Venerated from early times, Sobek’s prominence at Kom Ombo is no accident. Where the river bends around, there is a large island in the Nile and an associated series of sandbanks, hazardous enough to shipping even today, but more dangerous still in centuries gone by when they were a favourite basking place for crocodiles. As one of Africa’s most dangerous wild animals, the crocodile was to be feared, worshipped and appeased. Ancient Egyptian literature is full of references to this calculating Nile predator, for it loomed large in the imaginations of people who lived and worked by the water’s edge, always at risk from the unseen attacker lurking beneath the waves. An ancient literary work called the Admonitions of Ipuwer, which imagines Egypt in a state of utter chaos, includes the chilling lines, “Lo, crocodiles gorge on their catch, People go to them of their own will.”2 In another text of the same period, a man’s wife and children are lost when their boat founders; he is particularly distraught to think of his children “who have seen the face of the Crocodile before they have lived.”3 An earlier series of magical tales ends abruptly when a maidservant goes down to the river to draw water and is snatched by a crocodile.
The inhabitants of Kom Ombo knew, more than most, what it meant to mingle with crocodiles, and they were eager to do whatever they could to appease this fearsome creature—even to the lengths of building a great temple in its honour. Where once there were pools in the temple precincts, filled with sacred crocodiles, now there is—inevitably—a “Crocodile Museum,” home to a few mummified specimens. These are the only crocodiles left at Kom Ombo. The creature’s demise in Egypt was the result of Western tourism. By 1845, crocodiles were confined to Upper Egypt, and the chance to hunt them was highly prized by wealthy visitors. Forty years later, only a handful of beasts survived in the Egyptian Nile. The Reverend Archibald Sayce, in his reminiscences of a trip to Upper Egypt in the winter of 1885, chronicled the last days of the Egyptian crocodile:
Our landing-place on the western bank was usually a strip of sand immediately opposite the island of Elephantine, where our boats were moored … I had been in the habit of bathing there, but one morning when we landed one of the Sirdar’s aide-de-camps … observed the recent footprints of a large crocodile. After that there was no more bathing. It was one of the last few crocodiles left north of the First Cataract. A few weeks afterwards I saw another crocodile which was killed by the natives at Gebel el-Silsila … When they cut it open the four hoofs of a donkey and the two ear-rings of a donkey-boy were discovered inside it. For a few years longer another crocodile survived in a back-water near Qina, distinguishing itself by occasionally surprising and eating a woman who was drawing water, and successfully resisting all attempts to capture or kill it. But in time it too passed away, and before 1890 the Egyptian Nile had ceased to be the home of its ancient symbol.4
After the construction of the Aswan Dam, crocodiles were forcibly confined to Nubia, unable to pass through the sluices and into the Egyptian Nile. In Nubia, too, tourism took its toll: “the nervous creature could not stand the noise of the paddle-wheels of the steamers and retired before them into the Sudân.”5 In recent years, crocodiles have returned to Lake Nasser, where hundreds congregate in certain sheltered bays. But along the Egyptian Nile, even the song of the shadûf-men, sung in days of old to scare the crocodiles away, is only a memory.
While the images of Sobek on the walls of Kom Ombo recall the creatures of the Nile two, three and four millennia ago, even older rock carvings a few miles downstream tell a tale of Nilotic life from the very dawn of human settlement. North of the Kom Ombo plain, the line of cliffs on either side of the Nile swing back towards the river, confining its floodplain within steep-sided walls of Nubian sandstone. On the west bank, near the small village of el-Hosh, the boulders at the top of the cliff have taken on the chocolate-brown patina of age. Lightly pecked into these boulders, now faint and hard to discern, are strange drawings from remotest antiquity. They have been dated to the late Palaeolithic period between 10,000 and 5,000 BC, in other words some 7,500 to 2,500 years before the pyramids. The rock-drawings of el-Hosh are perhaps the oldest art to survive anywhere in the Nile Valley, echoes from the Stone Age.
