some ironworkings from the same period have been found at
Hydrax Hill, near Nakuru in Kenya.
Some scholars believe that both the technologies of min-
ing minerals and producing metals from them were used by
tribal chiefs and ruling oligarchies to establish control over
regions and to dominate trade. For these reasons some tribes
in Africa kept their methods of smelting secret, giving them a
trade or military advantage over their neighbors.
In West Africa, by about 500 b.c.e., the Nok culture in
what is now northern Nigeria was also involved in the use
of metals. Th e Nok tended to use iron for weapons and agri-
cultural tools, with copper preferred for making ornaments
or decorative and symbolic items. It is possible that the tech-
niques of mining for minerals came by land to the Nok’s
inland civilization across the Sahara, along the trade routes
of caravans that, among other things, took ornaments from
North Africa to western Africa and returned with salt.
Th e development of the use of metals in southern Africa
has been heavily researched, and it appears that the people
who used metals came to the region in small numbers, pos-
sibly from the coast. Th ey made contact with the Khoikhoi
and other peoples, bringing with them some metal tools and
the k nowledge of how to make more from smelting ore. Th ese
appear to have been either traders working their way down
the east coast of Africa or Berber ship merchants bringing
goods down the west coast. Either way, iron must have been
rare, and its use was limited to weapons and essential tools.
Th ere is some evidence of its use by 200 c.e., but the absence
of many iron tools from archaeological sites, some archaeolo-
gists have suggested, might be largely owing to the way the
metal rusts rather than its absence from the society. It is also
possible that iron tools were too valuable to bury and were
passed on to children and others at the death of their owner.
Certainly it was the Bantu who brought iron with them in
abundance when they arrived.
If the spread of metalworking can only be surmised be-
cause of a lack of evidence for the technology’s presence in
some regions, the spread of quarrying stones is even more
speculative. Certainly ideas of quarrying came from ancient
Egypt and northern Africa, with the use of stone tools in Af-
rica being common in many places until the seventeenth cen-
tury c.e. Some stone quarries were run by the Carthaginians
outside the city of Carthage, largely kept going by slave labor.
Routes of communication have long crisscrossed the Sa-
hara, used by caravans bringing salt to remote places in the
desert and also to the relatively heavily populated parts of
northern Africa. In eastern and southern Africa so many of the
settlements were small enough and close enough to the coast
that the acquiring of suffi cient salt was never a major problem.
EGYPT
BY AMR KAMEL
Egypt has been favored with rich and abundant stone and
mineral sources that extend over the deserts surrounding the
Nile River and into the Sinai Peninsula. Th e ancient Egyp-
tians quarried and mined these sources, seeking out stone as
permanent material for their pyramids, temples, shrines, and
monumental tombs, which were furnished with sarcophagi,
statues, stelae, and obelisks that were also made of stone.
From the earliest periods of recorded history in Egypt,
kings sent major expeditions to various places in the Western
and Arabian deserts as well as to Sinai and Wadi Allaqi in Nu-
bia, to gather stones, minerals, and other materials. One ex-
pedition dating to the Old Kingdom (ca. 2575–ca. 2134 b.c.e.)
that went to the alabaster quarries at Hatnub in the hills of
the Eastern Desert consisted of 1,600 artisans, while New
Kingdom (ca. 1550–ca. 1070 b.c.e.) expeditions, which were
sometimes supervised by the vizier himself or the high priest
of Aton, were even larger. During the reign of Ramses IV (r.
1163–1156 b.c.e.), an expedition was sent to Wadi al-Hamam
(in Palestine) for building blocks. It included, among oth-
ers, 170 administrative staff , 130 skilled stonemasons, 2,000
bondsmen for transporting the blocks, 5,000 soldiers, and 50
guards.
In general, aft er the required materials were quarried or
mined, they were transported by donkeys, which were able
to move easily along steep and stony mountain paths, to the
river Nile bank, where boats and barges would carry them to
the building sites.
Th e ancient Egyptians found the ideal materials for their
eternal architecture and sculpture in the great varieties of
stone available in the surrounding hills. In the Predynastic
Period (ca. 3000 b.c.e.) stone for vases and plates, such as lime-
stone, sandstone, gypsum, and calcite (Egyptian alabaster),
were taken from these hills as well as from the Arabian Des-
ert. Also from the Arabian Desert came volcanic porphyry,
marble, graywacke, quartz, schist, serpentine, and talc. Slate
was quarried in Wadi Hammamat near the Red Sea and used
for sleeping and ceremonial palettes. Th e soft stone gypsum
was obtained from Umm el-Sawwan, at the northern edge
of the El Faiyûm region of Upper Egypt. Egyptian alabaster
(calcite or travertine) was obtained from the Wadi Gerrawi,
south of Helwan and opposite Memphis on the western side
of the Nile, but the most important quarries were at Hatnub,
southeast of Tell el-‘Amârna.
Quartzite, a naturally cemented sandstone, was avail-
able near Cairo, at Al-Gebel Al-Ahmmar, and found in as-
sociation with the Nubian sandstones south of Idfu. Another
variety of quartzite was quarried in Gebel Abu Dokhān and
Gebel Fatira in the Arabian Desert. In the Greco-Roman Pe-
riod (ca. 332 b.c.e.–ca. 395 c.e.) a variety of porphyritic rocks,
including the so-called imperial porphyry, was obtained from
Gebel Abu Harba, and Gebel Gattar, from west of Al Ghur-
daqah in the Red Sea hills. Basalt, which was used as a special
building material because of its black color, occurred in many
parts of Egypt; sources close to the Nile and to building sites
include Abu Rawash and Gebel Qatrani, north of the Faiyûm
Depression. Th e Faiyûm was the main source of the basalt
used in ancient Egypt.742 mining, quarrying, and salt making: Egypt