and stork. The bald ibis in the el-Khawy inscription may then write
the root Ꜣḫ, “to be luminous,” thereby both representing the central solar
element in the iconography, and at the same time providing a phonetic writing
of luminosity. Such a B-A-B arrangement is common to ancient Egyptian
depictions of the solar cycle, and the sign of the solar disk between two hills
is the Egyptian sign for the horizon, Ꜣḫ.t, which the el-Khawy group can
therefore both depict and write. In the el-Khawy inscription, signs may repre-
sent phonemes (bald ibis), terms without phonetic indicators (bucranium on
pole), and concepts (addorsed storks as cosmic boundaries), all characteristics
of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.
On a desert cliff at el-Khawy, at the northern edge of a wadi system that

accesses the gold mines of the southeastern Egyptian desert, an early king
carved a monumental inscription that equated his royal authority with the
solar cycle. For the next three millennia, the pharaoh as guarantor of cosmic
order would remain central to the theology of Egyptian kingship.
4.4 Setting a Royal Seal on the Desert

With Dynasty 0, the Horus name of the ruler – written in a stylized palace façade,
the serekh, – begins to appear at desert road sites as a prominent marker of royal
interest (Darnell, 2011: 1181). Such serekh inscriptions continue through the First
Dynasty (Winkler 1938, pl. 11; Žaba, 1974: 239–241; Váhala and Červicek,
1999: no. 149) and into the Second Dynasty (Žaba, 1974: 30–31; Hamilton,
2016), apparently as a means of incorporating within the pharaonic realm a route
and the regions and products it accessed. Well attested at and near the termini of
several desert roads is the Horus name of Qa-a (ca. 2900 BCE), last king of the
First Dynasty (Darnell, 2011: 1181; Darnell & Vanhulle, f.c.). Two of these
serekhs appear in the region of Elkab (Figure 18), marking the northernmost
and southernmost points of direct access to roads that join to the east and lead to
the gold mining regions of the Eastern Desert. A probable serekh of Qa-a in the
northern portion of Kharga Oasis demonstrates the king’s interest in desert roads
far beyond the Nile Valley (Ikram & Rossi, 2004).
The Egyptians conceptualized these royal inscriptions as “sealing” the
desert. The Qa-a serekhs near Elkab are associated with an image of the
vulture goddess Nekhbet; and the southern inscription, at the Borg el-
Hammam, also incorporates a short hieroglyphic text that is arranged identi-
cally to contemporaneous seal impressions (Darnell & Vanhulle, f.c.). The
iconography associated with sealing is reinforced by the use of the verb ḫtm
“to seal” to describe a ruler’s annexation of a road in an inscription of late
First Intermediate Period date (ca. 2100 BCE) (Darnell, et al., 2002: 30–34).
The relative proliferation of Early Dynastic serekhs implies the presence of
treasury officials, early representatives of the “sealers of the god” (ḫtmty-nṯr)
(Kuraszkiewicz, 2006).
At Nag el-Hamdulab, northwest of Elephantine, the figure of a ruler wearing
the White Crown (the traditional crown of Upper Egypt) supervises a nautical
procession with images of domination of foreigners. A hieroglyphic inscription
of apparently early First Dynasty date (ca. 3100 BCE) labels the scene as
a representation of the Following of Horus (the royal entourage) and a record
of the taxation of an area at the terminus of a desert road (Darnell, Hendrickx, &
Gatto, 2017). The newly established royal authority literally steps into the
earlier image of Nilotic festival activities that proliferated at desert sites during
the Upper Egyptian Predynastic Period.
5 Self-Presentation of Foreigners in the Egyptian Deserts

In previous sections, the primary focus has been Egypto-centric: Egyptian
administration of the desert; Egyptian worship in the desert; Egyptian creation
of a hieroglyphic script. This final section presents some of the ways in which
foreigners also engaged with the deserts of Sinai, Egypt, and Nubia. Broken
ceramics bear mute witness to their presence on road networks. Some of these
foreigners were members of Egyptian-led expeditions, while others, like the
Nubian families surveilled in the Semna Dispatches (see Section 2.3), were not
necessarily part of the Egyptian world. Yet all of these groups also interacted
with the desert landscape, and the products of those interactions often illuminate
self-presentation of foreigners absent from Nilotic settings.
5.1 Nubians and Egyptians

