688 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Pharaohs increased rapidly. At the opening of the New Empire, about 

 1530 B.C., the lavish use of this metal by the kings indicates the won- 

 derful productiveness of the mines. Much gold is believed to have 

 been brought into Egypt from Ethiopia and the eastern shores of the 

 Red Sea, and gold dust (?) from the Soudan. 



Within the last few years the ancient workings of many gold mines 

 have been discovered in eastern and southern Egypt and in Nubia. The 

 mining region of Egypt proper was the mountainous belt bordering 

 the Eed Sea from the Gulf of Suez to the southern part of the country, 

 where it connected with the mining area of the Nubian Desert farther 

 inland, and with that of Nubia proper. Charles J. Alford* describes 

 the northern part of this region as follows : " The larger mountain 

 masses are usually formed of a hornblendic granite. Surrounding 

 these, in lower ranges, and covering very extensive areas, is a rather 

 fine-grained gray granite, passing in places into a gueiss, and that into 

 mica schist, traversed by dikes and intrusions of greenstone, felsite, 

 porphyry, and a very fine grained, white, elvan granite. It is in these 

 rocks that most of the auriferous quartz veins were found to occur, and 

 the more the granite was cut up by the instrusive rocks, the more fre- 

 quent and more promising the quartz veins appeared to be." 



In this region a number of mining sites were found which consisted 

 of groups of round and square huts built of rough stone. Some of 

 these villages are surrounded by walls. The old sand-filled workings 

 follow the veins and ore-shoots, but with few exceptions the working 

 faces and the bottoms of the shafts have not been uncovered by recent 

 explorations. Near Um Rus on the Eed Sea, there is an ancient camp 

 of large size. A large number of quartz veins outcrop in a gray granite 

 which is much cut by dikes of greenstone, porphyry and felsite. Nearly 

 all the veins were worked in ancient times, and in places some of the 

 rich ore-shoots have been completely worked out, while the leaner ore 

 has been allowed to remain. The veins varv in thickness from one 

 to over three feet, and all carry free-milling gold in varying amounts. 

 The quartz is white to gray in color, and in places carries a little 

 pyrite. The ore seems to have been reduced to a coarse powder by 

 means of stone rolling pins on elliptical rubbing stones. It was then 

 transferred to a circular mill consisting of an upper and a lower stone, f 



At one of the camps in the south, there is the ruin of a building 

 260 feet by 190 feet, which is supposed by some to have been the mill 

 in which the gold was separated from the ore. At the old workings 

 near Coptos, Lat. 26° N., may be seen the ruins of over 1,300 stone 

 huts once occupied by the miners. Very extensive workings found 

 still farther to the south are probably the mines for which the kings 

 of the twelfth dynasty sacrificed the lives of many thousand men, and 



* Eng. and Mm. Jour., Vol. 73, p. 103. 



t See illustration, Eng. and Mix. Jour., Vol. 73, p. 104. 



