Gold mining in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, from New Kingom to medieval times. New insight from the Samut district

Abstract

Gold was plentiful in Egypt and had been used by the Pharaohs from the earliest times as a means of asserting their power. But the history and archaeology of the mining and production of Egyptian gold is a lot less known than the splendour of the country’s kings. Between 2013 and 2016, the French Eastern Desert expedition aimed to fill the gaps in our knowledge through the excavation of the gold-mining district of Samut, situated between Edfu and Marsa Alam. It hosts one of the largest and at the same time perfectly preserved Ptolemaic mineral processing sites of the region, Samut North. This enabled the first ever comparison between archaeological remains and the well-known treatise of Agatharchides of Cnidus exposing the terrible living conditions in the gold mines of the Ptolemies. Three other sites were also explored: the impressive village of Samut el-Beda, dated to the New Kingdom, and two small villages from medieval times. Structures and artifacts related to gold processing were discovered at all of the sites, supplying crucial data on the technological and organizational sides of gold exploitation over more than two millennia in the Eastern Desert.

Keywords

• Egypt
• Eastern Desert. gold processing
• mine
• Ptolemaic
• New Kingdom
• medieval period