The curious, curvilinear designs that form the bulk of these early images resemble nothing so much as mushrooms on long stalks. From parallels in other cultures and other periods, they have been plausibly interpreted as “labyrinth fish-traps,” wicker-work constructions that the Nile Valley’s earliest inhabitants would have placed in the river to catch fish. During the annual inundation, the prehistoric people of Upper Egypt would have waded on to the floodplain where the waters were less turbulent and where the fish schooled in abundance. Setting their traps in the slow-flowing current, they would have beaten the water’s surface (as Nile fishermen do to this day) to scare the fish towards the mouth of the wicker-work nets. The result of a few hours’ work would have been nature’s bounty: a short-term feast, and, with air-drying, a valuable source of protein to sustain a small community for months. Little wonder that these early fisherfolk adorned the boulders above their catching-grounds with images of the miraculous technology that brought them so great a harvest. Egypt’s earliest art, carved with care at occasions of thanksgiving, records the river’s abundance and its annual regime by which Egyptians throughout the ages have measured their lives. Today, below the cliffs of el-Hosh, fishermen still cast their lines and nets in the shallows, while dragonflies dart over the surface. Thickets of lush green reeds at the water’s edge are reflected in the mirror-like surface of the Nile, while in midstream clumps of water hyacinth slow the river’s flow. Egrets and herons wade along the shoreline, and a hawk soars overhead.
The cliffs beyond el-Hosh mark a major transition in the geology of the Nile Valley, from rose-red Nubian sandstone to pale gold Egyptian limestone. But before the hard southern rock gives way to its softer northern cousin, it has one final spectacle to afford the traveller. As the Nile rounds a left-hand bend, immense slab-sided cliffs rise up on either side, dotted with rock-cut stelae and chapels. On the west bank, a large boulder, balanced precariously atop a great pinnacle of sandstone, acts both as a navigational aid—there are sunken rocks in the bed of the river here, which present a major hazard to shipping—and as a beacon of welcome. For we have arrived at Gebel el-Silsila, gateway to the north, terminus of desert routes, and the place that literally gave birth to all of ancient Egypt’s most magnificent temples.
The Nile Valley is at its narrowest at Gebel el-Silsila. The river here once ran through rapids, and the area was generally avoided by ancient travellers who preferred to circumnavigate the site to avoid its hazards. Because of the dangers of navigation, the site was a cult centre for water deities: Hapy, god of the inundation; Heqat, the frog-goddess; and Sobek, the crocodile. Shrines and stelae dot the cliffs on both sides of the Nile, and the isolation of the site imparts a holy feel. It is a special place. Yet, for somewhere so significant to Egyptian civilisation, Gebel el-Silsila is remarkably unknown to tourists. The authorities have invested in stone steps, flood defences, floodlights and interpretative signs, but few cruise ships stop here on their rushed journey north to Luxor. Those visitors who do disembark and stay awhile are rewarded with one of the most amazing ancient industrial landscapes anywhere in the world. For, in Amelia Edwards’ memorable description, “the yellow cliffs have been sliced as neatly as the cheeses in a cheesemonger’s window.”6 On both sides of the river, quarries were opened up in ancient times to supply construction projects the length and breadth of Egypt. Those on the east bank provided stone for the temples of Karnak and Luxor, the mortuary temples of western Thebes, and for Ptolemaic temples throughout Upper Egypt, including Kom Ombo and Edfu. From the quarry face, great blocks of stone were dragged down a causeway to the riverbank, to be loaded on to barges. On the west bank, where the cliffs are steeper, ships risked capsizing and sinking as they were loaded with tons of freshly cut stone blocks. To prevent this, eye-holes were cut through the walls flanking the
main quarry entrance, and ropes passed through these so that the waiting boats could be tied up securely. The eye-holes are still there, together with the countless chisel marks left by the ancient quarrymen, who worked carefully and economically, leaving little debris. It is as if the last team of workers left only last week, and yet most of Gebel el-Silsila’s stone was worked out by Roman times. Other than the extraction of some stone for the Nile barrages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, systematic quarrying activity at Gebel el-Silsila has not taken place for nearly two thousand years.
