March 23

Tuesday. Around Siwa

In his Life of Alexander, Plutarch tells the story of Alexander the Great's visit to Ammon's oracle at the oasis of Siwa. Alexander had conceived the desire to visit the god. The desert threatened death by thirst and, should a wind come up while the army was marching through the sands, the possibility of being buried and lost forever, like the army of Cambyses. But no account of the difficulties of the journey could dissuade him. Signs of the god's favor accompanied the march. Constant rains provided water to drink and cleansed the air of sand, and, when the guides got lost because of the destruction of signposts, crows came and led the way.

Alexander came to the god with a couple of questions. First, he wanted to know whether he had caught and punished all the men responsible for the murder of his father Philip II, or whether any had escaped, and then he wanted to know whether he was destined to rule the world. To the first the god gave an unexpected reply -- that he should rejoice because his father was immortal. Hence the notion that Alexander was the son not of Philip II but of Zeus Ammon himself. (The god's positive answer to the second question was belied by Alexander's early death. The story of his visit to Ammon's temple recurs in other ancient sources, notable Arrian.)

The temple still stands on a prominence above the village of Aghurmi, surrounded by the palm trees of the oasis. (It's the block of white stone in the sea of trees in the photograph below.) We arrived at the site after a long, enchanting stroll through the oasis itself. From the top of Shali it looks like an easy walk -- straight line from the town to Aghurmi, a few km away, over absolutely level ground. The reality is very different. Once you have plunged into the oasis, the horizon vanishes; there is nothing but the sun by which to orient yourself. The trees grow thick, and the ground is criss-crossed with larger and smaller irrigation channels (like the one in the photo to the right). The bigger ones can only be crossed by bridges, and sometimes we had trouble finding the way over. We had to stop several times to ask directions.

The oasis really is an oasis. You can't believe you are in the midst of a desert that "threatens death through lack of water," for water is everywhere. We saw frogs in one of the several ponds we came across. The palms, which grow straight and strong, are thoroughly domesticated; they require human intervention for pollination, as we saw a man whom we asked for directions doing. The stamens are placed in palm fronds and then stuck in the trees. Little gardens of water-loving plants are tucked away behind low fences. We saw one of the famous Siwa boxes, made entirely of palm and assembled without any fasteners. Palms serve (as I've already remarked several times in this Diary) almost any purpose you can imagine; we noticed fronds being cut from trees no doubt to be used as roofing or for basketwork, and freshly cut palm trunks lying split on the ground, the timber of the Western Desert. (At Qasr in Dakhla we would see trunks sacting as the frames of building several hundred years old.)

After an hour or so we emerged from the trees at the foot of Ammon's oracle temple. Below the hill stands another temple of Ammon,  Umm Ubayd, dated to the XXX Dynasty under the pharaoh Nektanebo II. We walked up through the town to the temple itself. The walls still stand several meters high, and the inner sanctuary remains unmolested. It consists of two rooms with a door between; the inner room belonged to the god, and petitioners -- Alexander included -- stood at the doorway to ask their questions of the god. It provokes a certain romantic frisson to stand at the very spot (or at least so close the difference doesn't matter) to where Alexander himself must have stood, petitioning the god, 2,337 years ago (right, at the inner doorway). Not, of course, that there's anything to admire in Alexander -- his reign was marked by extraordinary brutality and countless pointless deaths, as A. B. Bosworth has recounted in his uncompromising book Alexander and the East. It's rather like that magical connection communicated by contact with objects that famous persons have had contact with, as if something of their aura -- whether positive or chillingly horrible -- lingers around the spot.

The village of Aghurmi next to the temple has its own interest, particularly the mosque with its traditional-style minaret. I have seen photos of minarets, also in mudbrick, from old mosques in west Africa (in Mali in particular) in exactly the same style.

In the morning before we made our pilgrimage to Ammon (who, I must say, seemed utterly unimpressed by our visit), we had viewed some tombs closer to the central town, at Gebel al-Mawta. The tombs are carved into the face of a rock that rises above Shali; you can just make out their entrances in the photo to the right. The first tomb we saw -- and the most impressive --  belonged to a man named Si-Ammon; Fakhry, who calls the tomb "no doubt the most beautiful in all the oases of the Western Desert," dated it to the third century BCE, which seems likely to be right for a number of reasons. We were not permitted to take photos so, sadly, I can't illustrate here the stunningly beautiful and evocative wall and ceiling paintings. They show the owner, sporting a Greek-style beard, and his children, one of whom is fair and looks "Greek," the other dark and looking "Egyptian" (these features have spawned interesting stories about Si-Ammon's marital history, but in truth one must be cautious, and much more is known today about "inter-culturality" in Ptolemaic Egypt than when Fakhry was writing). A side panel displays Isis standing with her moon and crescent headdress, holding a jar of water; the jury o forty-two judges awaits the dead to try him; on the ceiling, a huge painting of the sky goddess Nut shows her naked, straddling the heavens from horizon to horizon as Horus emerges from her vagina. There are some Coptic graffiti on the walls here and there, attesting to the tomb's reuse -- or robbing -- in late Roman times. We then looked at three other tombs: the "Unfinished Tomb" of Mesu-isis; the "Tomb of the Crocodile," which was discovered in 1940 when locals were seeking shelter during the war and still contained some offerings, and which Fakhry dated to late Ptolemaic or early Roman periods but Amgad thought could belong to the Persian period (perhaps -- the use of green in the decorations is unusual in Egypt and the rosettes on Osiris's clothing might be thought Persian in influence; but I would reserve judgment); and the "Tomb of the Roman Mummies." Other tombs were not open to us.

