Precious stones of the Ancient Egyptians: Expeditions for amethyst at Wadi el-Hudi

Kate Liszka: I want you to imagine something first, okay? 4,000 years ago. Imagine a world without the colour purple in it. Just out of the spectrum altogether.

I mean, purple has to be artificially made, right? It's not really very common in nature, with the exception of amethyst or a couple of rare flowers.

And this is still a time, [that's] a good 1,500 years before the Phoenicians and the Romans learned how to make purple with snail shells. So it really was this very, very rare colour to see.

And when they would find it, it would open their world in a way that other things can't do, because it literally added a whole new spectrum to their existence in many ways.

Now we're going to be primarily talking about the Middle Kingdom today and I'll show you that in a minute. But there are a couple of rare examples of purple that are known from the beginnings of ancient Egyptian history.

There were a couple of pieces of amethyst that pop up before they actually find the big amethyst mines.

So, for instance, at 53,500 BCE—this is a good few hundred years before writing even started—we do have a handful of these very small purple amethysts, amulets that are either a bull's head or an elephant, depending on how you actually look at it.

And it seems like this stone is drawn to this specific type of divine amulet, even though they're small.

For those of you who know about ancient Egypt, in its early history, around 3,100 BCE—so, that's right about the time that writing is invented—there is this very cool cache that I'm not going to talk much about today, but it's called the Tell el-Farkha cache.

And here we actually have images of Egyptian gods. They’re some of the earliest ones that exist. They're made out of gold with eyes of lapis lazuli. There's a whole bunch of ivory votives in the shape of gods.

And in this very, very special divine royal deposit of the finest of the fine, you get a couple of rare pieces of amethyst that sneak in too. It's almost like when they find it, it filters up.

When we move to Dynasty 1 of Egypt, and you get the first kings of the unified country, we actually have King Djer’s tomb. He's one of the first 5 or 6 kings, and in his tomb they actually found his arm, and draped over his arm came all of this lovely, beautiful jewellery that's in the Cairo Museum today, including a couple of pieces of amethyst.

So, again, it's so rare that it makes it to the royal, king levels. I could show you another handful of examples, but we're going to fast forward 1000 years.

Egypt does things like it builds the pyramids, and then it goes through a civil war. And right towards the end of that time, you have this really important royal cache, wherein it has King Mentuhotep 2 buried in the back, and he's buried with all of these very cool priestesses in the front of his temple. I could talk about them for several hours, but I'm not going to today.

One of them is a young girl of just the age of five. Her name is Mayet, and she actually too, just has the little glint of amethyst, that that makes it into her special burial, in this case. So these things are very, very precious when they're found. They wanted purple.

And right after that they actually finally figure out where the mines were. And I'm going to talk about those today. But when they found purple, the Pharaohs went absolutely crazy to get it.

They did everything they could, and they basically went to the ends of the world to be able to mine this incredibly special, special gemstone.

Now, just to take a step back to show you the chronology, very briefly. For those of you who don't know a lot about ancient Egyptian history, it lasts a really, really, really long time. Several thousand years.

Today I'll be primarily talking about the Middle Kingdom. That is 250 years that you haven't heard of, but it's really awesome. It's something from about 2,000 BC to about 1,750 BCE. It is after they built the Great Pyramids. It is before Tutankhamun, Hatshepsut, Ramses the Great, Akhenaten. All those people you've heard of. And it is definitely, definitely way before Cleopatra and Julius Caesar.

That is the time that we are going to hone in today, because that is when purple really changed their world.

So, they find these amethyst mines right around 2,000 BC, and it's not just at one place. Within about 100 years, they figure out where a couple of different mines are. And actually, Bryan Kraemer and I have the privilege of working at several of them, so it's super fun.

We're primarily going to be talking about Wadi el-Hudi today, which is east of the city of Aswan. But also we get to work at Dihmit South, where Senwosret 1— Sorry, where amethyst was found. And amethyst might also be known in several other locations.

Within the first few years of this period, they find it all over the Eastern Desert. And since 2014, 12 years ago, Bryan Kraemer, Meredith Brand and several of our colleagues have basically been on this quest in the steps of the ancient Egyptians, where we get to actually follow them out into this landscape.

We get to fight with some of the things that they fight with, with the environment and the landscape, and just trying to actually stay alive in this fun environment and space to figure out how the ancient Egyptians actually did this 4,000 years ago.

So, amethyst is in fact a type of quartz, and it's just a purple quartz because of iron radiation. The finest amethyst is the darker colour purples, but it actually does have significant shades of purple into it. And it actually becomes like this rock crystal type of milky quartz, because it really is the same stone in many ways.

And amethyst becomes very, very precious. And we're going to talk about this a lot over the next hour. But one of the things you'll see is that it's beautiful, it's rare, and thus it becomes highly prestigious.

And we'll come back to that several times and you'll see how this fits through the Egyptian economy.

But of course, if something is going to be rare, pretty, and prestigious, the ancient Egyptians are also going to give it a religious significance, because why not? Even though it's just a utilitarian stone.