While ancient stone-cutting created this extraordinary landscape, modern extraction of a different kind is threatening to destroy it. At the edge of the cliff on the west bank, overlooking the Nile, an official chose to be buried in the fifteenth century BC, perhaps to remind him of quarrying expeditions successfully managed and completed. For centuries, he had lain in peace in this beautiful spot, until robbers came, cut away and removed the entire top half of his rock-cut tomb. In recent years, local villagers were caught using dynamite to extract other monuments for sale on the illicit antiquities market. Under Egyptian law, they were convicted, not for damaging antiquities, but for having explosives without a licence, and sentenced to just one year in prison. They will be back. Before long, without further protection, the monuments of Gebel el-Silsila will, like the cliffs behind them, have been quarried away to satisfy the cravings of wealthy patrons many hundreds of miles away.
THROUGHOUT EGYPTIAN HISTORY, stone has, by and large, been a building material reserved for the wealthiest in society. In ancient Egypt, quarrying was a royal monopoly: the logistics required to cut and transport blocks of stone were simply too great to be within reach of ordinary households. Even the state could baulk at the effort involved, which explains the frequent re-use of blocks from earlier buildings in later constructions. The gate-towers of the New Kingdom temple of Karnak were filled with blocks taken from Middle Kingdom shrines that had stood on the same site, just as the pyramids of the Middle Kingdom had cannibalised stone from their Old Kingdom predecessors. In medieval times, the pyramids of Giza offered a ready supply of pre-cut blocks for the builders of Cairo’s city walls. In this way, almost every significant stone building in Egypt is a palimpsest, incorporating within its structure the toil of earlier generations.
While stone, with its strength and durability, has long been preferred for state building projects, Egypt’s ordinary citizens have, down the centuries, made do with altogether humbler materials—materials that, like the people’s very livelihoods, are gifts of the Nile. For nearly seven millennia, Egyptians have built their houses, byres, granaries and workshops using silt, timber and reeds from the riverbank. Even today, rural Egypt is largely a creation of mud, wood and straw.
Sun-dried mud brick is the quintessential Egyptian building material. It is easily manufactured by mixing together alluvial silt with a temper of chopped straw and dung. This unprepossessing material is pressed into an open, rectangular wooden mould, then slapped out like pats of butter to dry in the sun. After just a day or two of drying, the resulting brick is ready to use. The basic technique and the standard size of brick have not changed for thousands of years. Ever since Egyptians first started living in towns, some six thousand years ago, mud brick has been the defining characteristic of the urban environment. Its grey stain is ubiquitous on archaeological sites. In the modern era, vast quantities of decayed mud brick have been quarried away for use as a cheap, organic fertiliser (Arabic sebakh). But despite the efforts of centuries of sebbakhin (those who dig for sebakh), mud-brick buildings from every era of Egyptian history still litter the landscape, stubbornly resisting the ravages of sun, wind and sand. Nowhere in Egypt illustrates the versatility, strength and durability of mud brick better than a small stretch of the Nile Valley north of Gebel el-Silsila.
In ancient times, this particularly fertile part of Upper Egypt was home to twin towns, important hubs of manufacture and commerce that faced each other on opposite sides of the river. On the west bank stood the town of Nekhen, an early centre of pottery and beer production that stood at the Nile Valley terminus of Western Desert routes to the oases and beyond. On the east bank, its twin settlement of Nekheb guarded the entrance to the Wadi Hellal, which provides a route through the hills to the gold-bearing regions of the Eastern Desert and the Red Sea coast. Together, Nekhen and Nekheb were pioneers in the process of state formation and the foundations of pharaonic civilisation. In their heyday, they were amongst the most important towns in all Egypt, with burgeoning populations. While today they have reverted to small rural villages, traces of their past greatness survive.
To reach Nekheb (now known by its Arabic name, Elkab), my boat has to double back. Huge floating mats of reed and weed block access to the shoreline, so we drift along the west side of an island before carefully navigating a small patch of clear water and then sailing back down an inner channel to the village mooring. On the way, we narrowly avoid a small fishing-boat. An older man rows it with planks of wood while a young boy smacks the surface of the water with a long stick to bring the fish up from the depths. On the mounds of floating weed there are egrets, stilts and glossy ibis. Pied kingfishers hover overhead before plunging into the river for an easy catch.
