Ah! Those Romans
The Romans left traces of their occupation in every corner of Egypt. Jenny Jobbins visits one of the most remote of their outposts, surely one of the most romantic spots on Earth
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The Roman fortress at Ain Umm Dabadib, a grand and lonely ruin overlooking the remains of settlements, a church and a temple beside a grove of ancient trees;
Trees at Ain Umm Dabadib
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The Romans soldiered and traded along the Nile Valley, the Red Sea coast and the valleys in between; along the Mediterranean shoreline east to Palestine and west to Cyrene; and to the far flung oases which have now been parcelled into the New Valley project: Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla and Kharga. These four great desert towns were linked by caravan routes not only to each other but also to the coast in the north, the Nile Valley in the east, to Sudan and Chad in the south and the main body of the Sahara in the west. There was no corner of the known world to which the Roman compass did not point.
The mastery of its vast empire, which reached its political zenith under the emperors Trajan and Hadrian in the early part of the second century of the Christian era, entailed the maintenance of a huge and well-organised army. It was also as well to keep the troops content, as many later emperors learnt to their cost. The huge infrastructure, bureaucracy and cash flow this entailed was to bring about the steep but lingering decline and fall of the empire, which began with the death of Hadrian in 138 AD and continued until the formal ending of the Holy Roman Empire in the west (in 1806) and the fall of Constantinople in the east (in 1453).
By that time the Romans had long left Egypt. Their rule, though, had been tenacious. It took the triumphal entry of Amr Ibn Al-'As in 640 at the head of his Arab army to oust them from the country they had occupied for 670 years. Because the invading Arabs did not have the means or the reason to man or defend their outposts and borders, they turned many of the fortresses the Romans had built to other purposes, or else abandoned them. Those that were covered by sand or left to crumble quietly and undisturbed in remote areas have, in many cases, been preserved for archaeologists and explorers of the present day to find and appreciate.
The Romans built their fortresses in the settlements which had grown up along the desert trade routes. These settlements may have had their origins hundreds or even thousands of years before, when the area we now know as the Western Desert was a grassy savannah inhabited by herdsmen and by wildlife that today we only see in Africa further south: lion, giraffe, hartebeest, antelope and ostrich. The oases of today's New Valley were, as now, tracts of arable land which sustained cereal crops, orchards, pastureland and thick forests of date palms and acacias. The rich clay soil supported small pottery industries and basket weaving. The local people bartered their excess produce and manufactured objects in the market-places of the towns along the trade routes for salt, soices, textiles and other necessities, and even luxuries -- much later, from the 18th century until fairly recently, the Maria Theresiad "silver dollar" was the usual currency in the oases, and thousands of these coins were melted down to make silver jewellery.
As long as you weren't the type of Roman who hankered after life in the big city, a posting to one of these settlements must have seemed like being sent to Paradise. And of them all one of the most luxuriant and beautiful was surely Ain Umm Dabadib.
Umm Dabadib lay just a few Roman miles west of the main track between Sudan and the Nile Valley, later called the Darb Al-Arbain. Once its vegetation covered an area of tens of thousands of acres, and its villages and cemeteries were spread in all directions. There was clearly an abundance of water. And clearly -- though it no longer flows through the ancient aqueducts -- there still is.
You must have a permit from the Antiquities Office at the Kharga Museum to visit Umm Dabadib, and you must be accompanied by a registered guide who really knows the way. This is not only a legal obligation but a necessity, since you won't find it otherwise (don't even bother to try and cheat by finding out the GPS reading, since that takes no notice of sand dunes which are very treacherous in these parts).
The ruins are only about 40 kms north of Kharga, but unless you have already been there several times you will have no idea where to turn off the road or exactly where you are going when you do. We placed total faith in our guide, Mohamed, but I'm sorry to say there were moments when this faith was shaken almost to the core. To begin with, we had been warned that it was hazardous to attempt this with only one vehicle, and here we were in a single, middle-aged Land Rover. At first we drove over a beautiful plain dotted with tufts of scrub and coarse grass. Lying among them were lumps of fossilised root systems, corals and limestone woven with fox and bird tracks. Ahead of us was a line of grey limestone hills which caught the early afternoon sun.