So, the ancient Egyptians actually also thought it was sexy, literally. Coffin Text 576 is just entitled. As for any man who knows this spell, he shall have sex in this land by night or by day, and he will have the heart of the woman beneath him when he has sex.

And you're supposed to put a bead in the hand of the deceased when he dies, so that he can keep having sex after death. If you want to have sex after you die, take a stone of amethyst with you.

One of the things you'll see is that a lot of these end up in graves, more than anything else. This is why. It ensures your future. So, you can see why the ancient Egyptians would go crazy for this stuff. This is behind this major push to fight the harshest of times, to actually gather it in great detail.

Wadi el-Hudi is over here. It's about 35 kilometres east of the city of Aswan. Aswan is one of the furthest southern cities in Egypt, and Aswan is the city that basically supplied the ancient Egyptian mines, and also our work today too. We actually stay in the city of Aswan and we commute into the desert daily.

And when I say Wadi al-Hudi, it is actually a vastly huge region.

We actually work over about 100 square kilometres. We are now up to 65 sites, but every time we go into the desert, we find new things.

Every time we look around, there's more to be discovered. And so we just keep adding new site numbers each time as well.

I'm primarily going to be talking about a couple of sites today, sites 5, 6 and 9, and a couple of others, but it is a larger region, more than anything else.

This region is very significant because of the geology. This is where the Precambrian basement of metamorphic [?] mixes with younger Nubian-Cretaceous sandstones.

A bunch of old rocks and a bunch of young rocks smashed together. And in that smashing together, you get cool stuff, basically.

You get amethyst, you get smoky crystal, you get rock crystal, you get garnet, you get copper, you get amazonite, you get hematite, and several other things. Pyrite, and even gold. Although the ancient Egyptians didn't find the gold until the Islamic period, so 4,000 years ago they were primarily working with the amethyst.

And this is also an area where every single mountainside and valley has its own personality. Some can have spiky rocks. Some can have deep sand.

Sometimes you get your car stuck in the sand and cut its tire on a rock on the same day. Spoken from experience. That was fun. But you keep going, right?

So every single mountainside can actually be just a little different. Some have boulders you can inscribe and others don't.

The other cool thing about the geology is that we're in this really heavy stone area. They have granite, and bedrock, and diorite, and significantly heavy stones all around us. That means that the sand is actually kind of heavy and doesn't blow that much, which means that we'll get sand build up, like around the bases of walls, but not really anywhere else.

So, it's kind of like walking into a time capsule. You basically just walk out there and you can see the first level of archaeology. None of this was excavated, and yet we're standing just a couple of centimetres above the floor.

It actually makes it really easy to walk around and see the first level of archaeological deposition without actually excavating anything.

That's incredibly fortunate for us. Especially, we're also fortunate because a lot of these miners didn't throw their trash away very nicely, which means that their trash is often in the place where they did the activity. So, this is kind of like an archaeological dream in many ways.

We don't really know who found the first giant amethyst vein and told the pharaoh about it, but they did.

And we have these three enormous open pit mines that you can actually see Bryan standing in here. That's the site 4 mine. And you can still see amethyst in the walls today.

We do know that the miners and the pharaohs’ expeditions were not the first people out there. We do have evidence of pastoral nomads—not just from that cow, but from lots of other inscriptions too.

We also have lots of evidence of pre-dynastic peoples, through burials, and also travellers in the area. That is, small groups of people who are moving through on their own at their own times.

And we know that people were looking for stuff. We have tons of— Most of our site numbers are actually this: tiny little starter mines where somebody looked for stuff.

Maybe they found it in small quantity, or maybe they didn't, and they moved on somewhere else; so we have a lot of small mines.

Some of these might have actually predated the finding, but we don't know which ones yet. And sometimes you have these really natural deposits of milky quartz. So, this was never a mine. This was never excavated. This is the natural surface.

And milky quartz and amethyst are the same rock. It's just that amethyst is purple. And amethyst also fades in the sun. So if you're going to look for an amethyst vein, you would start with a giant section of milky quartz and dig down and hope that some of the stuff underneath is purple.

So it does have a lot of these things that even with no geological knowledge, like me, you might be able to find.

Somebody told the pharaoh and the pharaoh went crazy. He's like, yes, go get this stuff. And he would basically send out these large expeditions that would go out for a couple months at a time.

They get the amethyst and they would come back. He wouldn't go himself. He's got better things to do and certainly, you know, wants the grandeur of being pharaoh.

But he would send one of his high officials in charge of these expeditions. Sometimes it's the vizier, sometimes it's the steward, sometimes it's somebody from the treasury. And they were given all the resources needed to make this done.

So, in this inscription, you actually see that one of the officials from the treasury specifically went to fetch amethyst for his lord. That's for the king specifically. And I would say a dozen of our inscriptions say that that's why they're there, to fetch amethyst for the king.

And a lot of these larger officials actually were nice enough to leave very lengthy inscriptions.

This is probably one of the best ones. This is from this rock here, known as Wadi el-Hudi inscription 6. Very exciting title, but it's from a guy by the name of Hetepu. And he actually goes through and lists who is going on this expedition to fetch amethyst.