As early as the Protodynastic and Early Dynastic Periods (Somaglino & Tallet,
2014, 2015), Egyptian expeditions left records within Nubia, while at the same
time, Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia shared an early iconography of rulership
(Williams & Logan, 1987; Darnell, 2013a: 123; Brémont & Vanhulle, in press).
Although a form of religious conversion seems to correspond to the adoption of
Egyptian script by elite Nubians of the Pharaonic Period (Doyen & Gabolde,
2017), at least occasional examples of Nubian self-expression – left by people
who were not members of the most exalted echelons of society – appear in the
rock art and inscriptions of the Egyptian deserts. The Egyptian-Nubian cultural
entanglement so clearly in evidence by the time of the New Kingdom (Van Pelt,
2013; Raue, 2019) is present in rock art much earlier.
In a series of autobiographical rock inscriptions at Nag el-Wasiya, south of
Aswan in the region of Abisko, a Nubian soldier Tjehemau described his career
in the Egyptian military, from his meeting with Montuhotep II through a period
of internal conflict, possibly during the reign of Amenemhat I (Darnell, 2004a:
23–37). Tjehemau is an example of the Nubian auxiliaries who assisted the
Middle Kingdom state in exerting authority over desert regions (Moreno
Garcia, 2010: 27–29). Composed in good Middle Egyptian and of no mean
literary merit, Tjehemau’s inscription presents its subject as a Nubian who
contrasts himself with what he depicts as a timid Theban army, whose com-
mander he nevertheless supports (Inscription No. 1, ll. 9–16):
He (the king) traversed the entire land, having decided to slaughter the ‘Amu of Djaty,
When it approached, Thebes was in flight. It was the Nubian who brought about the rally.
Tjehemau also compares himself to the Egyptian ruler (Inscription No. 3, ll.
15–18):
Tjehemau the victorious sailed north like the lion, Son of Re, bity-king,
together with this army of his which he recruited.
Claiming to be braver than the Egyptians he supports, Tjehemau is an

outsider without whom the Theban insider could neither hold nor expand,
writing an early version of a “ripping yarn,” a form of literature known from
more recent imperial systems (Dixon, 1994). Later Tjehemau depicts his arrival
at Thebes during a festival as though the city had assembled in his honor
(Inscription No. 4, l. 1–Inscription No. 5, l. 2).
A site of New Kingdom date (probably Eighteenth Dynasty) near the Wadi
Alamat Road, northwest of ancient Thebes (SWA 1), preserves depictions of
Nubian soldiers in a festival context (Figure 19). The Nubian figures are carved
alongside a pseudo-inscription and inaccurate copies of short inscriptions prob-
ably derived from glyptic (preliminary treatment in Darnell, 2002b: 143–144).
The depictions of Nubian soldiers there are grouped near the drawings of what
may be the bark of Amun, recalling the actual appearance of Nubian soldiers in
conjunction with Theban festivals (as in Epigraphic Survey, 1996: 16, pl. 32).
Also present at the site SWA 1 are a few divine images, depictions of horses, and
a scene of a family of three lions, the largest standing atop a supine human.
Depictions of ritual activities are present in New Kingdom Nubian rock art as
well – at Korosko images of wrestlers (on Nubian wrestlers, Decker, 1991:
97–105) occur in conjunction with the depiction of a seated official observing
dancers, and the representation of a lion standing atop a prone human, facing
a feather-wearing warrior armed with axe and rectangular shield (Dunbar, 1940:
pl. 19; imperfect drawings in Váhala & Cervicek, 1999: pls. 119–120 [nos. 456,
458, 459, and 461]; Suková, 2011: 148–149).
The festival imagery that appealed to Tjehemau, and provided the basis for
imagery at SWA 1 and at the Korosko site, links rock art and inscriptions of
Nubians with military careers. Service in expeditions of military and quarrying
natures could provide Nubians with paths to Egyptianization (Darnell, 2013b:
791–792, with nn. 31–32), but Nubian identity did not necessarily vanish.
Tjehemau in particular highlights his hybrid nature. Like the Inca in their
imagery and ritual performances in colonial Peru (Dean, 1999), in order to
mediate alterity for Nubians and Egyptians alike, the Nubian soldiers who left
their inscriptions emphasize their inherently conflicted (compare Dean, 1999:
122–159) composite culture. That same entangled culture is archaeologically in
evidence in the persistence of Nubian foodways at late Middle Kingdom
settlements in the oases (see Section 2.4).
Figure 19 Rock inscription site of SWA-1, with depictions of Nubian soldiers in

a possible festival procession; inset: Nubian soldiers from the Opet Festival
scenes of Luxor Temple (reign of Tutankhamun; after Wreszinski, 1935: pl. 200)
Tjehemau could command the resources for the carving of Middle

