ANCIENT GOLD MINING IN THE SUDAN 209 



The "Island" of Meroe, according to Diodorus, contains mines of gold, silver, 

 iron, and brass ; precious stones and ebony trees. 



With the fall of the twentieth dynasty began a period of foreign domination during 

 which Nubia regained her independence. It would appear that not until the beginning 

 of the Ptolemaic j)eriod (fourth to first century B.C.) was the mining industry again 

 prosecuted with anything like its former vigour. According to Mitchell, " Ilecomiaissance 

 des Anciennes Mines de Hamntauiat (Cairo 1879), certain hieroglyphic inscriptions found 

 in a temple at Hammamat, place the date of re-opening the mines under this period 

 at about 240 b.c. in the reign of the III. Ptolemy Euregetes, under whom the foreign 

 power of Egypt reached its proudest height. The annual output of the mines under The mines 

 the Ptolemies is said to have reached a value of five millions sterling, and Strabo tells "'"^ei'he 



° Ptolemies 



us that down to the days of the XIII. Ptolemy (80 B.C.), the Royal revenue was 

 between three and four millions, a great part of which, no doubt, must have come from 

 the mines. 



Agatharchides, Diodorus and Strabo, who lived during the first century B.C., described 

 many of the mines very minutely and traced their history back to the times of the early 

 Egyptian kings, but with the advent of the Roman period of occupation (40 b.c.) all further 

 record ceases and the mines seem once more to have dropped into oblivion. 



Towards the end of the ninth century of the Christian era, Roman rule having given 

 place to Mohammedan ascendancy, the mines again received attention. Al Makrizi tells us 

 in his account of the Beja {Burchhardt' s Travels) that the Etbai and Butana are full of 

 mines of silver, copper, iron, lead, loadstone, marcasite, emeralds, "and a very brittle 

 stone, of which if a piece is rubbed with oil, it burns like a wick " (probably lignite). 



In the reign of Ahmed Ibn-Talun, one Abderrahman el-Omari, a descendant of the .^bden-ahman 

 Khalifas, reopened the mines at Um Geraiat, about eighty miles from Esueh on the Nile. '^ ' "^^" 

 Following this he worked mines farther south at Ceija, later still, at Jebel Essewed; and 

 finally the more important gold mines of Dereheib. Accompanied by a hundred thousand 

 men, this adventurer's career was one long record of pillage and oppression, which, after 

 thirty years of bloodshed and treachery, ended in assassination by his own followers. 

 History gives us no record of the result of this working of the mines ; but the gold obtained 

 must have been considerable even to admit of the maintenance of so great a number of 

 men, the supplying of whom is said to have employed sixty thousand camels bringing 

 provisions from the Nile, and wheat from Aidab on the Red Sea. 



Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson, in his learned work on the Ancient Egyptians, makes reference 

 to certain Cufic inscriptions found by M. Bonomi in the Eshuranib mines which point 

 to their having been worked in the years 951-989 a.d. This date, if correct, brings us 

 down to a period nearly 100 years later than the Khalifa-el-Omari. The same writer 

 further states, though on what authority does not appear, that the mines continued to 

 be worked till a nuioh later period than the tenth century a.d., and that they were finally 

 abandoned because the amount of gold obtained barely covered the expense of work. 



It is unfortunate that no records of mining by the natives are obtainable between No records 

 the tenth and nineteenth centuries. ,1, , , jg . 



The following notes are principally in Mr. Llewellyn's own words. centuries 



The ancient method of mining the ore and extraction of gold is described in fragments 

 of the work of Agatharchides (140 B.C.), preserved for us by Diodorus, Siculus and 

 others. It is doubtful whether the historian's description refers to the period of the 

 Ptolemies or to an earlier epoch of the Pharaohs ; but the things of which he speaks 

 are in evidence at the old mines to-day ; the iron cutters and stone mortars of the men ; 