We have a bunch of high-end officials, and then it specifically says he wants 200 fighters or soldiers from Elephantine, 100 fighters or soldiers from Kom Ombo, we’ve got 210 administrators, and then recruits of bravery from the youth of every southern city, 1000 strong arms. So he's got 1000 labourers, essentially.

So this equals 1510 people. That's a lot of people.

That's a lot of people to go and find essentially a shiny purple stone. And a lot of these different expeditions that go out into the desert actually will bring different types of people too.

It seems like even from some of our early inscriptions, that we have evidence of Nubians out there, too, with the Egyptians on many of these expeditions.

So, for instance, in this very early inscription, perhaps from the first time they go out, they actually say that they also sent "every the Nehesy of Wawat and of Bowmen-land"—that's Ta-Seti—"of the southern half and of the northern half, he being pacified, he comes with his belongings..."

So, basically, a bunch of different Nubians seem to happily be going along too. And this makes sense. The Egyptians will actually have—They're not just Egyptians, they're multicultural people. And Nubians are part of things that are part of their society as well.

After about 40 years, we get this other inscription that actually talks about Nubians going to there as well.

This is from a king by the name of Senwosret 1 who decides to basically take over Nubia and annex land for the first time, so, he's not as nice as the pharaohs before. And he has all of this really highfalutin language about killing people in the south. Some of it's probably true, some of it's probably literary and overblown.

There's probably a nice little mix in between, but it says specifically, “As for every Iwn-bowmen of Ta-Seti—” That's a type of Nubian. “His work as a slave is only done because of the terror inspired by this God—” Meaning Senwosret 1. So it’s this really highfalutin language saying that the Nubians are slaves out in the desert.

So it really makes you start to wonder, well, who are the labourers? Are they people who are happily going out there and being paid for their work, or are they all slaves and prisoners?

This is really our only inscription that uses the term 'slave', and it's in this weird way where it could be taken in this literary fashion.

Or maybe they took slaves one time and then they switched back.

But even under the same king, just 7 or 8 years later— This is the same king, also Senwosret 1, Year 17. It says that they are taking the recruits of bravery of every youth of the southern city. 1000 strong arms. They don't mention Nubians. And here it seems really like they're using what the Egyptians call corvée labour.

So, the pyramids of Egypt were not built by slaves, okay? They were built by corvée labour. It's a type of tax. People didn't have property taxes. People had land taxes—I guess that's kind of like property taxes—but they didn't have sales tax. They didn't have income tax. But they had a labour tax.

You get you get taxed on your labour and you get taxed on how much your land produces. And that's it.

Basically, so for a couple of weeks of the year or a couple of weeks, every few years, one of your family members needs to go and do work for a month, and then they get to go home.

And this is a standard tax that everybody in the country paid themselves, or hired somebody else to take their place if they were rich enough. And so that's how they actually get most of this work done.

It's conscription, but it's a couple of weeks, they get to go home, and they're actually treated okay. So, you know, it’s in the middle.

And that's kind of what we see here, and that's also what we see in a lot of the different types of work environments around Wadi el-Hudi. And I'll show you this in a few minutes.

But I really do think that a lot of these workmen are actually being treated fairly well. They are not being abused while they're out in the desert. I like to think of it as conscripted labour because they are genuinely happy to—

Well, I'm seeing into things, but from what I can see it seems like an okay situation, for ancient Egypt.

So we still have 1,500 people going out into the desert. That's a lot. And you start looking at our settlements and we have these large mines like here at site 5 and site 9. They're probably about the length of this room, about 70 metres.

And then we have these big settlements that are next to them. But these settlements, even though they're big, they're not that big. And so you can't really fit 1,500 people in any one of these buildings.

As an archaeologist, we really do try to figure out, how is this inscription correct?

How did they actually have 1,500 people out there at any one time? Because I don't think that they're lying to us. I think that we just don't quite understand what they're doing.

Now, a lot of these places are actually fairly close together, and so what we assume is that multiple mining sites might be used at the same time, and that 1,500 might actually be groupings together.

And if you look through the Eastern desert, we know of at least 7 of these larger places that may or may not be used in tandem with one another. Now, we also know that once they use a specific site, like site 5 that you see here, they don't just abandon it. They go for a few months, they use it, and then when they come back 5 years later or they come back 20 years later, they reuse the same sites. We can actually see phasing in a lot of these different monuments.

For instance, here at site 5, both of these inscriptions show that they're not in their original locations. That one is upside down: so, somebody had an inscription and then somebody else moved it and put it upside down. This one was later used as part of a wall and shifted into the wall. So, we do see that things are being changed and used over time.

So they're still sending out 1,500 people. And this is not a friendly environment, right? In the summer it can reach 50° Celsius without a problem. In the winter it's definitely more temperate. So maybe only like 35 or some days at 40° Celcius.

But the nights get cold, you know, they'll get down to about 5° sometimes, possibly even freezing.

