In The Red Sea Mountains of Egypt and Egyptian Years, English scholar and explorer Leo Arthur Tregenza (1901-98) describes an Egypt unknown today. In his prose the Nile still floods, and Bedouin of the desert practice a way of life unchanged for thousands of years. L.A. Tregenza came to Egypt in 1927 to teach school, and remained until the 1952 Revolution. His passions in his native Cornwall had been the civilization of Rome, natural history, and walking. He carried on all three in Egypt, traveling on foot during school holidays through some of the country's wildest and most historic landscapes. The books deal mainly with his three long treks (1947, 1949, 1951) in the Eastern Desert. They also provide an extremely valuable depiction of the pre-High Dam rhythms of the Nile and its rural people. Walking with Tregenza, the reader probes the Greek and Roman mining and quarrying sites of the desert wilderness, including Mons Porphyrites and Mons Claudianus. When Tregenza finds an inscription he translates it on the spot, drawing us closer to the lives of those who toiled here so long ago. He is a careful observer of wildlife, so with him we track the birds, mammals, and reptiles, learning the names and habits of each species. Most memorably, we get to know the individual Bedouin men of the desert who were Tregenza's companions and friends. The nightly show in the firmament captivates him, inspiring him to write beautifully of life's mysteries. The reader becomes, as Tregenza described his own sensation, "subordinate to the strange, overmastering appeal of the desert itself." Tregenza's two classic accounts, published respectively in 1955 and 1958, are published here together in one volume, with a new foreword by Joseph J. Hobbs.

The Nile Basin contains a record of human activities spanning the last million years. However, the interactions between prehistoric humans and environmental changes in this area are complex and often poorly understood. This comprehensive book explains in clear, non-technical terms how prehistoric environments can be reconstructed, with examples drawn from every part of the Nile Basin. Adopting a source-to-sink approach, the book integrates events in the Nile headwaters with the record from marine sediment cores in the Nile Delta and offshore. It provides a detailed record of past environmental changes throughout the Nile Basin and concludes with a review of the causes and consequences of plant and animal domestication in this region and of the various prehistoric migrations out of Africa into Eurasia and beyond. A comprehensive overview, this book is ideal for researchers in geomorphology, climatology and archaeology.

The last quarter century has seen extensive research on the ports of the Red Sea coast of Egypt, the road systems connecting them to the Nile, and the mines and quarries in the region. Missing has been a systematic study of the peoples of the Eastern Desert--the area between the Red Sea and the Nile Valley--in whose territories these ports, roads, mines, and quarries were located. The historical overview of the Eastern Desert in the shape of a roughly chronological narrative presented in this book fills that gap. The multidisciplinary perspective focuses on the long-term history of the region. The extensive range of topics addressed includes specific historical periods, natural resources, nomadic survival strategies, ancient textual data, and the interaction between Christian hermits and their neighbors. The breadth of perspective does not sacrifice depth, for all authors deal in some detail with the specifics of their subject matter. As a whole, this collection provides an outline of the history and sociology of the Eastern Desert unparalleled in any language for its comprehensiveness. As such, it will be the essential starting point for future research on the Eastern Desert. Includes a CD of eleven audio files with music of the Ababda Nomads, and six short videos of Ababda culture.

For thousands of years Egypt has crowded the Nile Valley and Delta. The Eastern Desert, however, has also played a crucial-though until now little understood-role in Egyptian history. Ancient inhabitants of the Nile Valley feared the desert, which they referred to as the Red Land, and were reluctant to venture there, yet they exploited the extensive mineral wealth of this region. They also profited from the valuable wares conveyed across the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea ports, which originated from Arabia, Africa, India, and elsewhere in the east. Based on twenty years of archaeological fieldwork conducted in the Eastern Desert, The Red Land reveals the cultural and historical richness of this little known and seldom visited area of Egypt. A range of important archaeological sites dating from Prehistoric to Byzantine times is explored here in text and illustrations. Among these ancient treasures are petroglyphs, cemeteries, fortified wells, gold and emerald mines, hard stone quarries, roads, forts, ports, and temples. With 250 photographs and fascinating artistic reconstructions based on the evidence on the ground, along with the latest research and accounts from ancient sources and modern travelers, the authors lead the reader into the remotest corners of the hauntingly beautiful Eastern Desert to discover the full story of the area's human history.