Encyclopedia of society and culture in the ancient world ( PDFDrive ) 815

742 mining, quarrying, and salt making: Egypt some ironworkings from the same period have been found at Hydrax Hill, near Nakuru in Kenya Some scholars believe that both the technologies of mining 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 The Nok tended to use iron for weapons and agricultural tools, with copper preferred for making ornaments or decorative and symbolic items It is possible that the techniques 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 The 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, possibly from the coast They made contact with the Khoikhoi and other peoples, bringing with them some metal tools and the knowledge of how to make more from smelting ore These 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 There is some evidence of its use by 200 c.e., but the absence of many iron tools from archaeological sites, some archaeologists 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 because 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 Africa being common in many places until the seventeenth century 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 Sahara, 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 sufficient 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 The ancient Egyptians 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 Nubia, to gather stones, minerals, and other materials One expedition 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 others, 170 administrative staff, 130 skilled stonemasons, 2,000 bondsmen for transporting the blocks, 5,000 soldiers, and 50 guards In general, after 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 The 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 limestone, sandstone, gypsum, and calcite (Egyptian alabaster), were taken from these hills as well as from the Arabian Desert 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 The 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 available near Cairo, at Al-Gebel Al-Ahmmar, and found in association 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 Period (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 Ghurdaqah 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 The Faiyûm was the main source of the basalt used in ancient Egypt