It's hard, although one would think that you should probably go in the winter months, like most of our expeditions try to go between October and March.

We actually have evidence from other mining sites where they talk about seasonality of these expeditions and they actively do try to go in the winter, because why would you go in the summer? It makes no sense.

However, one inscription from Wadi el-Hudi says that they were there for a whole year. I still don't know how to understand that line because the grammar is correctly translated. They were there for a whole year.

I just can't get over the fact that they would want to spend summer out there. It is awful. It is really awful. Yet we try to sort out what they're actually doing.

And it's not just the heat that will get you. In Egypt, occasionally you will have these insane storms that come out of nowhere, like the one that Bryan and I personally were involved in, in November 2021.

I've been in a lot of storms. This one made me understand why, in the Bible, people think that God could smoke them with the weather.

It dropped about 30 centimetres of rain in an hour. Everything was flooded. There were just centimetres of water on our roof, and the next day all the snakes and the scorpions came out of their holes because they were flooded. It was biblical. But this will happen every 20 or 30 years. Luckily, we were inside when it happened.

There's also things like sandstorms, too. So, these people in the desert actually do need to deal with the real parts of things. Not to mention the fact that you're not in the desert alone. There are a lot of bugs.

Once the flies find you, you're the only source of food for miles. They won't leave you alone, and they are nasty.

Anytime the wind stops and you don't even have the smallest amount of wind, the sand flies will come out and bite you. That's not fun either.

There was one really weird, unexplainable day where we were just all covered in ladybugs. I don't know where they came from, but they were in the hundreds and they were everywhere. That wasn't as bad as the sand flies.

And then, of course, there are the snakes that we don't want to talk about. But talking to a roomful of Australians, you guys don't care. So, moving on.

The other thing isn't just the environment. This is hard because you're in the middle of the desert with 1,500 people and they still need food and water, so what do you actually do in many cases?

Well, some of the members of their teams would actually go around looking for local resources, and some of the people would do things like hunt gazelle or small hare. We actually have found several of those bones.

They do things like gather the trees of the desert. They deforested our desert, and because we know that, because all of our charcoal or most of our charcoal is actually desert trees, so they're gathering these things and bringing them in.

But that's still not enough food. Actually, most of our evidence for food comes from things that had to have come from the Nile Valley.

They were probably being sent bread instead of grain. They actually had loaved bread. And then we have lots and lots of animal bones. These are sheep, they're goat, occasionally cow, all being marched in, slaughtered on site, cooked and eaten there. Because we have things like hooves and headpieces that, you know— Why would you carry a sheep if it could walk there itself and then you kill it there? It's fine, and it's fresher.

We also have a lot of fish bones. 8% of our bones are fish. These are being caught in the Nile, salted and sent out to Wadi el-Hudi too.

One of the things I want you to realise is that all of our workmen doing labour are eating meat. Like, a lot of protein for this hard labour, which one needs but you might not give to a slave.

This is one of the reasons why I do think that they're actually being treated well, because we actually see that they're eating a significant amount of protein at this point.

So, the food is coming in. Water is a little more difficult.

There are, when you look around the desert, maybe 3 or 4 places where water will pool and you might have small sources of water. And certainly the pastoral nomads and the travellers all know about these small places, and they will in fact drink from them when needed.

But that is not enough for 1,500 people, at all. And so this becomes of epic scale, where they were probably actually bringing water from the Nile, 35 kilometres, too. You can put it in animal skins, and you can put them on the back of donkeys and just bring it in.

And we actually have lots and lots of water jars. But that really does make it [that] one of the most significant resources in the desert is going to be your water and your water sources.

And from the things that we see, the administration and the people in charge are most concerned about the amethyst and the water. Those are their top concerns in many ways.

We also have lots and lots of evidence for them bringing water in en masse, because we've actually found the road that travels from these sites straight to Aswan.

And this is actually a road that they built. It has infrastructure built into it. You can see it here, that they actually laid out stones at standard levels, and it's exactly 13 metres wide, which is 25 cubits. So, this is a properly laid type of track. When it goes through parts of the mountains, they're all carved out and around.

So, basically somebody could actually just stand in Aswan and say, go that way until you find people. You don't need a caravan leader. You don't need somebody to take you. You just walk for a day. And that's what it'll take.

And this road, we've tracked parts of it, and it does, in fact go the whole way back to Aswan. It follows a track that Mohammed Osman actually predicted based on GIS models of basically the easiest route to get there.

There is an earlier road that's known that goes from the northern part of Aswan and follows the natural wadi divots, but that's an extra 10 kilometres. This actually is the route that everybody started taking from that point forward. It's also full of Middle Kingdom pottery and later pottery too.

We're fairly sure that once this road comes into Aswan, it goes to a giant fortress that was on the east bank.

Now, if any of you guys have been to Aswan— Has anybody been to Aswan? It's right next to the Old Cataract Hotel. You know, the big fancy Cataract that Agatha Christie wrote her books at? It's in their backyard, so I can't get permission to dig it. It's probably under the very old gardens right now.