Egyptian hieratic inscriptions, their signs monumental in comparison with
other rock inscriptions. The Nubian soldiers at SWA 1 who created a place in
the desert where they could commemorate their own participations in festi-
vals used images and psuedo-texts. Nubian self-presentation in the desert
could deploy Egyptian hieroglyphic script or figural art, but in both cases the
men retain their Nubian identity. Tjehemau is the “Nubian,” braver than his
Egyptian compatriots; at site SWA 1, the carved human figures display clear
Nubian cultural markers.
Egyptian self-presentation in the desert displays a similar continuum, from
hieroglyphic inscriptions, at times even sophisticated literary forms, to a clearly
written name and title in the cursive hieratic script, to incised signs resembling
pot marks and other pseudo-hieroglyphs. This final group of pseudo-writing
may, considering the parallels in pot marks and seals, relate to the control of
resources at desert sites, and products traveling along the desert roads.
5.2 Lapidary Hieratic and the Origins of the Alphabet

Not all groups operating within the desert hinterlands of Egypt appear to have
adapted Egyptian imagery to their inscriptions. Whereas Nubian culture
engaged with Egyptian iconography and ideology from an early date, even
adopting Egyptian language and scripts for both private and royal inscrip-
tions, the people of the northeastern hinterland of the Nile Delta did not
frequently follow suit. As rock inscriptions at sites in the Western Desert and
in the Sinai peninsula reveal, the “Western Asiatic” auxiliaries of the ancient
Egyptians borrowed hieratic and hieroglyphic signs, but not the Egyptian
language.
Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom scribes accompanying desert expeditions
developed a loosely standardized script for rock inscriptions (Vandekerckhove
& Müller-Wollermann, 2001: 347–349; Ali, 2002: 12–22). The script blended
cursive hieratic and hieroglyphic features of signs, which decreased the time
needed to carve a hieroglyphic monument, while maintaining a graphic formal-
ity greater than a purely hieratic inscription. Particularly suited to the medium of
a natural stone surface, this ‘lapidary hieratic’ script was used by scribes
traveling with expeditions into the Egyptian and Nubia desert to memorialize
their activities (Gratien, 2004).
During the late Twelfth Dynasty, a ‘proto-alphabetic’ script appears in rock
inscriptions and on small objects, principally in Sinai – most prominently at
the site of Serabit el-Khadim – and at the Wadi el-Hol in the Theban Western
Desert (Darnell & Dobbs-Allsopp, et al., 2005; Hamilton, 2006). The abgad
script, an alphabet that omits vowels, has been termed “Proto-Sinaitic,” and
perhaps more descriptively Early Alphabetic. The somewhat roughly made
signs in the Sinai abgad inscriptions represent versions of hieroglyphic proto-
types, whereas the signs in the two Early Alphabetic inscriptions in the Wadi
el-Hol derive from lapidary hieratic prototypes. The Early Alphabetic script
employed Egyptian signs, each representing a single phoneme through
acrophony from the Semitic-language name of the object (Darnell & Dobbs-
Allsopp, et al., 2005; Hamilton, 2006).
Desert roads were both caravan routes and lines of communication traveled
by messengers on foot, with some mounted on horseback by the New
Kingdom (see Section 2.5). A hieratic rock inscription at the Wadi el-Hol,
dating to the reign of Amenemhat III (ca. 1831–1786 BCE), lists the names of
couriers (sỉnw) and royal messengers (wpwty-nsw.t), alongside a “General of
Asiatics” (ỉmy-r mšꜥ ꜥꜢm.w) (Darnell & Dobbs-Allsopp, et al., 2005: 85–90,
102–106). Asiatic auxiliary troops and affiliated scribes were also present in
the Sinai, the other location of the Early Alphabetic script (Valbelle & Bonnet,
1996: 34–35, 147). The creation of the earliest abgad texts appears to result
from the interaction of Egyptian scribes and Asiatic expeditionary forces
during the Middle Kingdom (contra Goldwasser, 2006). This abgad is the
direct predecessor of Old Canaanite, the first in a line of paleographic devel-
opment that gives rise to modern alphabets.
6 Conclusion
Egypt’s desert hinterlands were not passive and blank spaces through which the
ancient Egyptians roamed at will, nor were they forbidding wastes haunted by
frightful monsters. Instead, this Element has shown how the ancient Egyptians
viewed the desert landscape as a living entity, with which they could engage in
a visual dialog (Section 3). The marking of the desert with rock art and later
inscriptions, socializing the desert and creating places in otherwise vast and
nameless spaces, could find a reflection in the decoration of the human body, the
skins of humans and rocks reflecting one another. In developing themes of rock
art, visitors to desert sites could engage with other humans, past, contemporan-
eous, and to come. Within this conjunction of interacting bodies the ancient
Egyptians developed and expanded concepts of iconographic syntax that pro-
vide a precursor to the hieroglyphic writing system (Section 4).
Within the liminal desert landscape, the ancient Egyptians interacted with
deities, who might travel through the dry borderlands of the Nile Valley.
Temples could architecturally reflect the returning solar eye goddess, and
worshippers could meet and even accompany her back to the Nile Valley.
Humans within the desert vastness might feel themselves within a sacred
landscape, as this Element has demonstrated. Within the desert, a priest could
transcend the decorum expected in the Nile Valley to create a personal shrine.
Similarly, desert shrines at sites visited as part of officially sponsored missions
may be the focus for stelae, statues, and other small monuments. These formal
structures exist alongside votive cairns commemorating non-literate travelers.
Self-presentation in the desert for Nubians and Egyptians alike, frequently in
the context of ritual events, complements evidence from the Nile Valley.
Control of the deserts by the nascent Egyptian state led to early applications
of the hieroglyphic script to mark royal control of desert roads and their
resources (Section 2). Throughout the Pharaonic Period, Egyptian desert inter-
actions reveal attempts not simply to control an outer realm, but to transform at
least some portions of the outer desert hinterlands into integral elements of the
Egyptian state. The development of a dual system of oversight for desert
expeditions, some officials operating within a chain of command and others
reporting more directly to high levels of the administration, reveals the flexibil-
ity of ancient Egyptian bureaucracy.
This Element has presented the ways in which the Egyptians physically con-
trolled the desert landscape, especially the roads that connected the Nile Valley
with distant locales and provided access between points along the river. Particular
focus has been given to the role of Nubians in desert administration, culminating
with Nubian self-presentation within the desert landscape (Section 5).
No study of ancient Egypt is complete without a consideration of the vast

