Siwa Oasis
Interesting facts
- The ancient Egyptians called the oasis 'Field of Trees'.
- Herodotus wrote of a 'fountain of the Sun' here whose water ran coldest in the heat of noon.
- Greek colonists from Cyrene reached the oasis in the 7th century BC and identified its god Amun with Zeus, spreading the oracle's fame across the Greek world.
- According to ancient accounts, Alexander the Great found his way across the desert to the oracle by following birds.
- The first European known to visit since Roman times was the English traveller William George Browne, who came in 1792 to find the oracle temple.
- A wealthy Siwan bride's full set of traditional silver jewellery could weigh five or six kilograms.
- Girls wore a large silver disc called adrim on a neck ring and gave it up in a special ceremony on their wedding day.
- At the yearly Siyaha festival, Siwan men gather for three days on a hill outside town to eat together and settle their quarrels.
- Before the modern road, camel tracks through Siwa formed part of the pilgrim route linking the Maghreb to Cairo and on to Mecca.
- In the Second World War the oasis was a base of Britain's Long Range Desert Group, and Rommel's Afrika Korps occupied it three times.
Why it is worth it
Siwa is the most remote of Egypt's great oases, an island of green in a depression of the Western Desert between the Qattara Depression and the dunes of the Great Sand Sea, about 50 km from the Libyan border and some 560 km from Cairo. The oasis runs about 80 km long and 20 km wide and sinks to around 19 metres below sea level. Some two hundred natural springs feed a dense forest of date palms and olive groves, while the low ground is filled with great salt lakes whose shores glitter white, and beyond them rise the yellow dunes.
At the centre of the town stands the ruin of Shali, the old fortified settlement built on a rock outcrop out of kershef, a building material of salt and mud, with palm logs for beams. For centuries it was a warren of houses and alleys climbing five storeys above the surrounding town, until three days of heavy rain in 1926 began dissolving its walls and its people moved out. Today the melted, sculptural shapes of the ruin dominate the skyline, especially beautiful at sunset. Nearby, on the hill of Aghurmi, stand the remains of the temple of the Oracle of Amun, one of the most celebrated oracles of the ancient world; Alexander the Great made the desert journey to consult it, and tradition holds that it confirmed him as son of the god. The Gebel al-Mawta, the Mountain of the Dead, is honeycombed with rock-cut tombs of the Roman era.
Siwa also has a distinct culture: its people speak Siwi, a Berber language, and are known for their jewellery, embroidery and traditional dress, and for buildings of mud and salt that echo the colours of the desert. Bathing in the springs, among them the one known as Cleopatra's Bath, and watching the evening light over the salt lakes and palm groves are among the oasis's quiet pleasures.
Getting there
Siwa town lies at the heart of the oasis. A tarmac road, built in the 1980s, connects it with Mersa Matruh on the Mediterranean coast, whose Mersa Matruh International Airport (MUH) is about 286 km away in a straight line; the drive south across the desert is the usual way in.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Siwa Oasis is an urban oasis in Egypt. It is situated between the Qattara Depression and the Great Sand Sea in the Western Desert, 50 kilometres (31 mi) east of the Egypt–Libya border and 560 kilometres (350 mi) from the Egyptian capital city of Cairo. It is famed for its role in ancient Egypt as the home to an oracle of Amun, the ruins of which are a popular tourist attraction, giving it the ancient name Oasis of Amun-Ra, after the major Egyptian deity.
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