We hypothesise that it's a fortress by the name of Abu or Elephantine. We do have seal impressions that are connected with larger institutions. Unfortunately, only the last sign, which basically means 'institution' is visible. We don't have the name. So, I got to go dig more.

But we know somebody important was supplying them, and that's almost certainly that fortress in that location.

That was a very quick summary of these 1,500 people. But just keep in mind the kings are doing this en masse. There are hunter gatherers. There's prospectors. There's people building things. There's soldiers. There's administrators. There's miners. But this 1,500 people probably also includes this massive supply line that is coming regularly, maybe daily, but definitely regularly.

It might also include the people in Aswan that are gathering things for them. Somebody is catching those fish, somebody's baking the bread and somebody is shipping it all. So, I actually like to think of that number more holistically, as everybody involved in this process.

So, the pharaohs really did go to the ends of the world to get this stuff, and they were pretty happy about it. One of our inscriptions says that over the course of a full year, they got 150 hekat of this pretty, purple, useless stone. Yay! That's basically 680 litres. So, a closet full. And that was enough. That was enough for them.

That begs the question, if this is so valuable, is anybody else doing this?

And we also have evidence for other people mining in the desert too. So site 5, 4, and 9 are the big ones that the pharaohs are going to, but I want to talk about this site here for a little bit. This is site 21.

It's a much smaller site, but it doesn't have a big road to any of these big places too, because it wasn't connected, even though it's contemporary.

Now, by contemporary I mean within the Middle Kingdom, I don't mean at the same exact moment that the pharaoh's out there. I think I'd be a little scared. I might wait till the next year when he's not there.

But site 21 is very interesting. We have a small to medium-sized mine. It's about 20 metres across. And then we have 13 small huts or features that don't even look like huts. There's just a bunch of little rocks piled together. I know it doesn't seem that exciting, but it really is, for many reasons.

We found amethyst there. We know that this is a small amethyst mine, and it's on the same updrifts that amethyst would actually rise up on.

Now, feature 11, which is this one in the back, was one of the very cool ones that we actually spent some time excavating. Here we see a hut. It's about 70 centimetres high. We actually have this processing porch where they sat there, and they chipped the amethyst away, and you can see the hoards of amethyst.

We know that they were cooking over here because you get a lot of charcoal and a lot of burnt pots and things like that. You also have pots back there where they stored things, and then they just threw their trash out over here. This is really like 4 metres. Plus there's all of this activity, and then a level of sand and then the same exact activity on top of it.

So, I don't just think these are the same types of people going back over the different years. I think it's the same guy or the same 10 people, whatever. 4 people, I don't even know. Small amount of people. Because they're doing the same exact activities in the same locations with a gap in time. It's kind of weird. That's not just being a certain type of person. That's actually the same person, in many ways. Somebody is going and actually doing this.

And then the other thing that we see is that these are not connected to the pharaoh. We don't have any of the same types of supplies at all. The bones are totally different. All we get out here are tiny snake and bird bones, which might have just been the animals that died. It doesn't seem like they're eating meat at all.

And their pots are totally different. They're not even stealing things from the large expeditions a couple of miles away at all.

We actually see these people working in the landscape differently. And a lot of them are probably Nubians. I think this because we found a bunch of Nubian-type of objects.

So we have a whole bunch of ostrich egg shells that are usually connected with Nubians. We have axes that— We have some in the Egyptian stuff, but they're Nubian-style axes. We also have these weird geodes, which are found in a couple of Nubian sites further south too.

So, it's not a lot, but the proportions are different from what you get at the big Egyptian sites where they are actually using different types of stone technology.

And then there's the pottery. I know you guys don't know anything about Egyptian pottery, but this is what drew us there. All these little lines? This is very clearly Nubian pottery.

Now at our Egyptian site, the ones run by the pharaoh, we get Nubian pottery. It's about 10 percent. Here, the proportions are totally different. So, at feature 11 where I have all this activity, it's like 80 percent Nubian pots. That is mind boggling. And there are Egyptian pots mixed in too, but just our proportions are way off.

There might also be Egyptian groups working out there at the same time. Or— They're people. They're probably multicultural people that have their own personalities and identities, and I'm pigeonholing them now based on their pots, so we'll step aside.

But these are not our standard Egyptian expeditions at all. And in some capacity, they're not just standard Nubians either that are coming from the Nile Valley.

I'm not going to go into great detail, but it's because some of these pots weren't made in the Nile Valley. All the tiny little rocks in them come from the Red Sea hills. So, a couple of 100 kilometres the other direction. So these actually might be pots of pastoral nomads.

We are still at the beginning of this research project, but it's pretty cool because instead of just seeing Nubians from the Nile, we're seeing Nubians from the desert that are certainly not the same groups at all.

So, it's the beginnings of this origin of activity.

The point is, we see two major streams of amethyst coming in. Pharaoh is controlling most of them. And a lot of this en masse is going into the treasury.