expanses of desert east and west of the Nile Valley. This Element will
hopefully provide scholars of Egypt and the ancient world more generally
with a point of departure for understanding the complex interactions of Egypt
and the desert.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Profs. Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia and Gianluca Miniaci for the invita-
tion to contribute to the Cambridge Elements series. I have much enjoyed
attempting, however imperfectly, to encapsulate approximately three decades
of work in the Western and Eastern Deserts of Egypt and place it in the larger
context of ancient Egyptian approaches to the forbidding landscapes east and
west of the Nile Valley, from routine administration to religious activities. For
the permission to carry out this work, and for years of support and assistance, I
thank all of my colleagues, past and present, in what is now the Ministry of
Antiquities in Egypt. In addition to various smaller grants, devoted to the work,
much of the material appearing in this volume was supported by grants from the
National Endowment for the Humanities (an independent federal agency of the
United States Government), and the William K. and Marilyn M. Simpson
Endowment for Egyptology at Yale University.
Many colleagues around the world have contributed at various times and in a
variety of ways to the field work and research included in the current volume;
with apologies for not naming everyone, I shall try to list at least a few. Deborah
Darnell was a founding co-director of the Theban Desert Road Survey, and I
thank her for her significant contributions to the mission and its discoveries,
several of which are referenced here; she continues the work of the Theban
Desert Road Survey, and will publish final editions of several sites referenced
here (such as SWA-1). I would like to thank Stan Hendrickx and Maria Gatto for
fruitful discussions of Predynastic and Protodynastic rock art; Frank Forster and
Heiko Riemer for insights into far Western Desert caravan routes; in recent
years, Dorian Vanhulle and Axelle Brémont-Bellini, have undertaken important
analyses of rock art as members of the Elkab Desert Survey Project. Vincent
Morel and Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelettier have kindly shared the result of their
exciting work with Prof. Annie Gasse in the Wadi Hammamat, and I thank them
for many interesting discussions. The late Dr. Dirk Huyge was kind enough to
invite me to begin the Elkab Desert Survey, which his successor Wouter Claes
continues to support and encourage. The detailed maps and figures within this
volume would not have been possible without the skill of Alberto Urcia, whose
pioneering digital rock art recording technique has transformed our field work.
My archaeological and epigraphic work in the Eastern and Western Deserts
would not have been possible without the logistical and automotive expertise of
Abdou Abdullah Hassan, to whom I dedicate this volume.
For Abdou Abdullah Hassan
Ancient Egypt in Context
Gianluca Miniaci
University of Pisa
Gianluca Miniaci is Associate Professor in Egyptology at the University of Pisa, Honorary
Researcher at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL – London, and Chercheur associé at the
École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. He is currently co-director of the archaeological
mission at Zawyet Sultan (Menya, Egypt). His main research interest focuses on the social
history and the dynamics of material culture in the Middle Bronze Age Egypt and its
interconnections between the Levant, Aegean, and Nubia.
Juan Carlos Moreno García