Nile cruises between Aswan and Luxor generally restrict themselves to the major sites, such as the temple of Kom Ombo. Even Gebel el-Silsila is rarely visited, despite its impressive remains and modern facilities. Rural, isolated Elkab, it appears, has never seen a tourist boat before. Instead of bazaars and caleche drivers awaiting us, there is just an age-old scene of village life: little children in grubby galabeyas, boys riding donkeys, geese and ducks dabbling among the flotsam at the river’s edge. The villagers are as fascinated by us as we are by them, and there is great excitement as our boat comes alongside. Young mothers venture from their ramshackle houses, semi-naked babies in their arms, to gawp at the unusual sight: strangely attired white men and women, cameras and binoculars in hand, arrived from out of nowhere.
I have come to visit the nearby rock-cut tombs of Elkab, with their famous scenes of rural life from 3,500 years ago. Exactly the same tableau, only alive and in three dimensions, is happening around me. Despite lengthy negotiations with the village elders, there is no motorised vehicle to take me to the tombs. I politely decline the offer of a donkey-ride and decide to walk. In the village square—an open stretch of bare ground between groups of houses, close to the riverbank—is the village brick-yard. Freshly moulded mud bricks are drying in the sun in neat rows, a scene repeated in rural communities throughout Egypt since time immemorial. What makes this example particularly poignant is its location, for just a few yards away stands a massive 2,400-year-old wall, made from identical mud bricks. This is the city wall of ancient Nekheb, and it remains perhaps the single largest ancient mud-brick construction in Egypt. Enclosing an area 622 by 600 yards, the wall measures over thirty-six feet thick at its base and stands as high in places. Inside these formidable defences once stood the city of Nekheb—a jumble of domestic and sacred buildings covering every era of pharaonic history from the First Dynasty to the Roman period. The temple to the local goddess Nekhbet was so revered as a shrine of national importance that it was rebuilt at least ten times.
Excavations within the city wall have also uncovered evidence for earlier human occupation at Elkab. Fragments of pottery show that people lived here in the predynastic period (5000–3000 BC), while small stone tools belong to an even earlier phase of activity, as far back as the seventh millennium BC. At this time, hunter-gatherers made seasonal camps each autumn on the east bank of the Nile, to take advantage of the lush new growth and the game it attracted. The particular groups who came to Elkab are called by archaeologists Elkabian, so distinctive are their flint implements. Yet even they were not the first people to live here: stone hand-axes found in the hills surrounding the Wadi Hellal date back as much as 300,000 years. In its own quiet way, the riverbank of Elkab has witn
essed the entire history of human activity in the Nile Valley.
The town and tombs of Elkab were once linked by a stretch of low desert, but the construction of a railway, and later of the main Aswan to Luxor highway, divided the site in two. Although this has destroyed its integrity, it has been a blessing in disguise. The vast majority of visitors who come by road do not stray beyond the tombs. Popular with tourists since the late nineteenth century, the rock-cut sepulchres created for the New Kingdom mayors of Elkab remain a favourite stop-off for coach parties travelling between Aswan and Luxor. Today the site boasts a purpose-built coach park and ticket kiosk, and a small shelter by the roadside contains three large water jars on a stand, shaded from the fierce sun. It is a thoughtful pitstop for passing travellers, an Egyptian Welcome Break—and particularly welcome on days when, with the temperature reaching 47° C in the shade, the wind feels like a fan-assisted oven. By contrast, on the other side of the busy road and railway line (moments after I cross, and without warning, a train comes hurtling by), the ancient city wall offers no concessions to the visitor and thus remains largely off-limits. That is its best hope of survival.
From the tombs with their scenes of agricultural activity—sowing and reaping, harvesting and threshing—I return along the line of the great mud-brick wall to the Nile, rejoin my boat and we find a quiet mooring for the evening a short distance to the north of the village. On the riverbank, a bucolic scene plays out, bringing the ancient tomb paintings to life: big, brown-eyed cattle graze in the shade of a large tree; children sit watching the boat. A little girl in a colourful print dress collects herbs while a small boy chews on a stick of sugar cane, cut from the next-door field with a knife. An older boy arrives on a donkey-cart, dismounts and unhooks the cart. Fodder is brought for the donkey while the cart is loaded with freshly cut sugar cane. The children strip lengths of cane and pass them to our crew who have gone ashore. As the sun sets, the younger boy and girl ride back to their village on their donkey, and the cart is driven home by the farmer with the older boy sitting on top of the load. In the fading light, egrets fly up from the fields to roost on a reedy islet in the Nile.
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