On a much smaller informal level, we have the people at site 21 and probably other places that are going into the desert with a handful of people. They're doing a little bit of mining on their own. They're living on their own. And then they're somehow bringing the amethyst back, because it's valuable, and maybe they're keeping it for themselves, or it's otherwise getting into the informal economy around them. Anybody can buy and sell things, but somebody is trickling [it] in, in that capacity.

So, we've got two streams of amethyst coming in, and at that point you want to take your raw amethyst like this—this is what's coming out of the desert—and you're going to give it to a craftsman.

When you buy jewellery in Egypt, you as the person commissioning it need to supply the raw material too. Usually, craftsmen don't just keep that themselves. And so it seems like people would go to the craftsmen, and then they'd make them these really, really cool pieces of jewellery.

And we actually have evidence of jewellery workshops as well. So for instance, right about the same time at the cemetery that goes with the capital city, 700 kilometres north, you have the pyramid of the Pyramid of Amenemhet. You have the pyramid of Senwosret 1. And these are pharaohs of the same exact time, and right behind here we have a jewellery making workshop that had a whole bunch of raw amethysts that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had excavated 100 years ago. It's been a while.

Just in the last 5 or 6 years, a group of German archaeologists from the German Archeological Institute excavated house 169 on Elephantine Island.

Elephantine is the island in the middle of Aswan. It's a very cool place to visit. It has great contemporary Middle Kingdom archaeology. They now have a very awesome jewellery workshop too, thanks to the work that these guys did, where they actually have dozens or hundreds of pieces of amethyst that are in various locations around this house. It seems like they were hoarded in specific places and sorted.

In addition to amethyst, you also have evidence of a lot of other semi-precious materials being turned into beads. Peter Kopp, who excavated this, actually shows how you take a chip of an ostrich eggshell and turn it into an ostrich shell bead. It's the same thing with amethyst. It's just slightly harder than eggshell. But this is probably a jewellery workshop that is basically at the same place that our amethyst is coming from.

So, some of it is probably coming that direction too. And that's where you get all your pretty stuff that you see in museums.

And then how does it actually get to individual people?

Well, the pharaoh's controlling most of this. One would think that the pharaoh would keep some for himself, because why wouldn't you? We do know that Djer from Dynasty 1, a thousand years earlier, had amethyst in his bracelet.

We also know that King [Tutankhamun], 500 years later, has amethyst bracelets in his tomb. We just don't have any jewellery hoards of pharaohs from the Middle Kingdom.

However, look, they're drawn with beautiful jewellery on. I just need to colour it purple. The paint's come off so I can't really tell. But, they should keep some for themselves, right?

The other thing that they do is, they give the amethyst to gods and to temples, because that's their job as the king, to supply the gods and the temples too.

We have this really cool stele known as the Stela of Ikhernofret that dates to the same period of our mines. You can see it here in the Berlin Neues Museum, and it talks about King Senwosret 3 giving all of these fine things to a god, to the Osiris festival at Abydos.

And it says, "I made for him"—meaning Osiris—"the portable shrine that carries the beauty of the Foremost-of-the-Westerners, of gold, of silver, lapis lazuli, amethysts, of [?] wood, and cedarwood..." So this is all the finest materials. And he's bragging about how this is actually getting to this location. So, it is quite interesting.

Now, the king is also gifting it to people, specifically the royal women, because remember, it's sexy and the women are connected in that capacity. You can imagine the king actually giving this as gifts for people.

Now, we also have this very weird inscription known as the Admonitions of Ipuwer.

What it does is, it talks about a topsy turvy world where everything is gone wrong, and it is the way it's not supposed to be. And in this world of topsy turvy, it says, "Indeed, the gold and lapis lazuli, silver and turquoise, carnelian and amethyst...are strung around the necks of maidservants... and she who had to look at her face in the water is now the owner of a mirror."

Like those are the things that are not supposed to happen, right? So, it shows you that all of these materials, especially amethyst is this prestigious thing that you expect elite, wealthy, and likely snobby people to have. 

Now, of course, the last one is an inference, but, you know...

But we do see a lot of royal women, especially princesses, having very, very cool jewellery.

And there are a couple of princess jewellery hoards from this contemporary era. One of the ones that I love is this woman known as Sithathoryunet. She is buried right next to the pyramid of Senwosret 2 at El-Lahun. And, in her tomb, which is pretty small but in a cool location, it had the best jewellery hoard ever, and most of it was just in this box. But you get these absolutely gorgeous things.

So, she had a wig that you could actually tie gold beads on to. She has one of our only gold diadems that we know was worn. You have these beautiful pectorals that is in every single art history textbook. Other lovely objects, inlaid jewellery boxes. I particularly love this one. It's a small scarab, but it's made out of lapis lazuli.

Lapis lazuli at this time only comes from Afghanistan; so it goes from Afghanistan down to India, up the Persian Gulf, straight up through Mesopotamia along the Euphrates River, out to Aleppo, down through the Mediterranean, and then to Egypt.

And each way it gets more expensive. Lapis lazuli is 8 times more valuable than gold, but in the Middle Kingdom they couldn't get lapis lazuli. They had it before. They had it after.