The plain bore such an abundance of vegetation that I thought these must be the remnants of the ancient fields, and that the ruins of the fortress and villages must lie before the hills. But to my surprise we kept on driving northwest round the hillocks, keeping them more or less on our right, until we reached the foothills when we suddenly plunged into the midst of the outer mounds, winding our way through them on swathes of golden sand.
It was here we began to go round in circles. We climbed a cliff, following other tracks, and passed a cave almost filled to the brim with sand. But the tracks were suddenly covered by sand drifts and we had to go back. Mohamed was becoming very tense, which increased our own anxiety. He finally admitted the problem: in the five months since his last visit a huge, shifting sand dune had covered the wide track laid down by archaeologists working at the site over the last few seasons. Worse, it had completely blocked the gap between the hills.
He thought Umm Dabadib lay somewhere over there. We, on the other hand, thought he was bluffing. Nevertheless we all piled out of the Land Rover so he could run it up a very steep, very dangerous-looking sandy slope. On the first try he got stuck and we had to dig him out. On the second try he managed it. We followed on foot, then climbed in and drove up the rocky side of the mound.
Lord of the Rings can eat its heart out for there, below us and off to the north, lay one of the most beautiful and surprising vistas I have ever seen. On the far side of a wide plain was the escarpment which forms the edge of the limestone desert plateau. Before it were the remains of an abandoned town -- or rather, as our guide book told us, two or three villages -- dominated on the right by a ruined castle and on the left by what appeared, through binoculars, to be a small temple. A grove of tall trees gave the scene that cinematographic touch of perfection.
We still had a couple of hours before dusk, so Mohamed dropped us near the fortress and turned back to make camp under the bank of a small sand dune on the edge of the plain. There was so much to see. We climbed up over the mound to the fortress: it was hard to place our feet without treading on pottery shards, and to avoid them required some ingenious acrobatics. We spent some time examining these and attempting, with some success, to fit fragments together.
Pottery litters the site, and one assumes that most of the fragments were lying there because they had been discarded by past owners. The habit of throwing one's rubbish about has thus probably not changed much up until today, but what a difference a clay shard makes from a tin can or plastic bag. The shards blend in so well that it looks as though the pots were made to be broken. Tempting though it may be, taking them home as souvenirs is out of the question since they are the property of the antiquities department.
And so on to the fortress. The castle towers on top of a mound of mud-brick rubble. It has two square towers built entirely of mud brick and remarkably well conserved, and several lower rooms which seem to be filling up with sand. Next to the fortress are the vaulted remains of a church standing in a pool of broken bricks. There is a heart- rending story attached to this. About four years ago a local man, excited to hear that archaeologists were working at Umm Dabadib and convinced the only reason they were there was that they were looking for treasure, drove a Caterpillar all the way from Kharga. The rest of the story is best told by Cassandra Vivian in The Western Desert of Egypt:
"He did not get lost. He did not run out of petrol. He found his way. And when he got here he pushed his fork-lift against this church again and again until he had destroyed an important piece of history."
I have not yet ascertained whether this man is still serving time, but for his sake I hope he is because I know a few archaeologists he wouldn't want to meet on his next "buried treasure" quest.
Still with our eyes glued to the shards at our feet, we made our way over to the acacia trees, which were dusted with tiny yellow flowers. We wondered how old they could be. Some of the huge, gnarled trunks were leaning over to rest their elbows on the ground. We wished they could talk. There was obviously an abundance of water here -- not only in the past, but still. The grove was full of butterflies, insects and birds.
Beside the acacias there were several other varieties of trees and shrubs, some apparently decorative. And then a row of withered date palms, some dead and others barely alive.
