On The Road – TKH – Sinai trail Pt. 5 Serabit El Khadem – Traces of the Ancients

This is actually a turquoise mine a bit before we reached Serabit, but showing this gives me an opportunity to talk briefly about something else. This mine looks almost the same as the one in Serabit, only the pedants will care. What we are looking at here is the mine tailings, the rock thrown over the berm as the miners dig deeper into the rock.

The person in the photo is our guide that day, the only female guide on the Sinai trail, Omm Nasser. She is an incredibly strong-willed character. It is this trait together with the fact that she is married to a sheikh that gives her the leverage to be a guide.

Nonetheless she has to deal with restrictions in her guiding activities. For instance she cannot guide groups with men in them for overnight trips, but can do so with women groups. She and her husband then built a shelter in the village and from there mixed groups can take day trips.

(Photo credit: AMK)

This is now at Serbia Serabit proper and shows a cave near the mines where probably the scribes, the overseers and the muckety mucks were working. For us it provided a good bit of shade to rest after half a day’s hike through open terrain. This mine is located probably some 1000-1500 feet above the major wadi.

(Photo credit: AMK)

This is one of the entrances to the temple at Serabit dedicated to Hathor, the cow goddess and goddess  of the miners, the copper and turquoise miners specifically. This complex stems from around 1780 BC and was expanded in later centuries.

(Photo credit: AMK)

This picture gives more of an impression of the size of the site, about 80 x 35 m (250 x 100 ft). It is not as straight as a typical temple of that era both because of the location on the edge of an escarpment and because a second temple was added later.

(Photo credit:AMK)

This is one of the inscription panels in the wadi below the temple. It is proto semitic writing and this alphabet moved from this area to the Phoenicians and from there to the Greeks, undergoing changes along the way. The writing was deciphered in the early years of the 20th century.

(Photo credit: AMK)

This is another panel, a bit more exposed and on a more slanted rock and hence a bit more weathered than the one above. This stuff is about 4000 years old.

These were the kind of graffiti where the authorship and the age were impossible to establish. It could be the local youth having fun or it could be from ancient time. Without writing nearby it is difficult to assess the age.

(Photo credit: AMK)

Now this guy, COC from NY, made it easy. He dated his graffiti as being from 1912. If he could travel there at that time, he must have been well off and no kid. At least he did not put his graffiti in together with those of the ancient people, but on a rock nearby.

This was a complex of inscriptions of much more recent vintage left behind by pilgrims to Mecca (Arabaic writing) and to St Katherine (Greek writing) (Notice the cross in the center of the picture)

(Photo credit: AMK)