But at this point, those Royal Tombs of Ur guys—you know, the big death pit thing, that's really cool, that I could also talk about for a long time—you should see the [?]. They're buying all the [lapis lazuli]. None of it is getting to Egypt because they all need it for the royal tombs of Ur.

Except for that piece. And she [Sithathoryunet] is special enough to have that piece in her tomb.

And then within her tomb she has this whole set of the most stunning amethyst and gold jewellery. It includes a girdle. It includes bracelets and anklets. And it has these really cool lion clips with the finest craftsmanship where you can't even see how they connect and disconnect to put them on. It's really just some of the finest things around.

But it wasn't just the princesses who were getting royal jewels. The kings would also give them out to other types of courtiers too.

For instance, in this stela of a contemporary guy— This is basically his only record for life. He's going to brag about the most important time in his life. So, he mentions his wife, he mentions his kids. And the next most important thing is that, "the king gave to me a great seal of amethyst, being pure like the royal nobles and my staff in ebony, which was purified with electrum." Nothing else is talked about, right?

He didn't talk about the poker game he won with his friends or anything else that he did. He talks about this moment. It is one of the most significant moments of his life.

We also see a lot of amethyst being treated that has the names and titles of individuals on it. So, this is another high, high courtier. He is in fact the hereditary noble prince great sandal bearer, a guy by the name of Kanefer.

But what's really interesting is that this seems to be something that was used during life, but it was also found in Jordan, a different country to the north.

So, it's almost like they're treated like heirlooms. Even after this guy dies, either he takes it to his tomb with him, or it gets passed down to his family, until somebody else puts it in a very sacred place in a tomb. These are not just discarded objects in any way.

We know from recent excavations at Deir El-Bersha that governors also sometimes get amethysts from the king. So, again, high placed people that you expect.

And of course, the king will also give some out as diplomatic gifts. In a contemporary level, we also see very small bits of amethyst found in Byblos, in Mycenae, a couple in Mesopotamia, some in Babylonia.

Some of this might actually come from Egypt, some of them are in Egyptian designs, some are re-carved or carved into either Mesopotamian or Babylonian types of inscriptions. But you can also see this as presents being given out by the Egyptian king.

The Nubians also have a lot of amethyst, too.

So, at the royal tombs of Kerma—these are very wealthy, powerful Nubians, the kings of the country—they will have amethyst in their tombs.

However, they also have access to the Eastern desert and they are a super powerful country. So you don't know if this is diplomatic gifts from Egypt, or if they're just going and mining it themselves. It could be either. It could be both. We don't really know.

Maybe they were gifting it back to Egypt too. They're just as powerful as the Egyptians at this point.

But then there are the cases that get weirder. I can explain all of those first ones. They're like, well, the king gave it to them, right?

But you also have middle class people, and other people too, that are getting bits of amethyst.

We have this guy from Naga ed-Der. We don't even really know much about him at all, or his name. Basically, he just has a small tomb and he is decked out in jewellery, with a mirror. But he does have amethyst.

So, we don't know if this trickled down from his boss or he saved up to buy it. We don't know how he got it, but he has it.

And then it gets even weirder, because we actually have lots and lots of evidence for poorer people having amethyst too. People that are just a pit burial with a mat. No mummification, maybe 1 or 2 pots, and maybe 1 piece of jewellery. That's it. That was their whole burial. And yet they will have amethyst.

I haven't run the statistics on this, but it's not just once or twice. It's not some outlier. It happens regularly. And if you go to some museums—like, most of these photos are from University College London, that shows a lot of daily life things—you will see amethyst in a lot of these poorer tombs.

In fact, if you look at that bracelet back there, two of them are actually very lightly coloured pieces of amethyst that came from probably middle class or lower class tombs of Abydos.

And it fits very well with these things that you don't really expect. And then, even more that you don't expect; we get lots of amethyst in contemporary, poorer Nubian tombs too, especially groups known as the Pan-Grave. You guys don't need to know that. They are a type of Nubian. Maybe.

But here we actually have full amethyst bracelets or necklaces or even just 1 or 2 beads. And remember, if you want to have sex in the afterlife, you need that piece of amethyst. So, in some ways you wonder if that is the most important thing you have to get into the tomb.

You got your beer jar, you got your piece of amethyst, and you're good. 

Anyway. I want you to— I can't answer all the questions, right? I can try. I'm trying to figure out how this whole economy works, but there are multiple levels.

You definitely have the formal level coming down from the king. You also have the informal level of those random people gathering amethyst at site 21 or elsewhere—it's probably elsewhere too—and bringing in things into the informal economy.

Maybe it's trickling down, maybe it's selling through the lower levels, maybe both, because that's how economies work. They don't just go one direction. But it is possible to buy. It is possible to get if that is the one thing you definitively want.

So, the next time you go into a museum, especially something with an Egyptian piece of amethyst, and you look at the amethyst, I don't just want you to say, oh, that's pretty, and walk past.

I need you to see the blood, the sweat, the tears, the pain, the 1,500 people. All the bugs that they endured, and really how they went to the ends of the world to get a pretty purple stone, because it really was meaningful to them.

