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The Serabit Expedition of 1930: II. The Mines of Sinai1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2011

A. Barrois
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Extract

The district which constituted the field of our investigation is situated on the western slope of central Sinai facing the Gulf of Suez. The remains of ancient mine-workings are divided into two groups of unequal importance: the northern group, of which the numerous openings lie north and south of the upper course of Wadi Baba, and to which belong the mines of the plateau of Serabit, and the southern group, confined to the turquoise galleries of Maghara. The two groups are included in a rectangle which measures about 35 kilometers from east to west and 25 from north to south.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , April 1932 , pp. 101 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1932

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References

2 See the remarkable work of John Ball, The Geography and Geology of West Cen tral Sinai, Cairo, 1916, and the geological map which accompanies it. This map is the only survey on a small scale (1: 50,000) of this part of Sinai. Unfortunately it does not extend beyond the eastern part of the temple of Serabit el-Khadim and the naqb Budra to the south.

3 Rāmūth, dialectal form of the literary rimth, a kind of salsuginous plant.

4 Ball, p. 13.

5 Lucas, A., Ancient Egyptian Material, London, 1926, pp. 64Google Scholar, 83, 143, 147, 216. The presence of malachite in the mines of Wadi Kharig and of Wadi Umm Rinna is mentioned by Ball, pp. 188–191.

6 Concerning the pronunciation there is no doubt. I do not know the origin of the strange spelling of Wadi Bateh given by Petrie and Weill. The name was not even known to the Arabs who accompanied us.

7 See Petrie, pp. 55 ff.; Weill, pp. 168 ff. The maps which accompany their descriptions are rather inexact and not of much use.

8 Weill, p. 168.

9 Khasif, ‘place where water stands,’ hence a well dug in the rock, which always has water.

10 Qaṭṭar, ‘oozing’; from qaṭara, ‘to fall drop by drop.’

11 Literary: ṭalḣ, ‘acacia.’

12 Rūd el-‘;air, ‘valley of donkeys.’ The term rūd is frequently used in the peninsula for the name of an unimportant wadi, a ravine dug by the waters but where little moisture remains; cf. istarāḍa, ‘to contain water,’ used in reference to a valley or a basin.

13 Morgan, De, Recherches sur les origines de l'Égypte, l'âge de la pierre et des mêtaux, Paris, 1896, pp. 219 ff.Google Scholar; Weill, pp. 167 ff.

14 Wrongly held by certain authors to be piles of slag from the reduction of minerals.

15 De Morgan, p. 219.

16 Partially published by Gardiner, A. H. and Peet, T. E., The Inscriptions of Sinai, part I, Egypt Exploration Fund, London, 1917Google Scholar.

17 Cf. Petrie, pp. 109 ff.

18 ‘La Turquoise chez les anciens Égyptiens,’ in Kemi, 1928, fasc. III-IV, pp. 99ff.

19 This is one of the soundest arguments given by Loret for the identification of mafkat and turquoise. We are able to verify the instability of the Sinai turquoise, which easily passes from celestial blue to green, and from green to a dull gray.

20 See plate XXVIII.

21 See Canaan, p. 412, fig. 801, from Maspero, Histoire Ancienne, II, p. 147.

22 Father Butin definitely holds to the XIIth dynasty, which was the period of most intense activity at the mines; in it the texts explicitly mention the use of foreign labor. Sethe dates the inscriptipns in the obscure reigns of the pharaohs of the XIIIth or XIVth dynasty or even of the period of the Hyksos. Petrie makes them contemporaneous with the XVIIIth dynasty, and places them in the reign of Thotmes III.