At once we realised who had planted them and why. About a hundred years ago one of the aqueducts -- of which more later -- which carried water to Umm Dabadib was cleared of sand, and water again began to flow. Some farmers settled and began cultivation. But eventually they gave up and left, probably because they lacked the means or manpower to keep the water channels open. However, it was clearly they who planted the date palms, and left the small, dried mud squares which had once been rice fields. They also built the two adjoining mud-brick houses we found near the acacias just before dusk, which could easily be distinguished from the older houses because the latter were vaulted, while these were squat, square fellahin (peasant) houses with wooden lintels. The remains of a green glass bottle sat on the doorstep of one.
What a lovely spot these settlers had chosen, right beside the acacias and with the birds to wake them at dawn. Mohamed, on the other hand, had pitched our camp on the bare, wind-swept plain with its back to the dune. He said this was because of snakes, and after the navigation demonstration we bowed to his instincts. The moon was bright and the sky clear, but it was a cold night. Sand trickled off the brow of our dune with each gust of wind, and seeing this we could understand how the track had been obliterated and the valley blocked in the space of a few months.
Next morning, the photographers were off at dawn to set up their equipment among the ruins. After a while Mohamed packed up the camp and drove over to the acacias. I went for a walk, and disturbed a small fox which ran across the path from one bush to another. It must seldom see human visitors. We ate breakfast and brewed coffee, ferrying cups to the photographers whom we found by following the trails of discarded jackets and tripods.
At about 9.30am we all piled into the Land Rover and set off eastwards behind the fortress, and then continued on foot with the flattened second village on our right and the small, mud-brick temple on our left. The temple was instantly recognisable as such by its inward-sloping walls, so squat and thick they had been able to withstand all the centuries of weathering.
While the pylon-shaped design at the front was traditionally Pharaonic, at the back -- through which one can enter the structure by climbing over the mound of rubble and sand -- were the remains of vaulted ceilings typical of Roman-Byzantine ecclesiastical architecture. Several stone blocks lay about, some with Coptic inscriptions and traces of red paint. There was also an Arabic inscription on the wall, of which the only words that could be read clearly were "Muslim" and "al-zaman" (the passing of time). Cracks in the walls may have been signs of earthquake damage.
Nearby ran an aqueduct, one of the several at Umm Dabadib which carried water down from the escarpment. These underground water channels required enormous manpower to keep them free of sand, but they were what made it possible to cultivate so many thousands of acres. In some places, with care, you can enter the tunnels through the open shafts or manafiz.
We drove closer to the escarpment. Here were several rock-cut tombs and the remains of mud- brick buildings, as well as stones covered with Arabic graffiti. The tombs seemed to be empty except for tiny bird prints. People say that mummies used to lie openly on the sand, but these have disappeared: perhaps they have been stolen by ghoulish souvenir-hunters. But the presence of sand- filled shafts makes one wonder if one is not standing on a cemetery similar to the Valley of the Golden Mummies in Bahariya, where thousands of Roman mummies are said to be lying in rows carved into tombs under the sandstone desert floor.
There seems to be no evidence to tell us when the last of the settlers left Umm Dabadib, or why. Perhaps there were just not enough people to maintain the aqueducts. For now, we can just enjoy the beautiful ruins. But the sands will inevitably play their course. The dunes have reached the edge of the villages, and it is only a matter of time before they engulf the whole site. When they move on Umm Dabadib will, of course, have changed: the trees will probably suffocate, and there will be much that stays buried. And then another cycle of discovery will begin.
Practical information
Our trip was arranged by the International Hot Spring Hotel, Bawiti Bahariya Oasis. Half Board LE85 per person in a double room, LE95 single. Tel: (02) 847 2322. E-mail: whitedesert@link.net. Web site: www.whitedeserttours.com
Four-wheel drive vehicle with driver/cook approx. $95 per day/night, including camping equipment.
