Kab Marfu'a
Egypt's deserts are fearsome places: drifts of pale yellow sand lap about ragged outcrops of dark rock; all is oppressive heat and throat-parching dryness. It is bad enough encountering such conditions from the safety of an air-conditioned coach and knowing that adequate supplies of food and water are only a few minutes drive away. What it must have been like in the days when there was no refuge from the heat and supplies were uncertain doesn't bear thinking about.
Yet in the furthest reaches of the desert evidences of human activities can be found - rock art, quarries and mines, and the remains of buildings preserved by the dry desert air. For the past few years the Universities of Delaware and California and Leyden University have been cooperating on a survey of the eastern desert, the area between the Nile and the Red Sea. Named after the most famous ancient port on the Red Sea, the Berenike Project has succeeded in finding many ancient sites and identifying some of them.
One place that is mentioned by Pliny, the Antonine Itinerary and the Peutinger Table is the Roman fortress of Apollonos which, apparently, provided shelter and supplies for travellers between Berenike and Edfu. Explorers from the Berenike Project found a badly ruined Roman fort in Wadi Gemal that they think may have been Apollonos.
Half a mile to the north there is an extensive area of ruins whose ancient name is not known, so the Berenike Project explorers refer to it by the local beduin name of Kab Marfu'a. They have found over a hundred buildings spread out in an area 250 yards by 300 yards, all constructed of flat slabs of local stone piled up with a minimum of mud mortar. These insecure walls are up to three feet wide at the base but rapidly taper to less than half that at head height.
Although at least one of the buildings was double storey, as shown by the remains of a stone staircase, no upper stories survive, probably because they were built of wood or consisted of little more than airy enclosures protected by curtains of cloth or leather. However the walls are frequently high enough to show the remains of doorways and windows.
One particularly large cluster of buildings is referred to by the project members as "the Administrative Centre" and directly behind this on a spur of a rocky outcrop is an artificial platform on which stands the remains of a large building. This was probably a temple, though what god was worshipped here we do not know. It is possible that at least some of the buildings were decorated with plaster on which inscriptions and frescoes were painted, but if so no trace whatsoever has been found.
According to the pottery evidence, the settlement of Kab Marfu'a was founded around the 1st century AD and lasted down to the 5th century AD. This was a period when mines to the northeast were supplying the Roman empire with beryls (a green coloured form of aluminium silicate related to emerald). The initial thought was that Kab Marfu'a was also a beryl mine, an idea that appeared to be confirmed by the discovery of a couple of small beryls in the ruins, as well as several dozen hard quartz pounders that were used by ancient Egyptian miners to break up the rock.
In addition there are clear signs that Kab Marfu'a was a wealthy place with a degree of ostentatious living typical of a gold-rush town. Many of the amphorae found on the site and used originally to transport oil or wine are not from Egypt at all, but originate from Gaul and Mauretania (Morocco and Algeria). The explorers also found numerous sherds of pottery - pottery of all periods and types - that had been deliberately shaped in antiquity to look like the letters T, V and Y. It is thought that they may have been counters or tokens for some sort of game.
It is tempting to imagine rambustious miners, their pockets full of cash from their successful prospecting, swaggering into Kab Marfu'a and demanding nothing less than Gaulish wine to drink and Mauretanian olive oil for anointing their sweaty bodies - then losing the lot in a game of chance presided over by some dark-eyed ladies of negotiable virtue.
Unfortunately the rock around Kab Marfu'a is not beryl-bearing, so despite the presence of several shallow shafts hewn into the rock, Kab Marfu'a was not a busy mining settlement. It was, however, situated conveniently close to the trade route from Berenike to Edfu, so rather than a centre of mining, Kab Marfu'a is more likely to have been the central point to which beryls from the various mines were brought and sold on to traders and dealers. The Roman legionary fortress half a mile outside town, where the soldiers were safe from the temptations of boom-town life but close enough to intervene if the weekend partying got out of hand, makes perfect sense.
What doesn't make sense to the project members is the fact that Kab Marfu'a appears to have been abandoned nearly a century before beryl mining in the area came to an end. It doesn't surprise me, however. Once the supply of beryls began to dry up and fewer miners operated in the area, the boom town quickly collapsed. It is even possible that mines were acquired by large corporations who had their own distribution networks. The dealers didn't bother to come any more, the bars and casinos closed down, the few miners who were left drifted away in search of the next big "rush" and beduin, whose coarse, locally produced pottery has been found on the site, moved in and stripped away the wood from the buildings, leaving only the stone walls and foundations for us to see today.
