Aswan

Aswan, the capital of Egypt's most southerly governorate and the terminus of the railroad line along the Nile Valley, has a university which is still in course of development. As a result of the construction of the High Dam farther up the valley Aswan is now becoming one of the country's principal industrial centers (steel, nitrogen, electric power).

At Aswan the Nile divides into several arms, separated by large granite rocks and islands, in particular the island of Elephantine. There is only a narrow strip of cultivable land, supporting almost nothing but date-palms; the dates produced here are considered the best in Egypt. The Southern Cross constellation is visible here in January about 3 a.m., in April about 10 p.m.

History

The area around modern Aswan, including the island of Elephantine, was known in antiquity as Yebu ("Elephant Land"), perhaps because the Egyptians saw elephants here for the first time or because the rocks in the river, worn smooth by the water, were thought to resemble the backs of a herd of elephants. At a later date the name was restricted to the island and town of Elephantine. From the earliest times down to the Roman period the quarries of Yebu, which became known in the Ptolemaic period as Syene, supplied the Egyptians with fine colored granite (containing quartz, yellow and brick-red felspar and blackish mica) for their buildings and statues. The term "syenite" applied to this rock by Pliny is now, however, used by geologists to denote a different kind of stone containing a higher proportion of hornblende.

Yebu was also of strategic importance, commanding as it did the Nile cataracts and traffic by water between Egypt and Nubia. It was also the starting-point of the great caravan route to Nubia and the Sudan, along which passed the commercial and military expeditions of the Egyptians. The ancient capital of the province, also called Yebu, lay at the south end of the island. In the sixth and fifth C. B.C. there was a Jewish military colony here, with a Temple of Yahweh, as was shown by Aramaic papyri found here in 1906-08 (now in the Egyptian Museum, West Berlin, and the Bode Museum, East Berlin).

On the east bank of the river was the town of Swenet, the Greek Syene, which rose to importance only in a later period. In the early second C. A.D. the Roman garrison here was commanded by the satirical poet Juvenal, who had been posted to this remote frontier of the Empire as a punishment for his biting attacks on the Court. A celebrated curiosity of ancient Syene was a well into which the sun's rays descended perpendicularly at the summer solstice, casting no shadow; and this led the Athenian scholar Eratosthenes (276-196 B.C.), who was attached to the Museum in Alexandria, to devise his method of measuring the size of the earth. The town suffered greatly at the hands of the Blemmyes, but became the see of a Christian bishop, and seems to have regained its prosperity under the Caliphs. Arab writers record that a plague carried off 20,000 of its inhabitants, which points to a very large total population. From the end of the 12th C. Aswan suffered severely from the incursions of plundering bedouin tribes, which were ended only when the Turkish Sultan Selim stationed a garrison in the town in 1517.