AFRICA, NORTH | Egypt, Pharaonic

The History of the Peoples of the Eastern Desert

“…Along with the reflections of economic and political use, there are also attestations of activities related to the religious beliefs and practices of the human groups that entered the area. This data set has attracted limited attention of scholars and researchers, who often studied them to know their most worldly contents, such as the prosopographical and administrative information they can provide (Seyfried 1981;Eichler 1993;Hikade 2001Hikade , 2006. The aim of this chapter is to underline the potential of this kind of data for retrieving their original meanings and intentions and to indicate the complexity of their study by providing some examples of religious activities in the desert during the Pharaonic period (between 2600 and 300 BCE).…”

“…Official expeditions were sent to Wadi Hammamat under the Pharoahs Psammetichus I, Necho II, Psammetichus II and Amasis of the 26th Dynasty, as well as by agents of the Persian overseers of Egypt and later Egyptian rulers (Tuplin 1998;Lloyd 1999;Meyer 1999). These expeditions, attested by epigraphic evidence in Wadi Hammamat and by temple inscriptions, were a continuation of a Pharaonic tradition of dispatching royal missions to extract stone and other mineral resources from the desert (Porter and Moss 1952;Klemm and Klemm 1994;Hikade 2001;Rothe et al 2008). There is, however, little comparable Late Period epigraphic evidence for the area farther south and discussed in this chapter, which suggests that Persian and Saite rulers either did not exploit the southern gold mines, or did so in ways that left no obvious epigraphic markers.…”