Bir Umm Fawakhir Survey Project 1993: A Byzantine Gold-Mining Town in Egypt.

• Author: Sidebotham, Steven E.
• Position: Review

Bir Umm Fawakhir Survey Project 1993: A Byzantine Gold-Mining Town in Egypt. By C. MEYER, L. A. HEIDORN, W. E. KAEGI, and T. WILFONO. Oriental Institute Communications, vol. 28. Chicago: THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, 2000. Pp. xviii + 92, illus.

This monograph presents the results of fieldwork conducted by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago at the fifth- to sixth-century A.D. gold-mining settlement of Bir Umm Fawakhir, Egypt. The site is on the trans-desert route that linked Qift (ancient Koptos) on the Nile to Quseir/Quseir al-Qadim (ancient Leukos Limen/Myos Hormos?) on the Red Sea Coast. A small team using a total station mapped approximately half of this sizeable settlement during two short field seasons in 1992 and 1993. The team has conducted additional work at Bir Umm Fawakhir since 1993.

There is little published about estimating populations of ancient Egyptian sites, but Meyer and her crew, using studies conducted elsewhere in the ancient Near East (especially in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Jordan), calculated the population of the main site at Bir Umm Fawakhir. With an estimated thousand inhabitants, this was one of the largest late-Roman/early-Byzantine settlements in the Eastern Desert. This figure does not include outliers in the vicinity. The survey could not determine if women and children were also present, though extant Hellenistic literary sources indicate that they were at other desert gold-mining operations. Nor could the survey ascertain if the mines were worked seasonally or perennially.

There is little or no reference in extant ancient literary sources to gold mining in Egypt in late antiquity, and it appears that Bir Umm Fawakhir was one of the few mines in Egypt that provided gold for the Byzantine Empire. The intensity of the operations indicates that the Byzantine government urgently needed the gold from Bir Umm Fawakhir despite the low-grade ore--derived, as is typical of the region, from white quartz veins. It is uncertain where the gold mined at Bir Umm Fawakhir was sent.

The main settlement of Bir Umm Fawakhir was a single-period site that comprised predominantly domestic dwellings ranging from two or three to upwards of fifteen rooms, some having niches, courtyards, and benches/mastabas both inside and outside the structures. There were outbuildings that may have been used for storage, cooking, animal shelters, latrines, watch posts, or that served other functions. The...