We also had a brief look at some tombs at Gebel al Dakghur supposedly of New Kingdom date -- and if so evidence of much earlier occupation of Siwa than anything we had yet seen -- being excavated by a team of German archaeologists; but these hand been closed to prevent looting, and we could only stare at the locked doors while Amgad described the wonders supposedly inside.

The afternoon we headed out to a site called Bilad al-Rum, the place of the Romans. On the road the car broke down -- another relic, I think, of the original problem we had on the drive from Bahariya to our first campsite. It became clear pretty soon that Hamada would need some time to fix it, so the four of us (Jimmy, Zoe, Eph, and I) headed out into the escarpments along the road, where, as usual, there were more rock-cut tombs, and a great view of the lake (right). The tombs had some nice paintings (left) and structures with plaster still on the mudbrick walls -- as usual completely unprotected and unmarked. I wandered off on my own a bit, trying again for that sense of being alone, my favorite illusion in a place full of people; eventually I came back to the car just as Hamada was finishing up, and we continued our short drive to the site.

Bilad al-Rum gained considerable notoriety a few years ago when a Greek archaeologist working there announced that she had discovered the tomb of Alexander the Great. Her announcement stirred up the archaeological and historical community, for ancient sources all agree that Alexander's body -- which had been the object of much undignified scuffling among his generals after his death -- was eventually interred in a special mausoleum in Alexandria (itself long unlocated, but now new claims to have identified it have been published: Andrew Chugg, "The Tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria," American Journal of Ancient History n.s. 1 [2002] 75-108). It turned out that she was wrong -- the buildingshe claimed for Alexander's last resting place seems instead to have been a temple erected in the Roman imperial period, perhaps by the emperor Trajan (whose works dot the Western Desert). But the controversy was so great, and so acrimonious, that the Director of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities has closed the site, and all we could do was peer at the structures from the other side of the fence (right).

Like all the oases we visited, Siwa hosts a "traditional house" turned into a museum devoted to traditional local folkways. The Siwa House (left) owes its existence to a grant from the Canadian government (which, I understand, has made similar grants to other oases; it would be interesting to know the origin of Canadian interest in traditional Libyan Desert life -- a landscape and folkways more different from those of Canada would be hard to imagine). Its two floors contain living rooms and, perhaps most interesting, an outdoor area which holds the stove, food preparation space, and a bath and toilet. Like all buildings in the desert, the basic construction material is mudbrick with beams of date palm trunks. Inside, the displays include musical instruments, implements of daily life, and mannequins dressed in traditional men's and women's clothing. These costumes were of course for special occasions, not daily wear. Until relatively recently, however, the populations of the oases retained many of their older customs and habits; there is still considerable conservatism and sense of local -- as opposed to Egyptian -- identity in the desert. At Siwa the sense of a local identity is strengthened by the fact that the Siwans have their own language, a Berber dialect laced with borrowings from Arabic. I understand that this dialect is dying out, or at least tends to be less used, and less known, by young people; but I was also told that you still hear it in Siwa today. This is one element in the congeries of factors that make this region of Egypt different from the Nile valley, and indeed link it more closely in every way with eastern Libya, with which it forms -- and in the past in fact did form -- a logical unit of geography and culture. The Siwans also retain strong memories of intra-civic warfare between the groups that inhabited the eastern and western parts of the city; an annual festival is held today in a certain part of the town whose buildings are occupied only during the celebration to commemorate the end to these feuds.

Some sights around the oasis that day --

Up by Ammon's temple at Aghurmi, we stop for tea; it is hot, and we need some shade. A flock of women and kids surround us, selling necklaces and souvenirs. We don't buy, but I do pay the kids to pose in their colorful costumes -- a bad practice, I know, and one I commit only this one time, but it seems worth it.

In town by Shali we take rides in donkey carts -- Jimmy, Amgad, and I in one, Eph and Zoe in another. It's for the tourists, of course, but how can one resist? Typically, Eph makes it a contest and is immensely satisfied when the cart he and Zoe occupy wins the race around the town. (He will not hear my argument that the weight distribution may have contributed to an unfair advantage.) We see three girls in pink returning from school during the jaunt, but they disappear around a corner before I can capture them on film; my sudden request to stop the cart to get their picture results in an upset when the collar shifts on the donkey; much ado to get it re-settled, while I feel guilty.

We head out somewhere -- alas, my notes are incomplete here -- for sunset over the desert. Sunsets and rises are short and sharp in the desert air; you must be quick to catch them, and the colors soon wash out into the pastels that all desert palettes seem to share.

Dinner that night at the Siwa Oasis Hotel was, alas, held in their regular dining room, and consisted of a buffet of perfectly nice food -- how can anyone go wrong eating oasis rice, as I have said before and will say again? -- but a let-down after last night's feast outdoors, under the palms, with bread fresh from the ovens. . . .

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