CNRS, Paris
Juan Carlos Moreno García (PhD in Egyptology, 1995) is a CNRS senior researcher
at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, as well as lecturer on social and economic history
of ancient Egypt at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He has
published extensively on the administration, socio-economic history, and landscape
organization of ancient Egypt, usually in a comparative perspective with other civilizations
of the ancient world, and has organized several conferences on these topics.
Anna Stevens
University of Cambridge and Monash University
Anna Stevens is a research archaeologist with a particular interest in how material culture
and urban space can shed light on the lives of the non-elite in ancient Egypt. She is Senior
Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Assistant
Director of the Amarna Project (both University of Cambridge).
About the Series

The aim of this Elements series is to offer authoritative but accessible overviews of
foundational and emerging topics in the study of ancient Egypt, along with comparative
analyses, translated into a language comprehensible to non-specialists. Its authors
will take a step back and connect ancient Egypt to the world around, bringing ancient
Egypt to the attention of the broader humanities community and leading Egyptology in
new directions.
Ancient Egypt in Context
Elements in the Series

Seeing Perfection: Ancient Egyptian Images Beyond Representation
Rune Nyord
Ethnic Identities in the Land of the Pharaohs: Past and Present Approaches in
Egyptology
Uroš Matić
A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/AECE

Egypt and The Desert

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Egypt and The Desert

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How did ancient Egyptians view and interact with the desert?

How did ancient Egyptians view and interact with the desert?

What evidence exists of early writing and religious practices in the desert?

What evidence exists of early writing and religious practices in the desert?

Darnell

Egypt and the

Egypt and the Desert

John Coleman Darnell

EGYPT AND THE DESERT

John Coleman Darnell

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Elements in Ancient Egypt in Context

John Coleman Darnell

Keywords: Egypt, deserts, writing, administration, roads

© John Coleman Darnell 2021

1 The Red Land 1

2 The Deserts and Their Administration 17

3 Desert as Numinous Space 40

4 Writing and Drawing in the Desert 63

5 Self-Presentation of Foreigners in the Egyptian Deserts 70

1 The Red Land

of a Sixth Dynasty king Pepi. He then traveled on to Kharga Oasis, past

1.1 Desert Roads

An ancient Egyptian road is most often a set of slightly meandering, parallel

ceramic evidence from the roads, allowing a combination of archaeology and

1.2 Geographic Overview of the Egyptian Deserts and Road

Map 3 Major roads, military installations, caravansaries, inscription sites, and

interconnected caravan routes that traveled through well-watered depressions

a portion of the Darb el-Arba’in functioned by the time of the Second

Mons Porphyrites and Mons Claudianus) (Klemm & Klemm, 2008:

1.3 Water Resources

1.4 About This Element

2 The Deserts and Their Administration

and a reference on a stela of Tutankhamun to a “Western Wall” in the region of

2.1 Protodynastic and Early Dynastic Organization of the Desert

through the Old Kingdom, ﬁnally becoming fully subsumed in an Egyptian

2016). Old Kingdom inscriptions in the well-inscribed landscape of Sinai

granted power and wealth to leaders of Coptos in particular (Moreno Garcia,

2.4 The Late Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period

2016).11 As at the Nubian fortress of Askut (Smith, 2003), ceramic remains

2.5 Desert Activities during the New Kingdom (ca. 1550–1069

southern Egypt (Hikade, 2001), became a major responsibility of the King’s

may represent to some extent a consolidation of earlier titles and duties

in viceregal rock inscriptions, and the number of sites at which pharaonic

The suggestion of the Kurkur stela of Tutankhamun is that a Nubian patrol-

2.6 Desert Activities during the First Millennium BCE: Expansion

Figure 7 Rock inscription of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty pharaoh Amasis

established in the region of Moalla, a perhaps semi-autonomous and semi-

3 Desert as Numinous Space

of attention, but an element in a sensual encounter between both human and

3.2 The Desert Landscape as Entity

“strews greenstone, malachite, turquoise – the stars” (Sethe, 1908: 292–293,

Behold – through the green does Hathor reveal herself.

I came from Egypt, my face downcast –

3.3 The Desert as Repository of Sacred Objects in ovo

Then his majesty found a new quarry,

3.4 Worship in the Desert

3.5 Rock Inscriptions as Records of Religious Activity

3.6 Shrines Natural and Constructed