Bir Umm Fawakhir: Insights into Ancient Egyptian Mining

Archaeological surveys at the site of Bir Umm Fawakhir in the central Eastern Desert of Egypt have clarified its role as a 5th-6th century gold-mining town. To date, 152 out of an estimated 216 buildings in the main settlement have been mapped in detail, eight outlying clusters of ruins have been identified, and four ancient mines have been inspected. In conjunction with Diodorus Siculus' first century B.C. account of Egyptian gold mining, the recent archaeological discoveries permit new insights into ancient Egyptian mining towns and techniques. Some evidence of activity at Bir Umm Fawakhir in earlier Roman, Ptolemaic, and pharaonic times has also been found.

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The Bir Umm Fawakhir site, surveyed by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in 1992, 1993, and 1996, is the first entire ancient Egyptian gold-mining community to be studied archaeologically. Located in the central Eastern Desert of Egypt, Bir Umm Fawakhir was long believed to be a Roman caravan station serving traffic traveling from the Nile to Red Sea but was actually a 5th-6th century Byzantine/Coptic gold-mining town. The sprawling settlement is estimated to have housed slightly more than 1,000 people who worked the mines riddling the mountainsides and reduced and washed the ore. Although direct textual evidence is lacking, it seems probable that in light of the compelling need for gold, the imperial governors of the Thebaid (Upper Egypt) and their bureaucracies were concerned with the mines at Bir Umm Fawakhir, their product, and their support. Also, it is difficult to see who, apart from the government, could have recruited and routinely supplied so many workers in so remote a region.

Figure 1. A map of Bir Umm Fawakhir main settlement showing areas mapped in 1992, 1993, and 1996.

Bir Umm Fawakhir, about 5 km northeast, lies in a different geological zone. The Fawakhir granite is a stock intruded into the older Precambrian rocks. As no agriculture has ever succeeded in this hyperarid desert, the only resources are mineral, namely, gold, granite, and water. The granite was quarried to no great extent in the Roman period, but it also acts as an aquifer, carrying water in tiny cracks until it is stopped by the dense ultramafic rocks to the west. 3 Wells have always been dug there. Most importantly, however, the quartz veins injected into the granite are auriferous, particularly towards the edge of the stock. (Many other minerals occur as well, including pyrite, chalcopyrite, and hematite, which stains the quartz reddish.)

Estimates of the gold yield vary widely. 4,5 What is consistent among these analyses, however, is the conclusion that the yield at Bir Umm Fawakhir is very low compared to the older mines about 4 km southeast in the Wadi el-Sid. The latter were probably worked out well before the Coptic/Byzantine period. The combination of the paucity of rich ore sources as well as the urgent need for gold in the 5th and 6th centuries probably explains why the low-yield mines at Bir Umm Fawakhir were worked and why virtually nothing has happened at the site since.

Researchers have mapped, in detail, 152 out of an estimated 216 buildings so far. Individual houses are laid out on both sides of the street, and many are still a meter or more in height. Doors, stone benches, and wall niches for storage are also preserved in many cases. The basic pattern is a two- or three-room house, but several houses are often joined into larger agglomerated units. The largest building mapped so far is Building 106, which has 22 rooms.

Figure 2. A view of Bir Umm Fawakhir's main settlement. The plaza area is shown in the foreground surrounded by buildings 92, 100, 101, 102, 99, 97, and part of 93. Granite Quarry 2 lies at the foot of the hill on the left. The main street runs northwest toward the modern road and settlement. The Roman watch tower is on the mountain top at the far upper right. (Photograph by Henry Cowherd.)

Several cemetery areas have also been identified on the ridges around the town. The graves are simple cists built of granite slabs or natural clefts in the granite with cairns piled on top. All of the graves found so far are small and thoroughly looted, but the pottery scattered around them indicates that they are of the same period as the main settlement.

Apart from the sherds, which are thick on the ground and used as the primary dating evidence, 2,3 , 6 surface finds are sparse. In particular, no written evidence has yet been recovered from the site aside from the dipinti, which are dockets painted in red on the shoulders of wine jars. Written in a cursive Greek hand and highly fragmentary, the dipinti have so far yielded little information beyond showing the presence of an imported luxury (i.e., wine) at a remote site.

With the potential exception of two possible community bake ovens, all of the buildings mapped so far appear to be domestic. Crosses and other Coptic symbols indicate that the population was Christian, but no church has been located. Likewise, no administrative buildings, storehouses, or workshops have been found, although there is some reason to believe they existed closer to the modern road, where the wadi wash is heaviest.

Figure 3. A map of the Bir Umm Fawakhir vicinity showing the outlying areas and quarries.

