1. In the preparation of this report great benefit was derived from correspondence with Professor Rhys Carpenter.

2. This reflected the fact that the (current) modern history of Jeghbub was entirely bound up with the Sanusi order. It is stated that the oasis was uninhabited when the Grand Sanusi established his headquarters there in 1856. After 1895 the main centre of Sanusi's energies was transferred south across the Libyan desert to Kufra, and Jeghbub became a backwater. When Sidi Idris returned to Cyrenaica in 1943 he did so in the guise of Amir (king to be) of a newly independent country, not as head of the Sanusi religious order. In this way, paradoxically, the Sanusi order was of less significance in the independent Arab state of Libya than it had been through the vicissitudes of Italian colonial rule, when it was variously the ‘resistance' or the de jure partner in a condominium.

3. The writer remembers that an Arab officer of the Libyan army, who had made a duty visit to the oasis, asked for a lift with us back to the coast since otherwise he was stranded there.

4. See, most recently, Leahy, A., ed. Libya and Egypt, London 1990Google Scholar.

5. For example, the mountains of salt have been variously referred to depots in the salt trade or, in contrast, to the rendering of mud houses with a salt based plaster! In any event salination is an endemic problem of these oases.

6. Perhaps the most interesting commentary on Herodotos's account is that of Carpenter, Rhys, Beyond the Pillars of Hercules, London 1973: 110–35Google Scholar.

7. Bates, O., The Eastern Libyans, London 1914Google Scholar gives an account of what was known in his time and more recent surveys can be found in Leahy (n. 4).

8. The earlier scholar to concern himself archaeologically with the Egyptian oases was Ahmad Fakhry. See for example his Siwa Oasis, Cairo 1944. While most recently a survey of developments in oasis archaeology has been provided by Giddy, L. L., Egyptian Oases, Warminster 1987Google Scholar.

9. Cf D. O'Connor, The Nature of Tjemhu (Libyan) Society, in Leahy (n. 4), 64; Bates (n. 7), 160–71; for the oases, 171.

10. For a convenient outline history of the Pentapolis see Chamoux, F., Cyrène sous la monarchie des Battiades, Paris 1953Google Scholar; Romanelli, P., La Cirenaica Romana, Rome 1943Google Scholar.

11. References by these visitors (e.g. from 1790–1899) to the mummies have been collected by Ahmad Fakhry, who gives a very full bibliography in Siwa Oasis, Cairo 1944: 122–23Google Scholar.

12. Ibid., 125.

13. The geographical extension of the practice of mummification is an ideologically vexed question. If mummification is to include all practices designed to preserve the flesh of corpses from decay, then it has a very wide distribution both in space and time. This was seized on eagerly by the ultra diffusionist ‘Children of the Sun’ writers. However, if mummification meant exactly the Egyptian practice of mummification, then the distribution is narrowly restricted to the Nile Valley (including Nubia) and its immediate extension of the Egyptian oases. Some consideration of the distribution of mummification can be found in Smith, G. Elliot and Dawson, W., Egyptian Mummies, London 1924 (1991)Google Scholar. Neither Herodotos nor Bates, who gives a good survey of funerary customs (n. 7, 181–83) mentions mummification among the ancient Libyans.

14. Basketry is obviously a very primordial technique and stands behind weaving, since its materials are to hand raw and do not require processing (spinning etc.). See (in general) Lucas, A. and Harris, J., Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, London 1962, 128–33Google Scholar, with extensive references.

15. Ibid., 132. Also an excellent account of the process in modern times is in Blackman, Winifred, The Fellahin of Upper Egypt, Edinburgh 1921, 157–59Google Scholar; figs 86, 87, 89 illustrate products very similar to those in the Jeghbub tombs. One example reckoned to be of most superior workmanship in fig. 89 is from Siwa.

16. For the use of baskets by the nomadic Eastern Libyans see Bates (n. 7), 152–53.

17. For a brief mise au point of ostrich eggs in antiquity see Finet, A., L'Oeuf d'Autruche, in Quaebegeur, J., ed., Studio Paulo Naster Oblata, Orientalia Antiqua II, Leuven 1982, 66–77Google Scholar. Lexikon der Ägyptologie VI, cols 76–77.

18. See LÄ VI, col 76; Finet (n. 17), 71.

19. NB the modern Christian institution of the Easter Egg; cf. Finet (n. 17), 76. For the deposition in tombs from ancient Neolithic times see LÄ col 76 (at Badari).

20. Finet (n. 17), 69–70. For encounters with ostriches and their eggs in the South Libyan Desert (Sudan) see Bagnold, R. A., Libyan Sands, London 1935, 296–98Google Scholar.

21. See Finet (n. 17), 71, NB note 20. Bates (n. 7), 153. For ostrich eggs in association with stone age remains (flints) found 130 kilometres south of Siwa see Bagnold (n. 20), 175–76.

22. For brief surveys of Nabataean Pottery see P. C. Hammond, Pattern Families in Nabataean Painted Ware, American Journal of Archaeology, 63, 1959, 371–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parr, P. J., A Sequence of Pottery from Petra, in Sanders, J. A., ed., Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century, New York 1970, 348–81Google Scholar; Schmitt-Korte, K., Beitrag zur Nabataischen Keramik, Archäologischer Anzeiger 1968, cols 456-519Google Scholar; Die bemalte Königreich der Nabatäer, München 1970, 47–70Google Scholar.

23. The ‘Nabataean’ capital is known in different parts of the Ptolemaic cultural province, e.g. in and about Alexandria and in the Fayyum as well as in Cyprus (but not in the Pentapolis). Also there is good epigraphical evidence for the presence of Nabataean merchants in the Levant, Greece and Italy, see Wright, G. R. H., A. Nabataean Capital in the Salamis Gymnasium, in Acts of the First International Cypriote Congress, Nicosia 1971, 176–78, NB 177, n. 4Google Scholar.

24. See the once well known book Rostovtzeff, M., Caravan Cities, London 1932 (NB chapters I and II)Google Scholar. There is a newer Italian edition of this book, Citta Caravaniere, Bari 1971Google Scholar, edited with great care by A. di Vita to incorporate later discoveries.

25. The most accessible record of these events is given in Long, G., To Benghazi, Adelaide 1952 (in the official Australian War History Series)Google Scholar.

26. See Fakhry (n. 8), 124–28.

27. See Long (n. 25), 291.

28. See ibid., 303, n. 6.

29. See n. 9 above.

30. See n. E. Pritchard, Evans, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Oxford 1949, pass (NB 14–16)Google Scholar.

31. See ibid., 14–16.

32. Very interesting accounts of life and conditions in Jeghbub at this juncture have been published by both Hassanein Bey and Rosita Forbes who visited the oases jointly and severally at this time. They emphasised the peacefulness, and also the absence of motivation consequent on the non-return of the Sanusi headquarters to the oasis: Forbes, Rosita, The Secret of the Sahara, London 1921Google Scholar; Bey, A. M. Hassanein, The Lost Oasis, London 1925Google Scholar.

33. It is of some interest that Bagnold (n. 20), 327–47, also concluded his impressions of the Libyan desert with an evocation of this idea, viz ‘the lost oasis’.