Elephantine Museum Elephantine Museum This delightful museum (7 on plan p. 41) was first opened in 1912. It is approached by a stairway leading up from the river. It was built in 1906 as a rest house for the Irrigation and Antiquities Departments involved in building the Aswan Dam and also to store the antiquities […]

Granite Quarries The famous granite quarries lie in the hills to the south of Aswan, just off the main road. They were the main source of granite in Egypt, exploited from earliest times right through to the Greco-Roman Period. The Fourth Dynasty pharaohs who built the pyramids at Giza (2613-2494 B.C.) were among those who […]

Plantation Island Plantation Island This island, originally known as Kitchener’s Island, was deeded to British Field Marshal and Egyptian Consul General Kitchener by the British government in gratitude for his services in Sudan, specifically for his suppression of the Mahdi revolt. Egypt was still a British protectorate when he died in 1916, and the island reverted […]

Nubian Museum The new Nubian Museum lies southeast on a rocky slope overlooking part of ancient need to build a special museum house the Nubia was realized years before the High Darn in 1971. Excavations schemers around the  yielded such an abundance of diverse objects that no museum could allocate the space needed to house […]

The High Dam High Dam To a Greek-Egyptian agifonomist, Andrian Dannios, must go credit for the idea of building a dam at Aswan so large that it could provide for long-term storage of water as well as protect against high and low floods. His concept was not, however, to take root until after the 1952 […]

Daraw Just to the south of`Kom Ombo is Daraw, the site ofa Tuesday camel market, The animals are brought in caravans all the way from Sudan along the Darb al-Arbain (‘f`orty-day road’)_ Mer- chants from Cairo send representatives to make purchases for the larger camel market in the Cairo suburb of lmbaba, where they are sold […]

Kom ombo ln early dynastic times Kom Ombo stood at the northern end of the border province of Aswan. Here is the physical division between the limestone belt of Egypt and the sandstone belt of  Nubia, and here is where a large part of the population of Lower Nubia are now relocated. It is also […]

New Nubia Resettlement Lower Nubia, the area lying between Aswan and the Second Cataract has traditionally been known as Egyptian Nubia, Sudanese New Nubia Resettlement. When the High Dam was built in the 19605, the whole of Lower Nubia was inundated, and its entire population was resettled: fifty thousand to Qasr al-Girba in northern Sudan and […]

Aswan practical information How to Get There Aswan practical information The trains from Cairo to Aswan run daily and take about sixteen hours. They are air-conditioned, have sleeping cars, and provide dinner, Traveling by air is quicker; the flight from Cairo takes about two hours, usually with a single stopover in Luxor. Cruises in the […]