IN THE ESNA-IDFU REGION, NILE VALLEY, EGYPT 7 



Sabaris, Miss M. Veillon, Prof. M. Vigneaux, Dr. J. H. Van Voorthuysen, Dr. L. Weiss 

 and Dr. E. Witwicka. 



A special word of thanks also goes to members of the technical staff of the Depart- 

 ment of Geology, U.C.W., Aberystwyth, for their invaluable help, and to the staff of 

 the various mining companies in the Esna-Idfu region and the local inhabitants for 

 their sincere collaboration and genuine hospitality. 



Much is owed to the authorities of the Robertson Research Organization, and its 

 Director Dr. R. H. Cummings, for a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship during part 

 of which the type sections of the Upper Cretaceous-Lower Tertiary in Western 

 Europe were sampled. 



Finally, the author is deeply indebted to his parents who paid generously for the 

 various stages of this research and without whose spiritual and financial support the 

 work could never have been carried out. 



II. INTRODUCTION 



Since the later part of the nineteenth century the highly fossiliferous Upper 

 Cretaceous and Lower Tertiary rocks of Egypt have been the subject of numerous 

 stratigraphical and palaeontological studies. However, no satisfactory classification 

 of these rocks was established and their correlation with the type sections in Europe 

 proved very difficult. The difficulty has been mainly explained by the fact that the 

 rich macrofaunas of these rocks are strictly localized in nature, and can hardly be 

 correlated with the faunas of corresponding strata outside the Tethyan region. As 

 a result, the limits of the various stages and substages of the Upper Cretaceous and 

 Lower Tertiary were differently interpreted by the various authors, and were chosen, 

 as stated by Youssef (1957 : 45), " rather arbitrarily, on whatever meagre evidence 

 the stratigrapher can collect ". 



Recently, the rich microfossil content of these rocks has been dealt with by many 

 authors, but correlation with the type sections still proved very difficult, and the 

 stratigraphical boundaries were, once again, differently interpreted. Moreover, the 

 discrepancies between zonations based on macrofossils and those based on micro- 

 fossils led to further complications, and regrettably no attempt was made to treat 

 together the co-existent macro- and micro-faunas. This, added to the world-wide 

 problems of Cretaceous-Tertiary stratigraphy, has resulted in the complication of 

 the stratigraphical interpretation of this period in Egypt. 



The same problems were faced in trying to analyse the stratigraphy of the Upper 

 Cretaceous-Lower Tertiary succession of the Esna-Idfu region. However, the 

 accumulation of knowledge during the last twenty-five years has emphasized the 

 value of planktonic Foraminifera as guide fossils for stratigraphical zonation, and 

 for regional as well as world-wide correlation. In this connection, Loeblich & 

 Tappan (19576 : 1109) stated that " Because of their independence of the sea 