In addition to the detailed mapping of the main settlement, the researchers have also begun a walking survey of the immediate vicinity. Eight outlying clusters of ruins of the same date as the main settlement have been identified, and more may exist (Figure 3). The outlying sites range in size from a few huts to more than 60 buildings in one site (Outlier 6). Outlier 2, on the Roman road between the wells and granite quarry 1, is particularly well preserved. One house may still stand to its original height of about 2 m, and two houses have silos associated with them. The silos, built of cobbles and thick mud plaster, are of particular interest because such features have not been detected elsewhere on the site and because their association with individual houses does not suggest central control of grain rations.

*Diodorus is frequently cited as the only ancient account of Egyptian gold mining. He states he tried to check his sources, but he relied on Agatharcides' account from the 2nd century B.C. It is not clear whether either writer ever saw a gold mine; however, Diodorus wrote approximately half a millennium before the Byzantine/Coptic operations at Bir Umm Fawakhir. If nothing else, the political and economic situation had changed. Diodorus' kings and queens of Egypt (the last of whom was Cleopatra) had long been replaced by distant emperors in Rome or Constantinople, and Egypt had been reduced to a province.

The first stage of mining that Diodorus describes is fire-setting, which is used to shatter the rock.



"The gold-bearing earth which is hardest they first burn with a hot fire, and when they have crumbled it...they continue the working of it by hand; and the soft rock which can yield to moderate effort is crushed with a sledge by myriads of unfortunate wretches. And the entire operations are in charge of a skilled worker who distinguishes the stone and points it out to the labourers;...the physically strongest break the quartz-rock with iron hammers, applying no skill to the task, but only force."7

Figure 4. A mine entrance with revetment. The main settlement lies in the long narrow wadi in the background. (Photograph by Henry Cowherd.)

Diodorus also discusses how the stone is quarried.



"The boys there who have not yet come to maturity, entering through the tunnels into the galleries formed by the removal of the rock, laboriously gather up the rock...piece by piece and carry it out into the open to the place outside the entrance. Then those who are above thirty years of age take this quarried stone from them and with iron pestles pound a specified amount of it in stone mortars, until they have worked it down to the size of a vetch."7

Figure 5. Three dimpled crushing stones and the lower stone from a rotary mill. (Photograph by Henry Cowherd.)

"Thereupon the women and older men receive from them the rock of this size and cast it into mills of which a number stand there in a row, and taking their places in groups of two or three at the spoke or handle of each mill they grind it until they have worked [it] down...to the consistency of the finest flour."7

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Diodorus describes gold-washing and refining.



EARLIER ACTIVITY Exploitation of the Eastern Desert extends far back into prehistory, but at Bir Umm Fawakhir, good evidence goes back only to the late New Kingdom period (ca. 1307-1070 B.C.). Middle Kingdom, Old Kingdom, and Predynastic (roughly 3200-ca. 1783 B.C.) inscriptions are present in the Wadi Hammamat, but not at Bir Umm Fawakhir or in the Wadi el-Sid. Roman activity is attested, though it is less extensive than when the entire site of Bir Umm Fawakhir was considered 1st-2nd century A.D. The small granite quarries were probably Roman undertakings, although possibly only exploratory. There is a small amount of Roman pottery in Quarry 2 with quarrying marks identical to those at a known major granite quarry at Mons Claudianus. A couple of partly quarried blocks have been incorporated in 5th-6th century houses, and the Romans had an unexcelled passion for handsome and exotic stones. The Roman period ostraca (letters and messages written on potsherds) reported as coming from Bir Umm Fawakhir pertain to military activity 10 and probably came from the vicinity of the modern mines in the Wadi el-Sid. The modern mines, operated in the 1940s and 1950s, were probably the focus of most of the ancient efforts as well. Tailings there yielded a handful of sherds of Roman, possibly Ptolemaic (334-64 B.C.), and Late Period (26th Dynasty, 664-535 B.C.) dates. The 1996 survey located the remains of late New Kingdom activity near the Wadi el-Sid mines. The Turin Papyrus, dateable to the reign of Ramses IV of the 20th Dynasty (ca. 1163-1156 B.C.), can reasonably be read as a map to the stone quarries in the Wadi Hammamat. The papyrus also shows a well with "a Mountain of Gold" and a "Mountain of Silver" just beyond. 11 Thus, while the map indicates that pharaonic mines ought to exist in the vicinity of Bir Umm Fawakhir, the survey has only recently been able to document them. Some very large (ca. 8 m square) and heavy slabs with shallow depressions on the top, unlike the smaller and deeper Bir Umm Fawakhir grinding stones, may represent pharaonic or Ptolemaic ore reduction activities, but all stones found so far have been pushed out of any sort of context by modern road building.

"In the last steps the skilled workmen receive the stone which has been ground to powder;...they rub [it] upon a broad board which is slightly inclined, pouring water over it all the while; whereupon the earthy matter in it, melted away by the action of the water, runs down the board, while that which contains the gold remains on the wood because of its weight. And repeating this a number of times, they first of all rub it gently with their hands, and then lightly pressing it with sponges of loose texture they remove...whatever is porous and earthy, until there remains only the pure gold-dust."7