Thank you very much, and I'm happy to answer questions.

I do want to thank so many people here today, especially Heather, the History Teachers Association, Macquarie University, of course everybody in Egypt, the Ministry of Antiquities...

If you'd like to donate to our project, we also have a website, wadielhoudi.com, where you can make a donation. You can always check out our publications as well. And I'm happy to take any questions. So, thank you.

Audience 1: Of the 1,500 expedition members, 41 are listed as chief miners. Is there any evidence that these are men skilled in the craft of mining? Members of a guild, or guild families? Or just good overseers?

KL: They are definitely people who know how to do exactly what they're doing. It does say that their chief of mining— It says there are 41 of them, and that they came from the capital city.

We don't have their individual names, but we do know that they're there. We also have an inscription from site 4 that I didn't show you, that is a dedication of a person to a god, and it just says that they are a gem miner.

I don't know if they're specifically from individual guilds, but we do know from other parallel examples that there are craft families and that this is usually an apprentice skill.

Of course, you can teach people outside of your family or friends of your family too, but it's typically an apprentice skill. So these are people that know what they're doing and they go around to different places.

Audience 2: Was the environment and the climate much the same as it is now? Because obviously there were trees, because they've cut them down to burn things with.

KL: Yes. The environment, the climate are basically as they are now. There was a climate shift maybe a couple hundred years, 200 years earlier, where it went from more savanna to less savanna and took away some of the water. But I think it's essentially the same.

Audience 3: Hi. I'm just interested in how the, I guess the pharaohs would have controlled the other mines. So, was this a special case where they didn't control the mine for the whole year and had some of these artisanal miners coming in and maybe stealing, maybe not stealing other precious minerals? Were they protected all year round or was this kind of like a standard process of expeditions going out?

KL: That's a great question. So, the Egyptians have been mining gems since the early Dynastic period, so, for the last 1,000 years. They have been sending out turquoise mining expeditions specifically to places in the Sinai, so, much further than 35 kilometres away. And they've been doing it since Dynasty 3. So like 2,700 BC, possibly even earlier. That's just when the inscriptions start.

So, they do have a history of doing this in very extreme places, just not for the colour purple. I guess I leaned into that a little. But all mining expeditions are only ever temporary. They go out and they come back—at least until the Roman period, where they just take over and you get whole cities. But that's way later.

We know this, and we often think that they go like every 5 years at a place called [?]. The French actually argued that they would wait every 20 years to go back because you clear out so much of the wood that you deforest the desert and the resources aren't out there anymore. So, they would go and then they'd wait for the trees to grow back, and then they'd go 20 years later.

I don't know if that's exactly what's going on here. We actually have a lot of different inscriptions that you can track on a timeline, and it seems like sometimes they're going every year, every 3 years, and then it jumps 20 years.

It depends on the individual pharaoh. I think that they're close enough to the Nile that even if they couldn't get their resources, they'd just bring them in. But some of these other places are really much further away.

And I know I made a big deal about 1,500, but if you go to Wadi Hammamat, where they're actually excavating large pieces of stone, those inscriptions talk about 18,000 people. And that's in part because they have to actually haul the stone back, and they have to have people pull it, so you need 18,000 people.

In this case [of amethysts], they throw them on the backs of donkeys and put them in bags. So you don't you don't need the people to actually do the hauling at that point. Yeah, but I swear my place is still cool.

Audience 4: Can I just ask a follow up question? How long did the mining expeditions kind of run? If they go back every 3 years, every 20 years, how long did that kind of go for? And when did they stop?

KL: Our first expedition went during the reign of Mentuhotep 4, year 1, so, something like 1995 BCE. And it goes— Our last inscription dates to Sobekhotep 4. So he's in the middle of Dynasty 13 but that's basically right when the Egyptian government was about to collapse. So it's about 1650 B.C.E. So we have a good chunk of 250 years. And at that point, the Egyptian government falls apart and you fall into the second and immediate period and the big vacuum of power that turns into a massive war.

However, when we get to the New Kingdom, they decide not to re-open the mines at all. Apparently purple wasn't cool in the New Kingdom.

Actually, Diana Craig Patch is another Egyptologist who has actually argued that the whole colour spectrum shifts and they just don't like purple so much anymore.

They know the mines still exist because one guy, a guy by the name of Usersatet, who's basically the number 3 person in the country, and this is his big jurisdiction. He went out. He leaves an inscription that is our only piece of New Kingdom anything at Wadi El-Hudi. We don't even have one New Kingdom broken pot.

So, he carries out this massive rock. He leaves it there, dedicates it to the gods, doesn't break any pottery, and goes home. And then, interestingly, he falls from grace a couple of years later and they hate him so much they sent somebody back to the desert to scratch his figure out, even though there's absolutely no audience at all, and nobody's there.

So, they know the mines are still there. They know he left the inscription out there. And yet they choose not to re-open those mines. And that's at the same place that people in the Ptolemaic period—so, 1,500 years later—did re-open. There's still amethyst there, because there's a whole 'nother 300 years of mining at that point.