In Egypt, the Western Desert is a part of the Sahara Desert that lies west of the Nile River, extending to the Libyan border and south from the Mediterranean Sea to the border with Sudan. It is named in contrast to the Eastern Desert, which extends east from the Nile to the Red Sea, although both are part of the broader Libyan Desert in North Africa.
Map of Egypt showing location of the Western Desert.
The Western Desert covers an area of some 700,000 km2, accounting for around two-thirds of Egypt's total land area. This immense desert spans the area from the Mediterranean Sea southwards to the Sudanese border. The region is described as a plateau standing on average some 150 m (500 feet) above sea level. It is barren, rubble- and boulder-strewn, dark brown in color, occasionally dotted with scrub, and, at first sight, flat.
The government considers the Western Desert a frontier region and has divided it into two governorates at about the twenty-eighth parallel: Matruh to the north and New Valley (Al Wadi al Jadid) to the south.
Geographical Features
Map of the Western Desert of Egypt.
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While much of the area does not conform to the "romantic view" of wind-formed dunes with occasional oases fringed with palm, such areas do exist in the Sand Sea where dunes are sculpted into fantastic shapes. The area is also the location of a series of oases created where the land dips sufficiently to meet the aquifer. These lie in an arc from Siwa in the northwest near the Libyan border, to Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla, then Kharga in the south.
Oases of the Western Desert
There are seven important depressions in the Western Desert, and all are considered oases except the largest, Qattara, the water of which is salty. The Qattara Depression encompasses 19,605 square kilometers, which is similar to the size of Lake Ontario. It is largely below sea level and is 133 meters below sea level at the lowest. Limited agricultural production, the presence of some natural resources, and permanent settlements are found in the other six depressions, all of which have fresh water provided by the Nile or by local groundwater.
The five oases all have salty water, sometimes entire bitter lakes, but enough fresh to sustain them. They are large fertile areas with towns and industry, and don't match the popular image of a few palm trees and huts clustered around a pool.
- Siwa: Far to the west, a large oasis, a county-sized fertile area some 20 km north-south by 50 km east-west, fed by a series of lakes and springs. The Siwah Oasis, close to the Libyan border and west of Qattara, is isolated from the rest of Egypt but has sustained life since ancient times. The Siwa's cliff-hung Temple of Amun was renowned for its oracles for more than 1,000 years. For instance the aquifer at Siwa continues all the way into Libya, where it emerges as the Jaghbub oasis.
- Bahariya: Is the most accessible, five hours by bus from Cairo, and transport to other oases comes this way.
- Farafra
- Dakhla: Another large oasis, some 25 km north-south by 80 km east-west.
- Kharga: The largest of all, 160 km north-south and up to 80 km east-west. The other major oases form a topographic chain of basins extending from the Faiyum Oasis (sometimes called the Fayyum Depression) which lies 60 kilometers southwest of Cairo, south to the Bahariya, Farafirah, and Dakhilah oases before reaching the country's largest oasis, Kharijah.
A brackish lake, Birket Qarun, at the northern reaches of Al Fayyum Oasis, drained into the Nile in ancient times.
The Black and White Deserts
To the south, beyond the Bahariya oasis lies the Black Desert, an area of black volcanic hills and dolerite deposits. The mounds of the Black Desert, up to 100 metres (330 feet) high, vary in size, composition, height, and shape as some are dark consisting of iron quartzite while others are more reddish as its surface rocks consist of iron sandstone. Beyond this, north of Farafra, lies the White Desert, an area of wind-sculpted chalk rock formations, which give the area its name.
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The Black Desert is a region of volcano-shaped and widely spaced mounds, distributed along about 30 km (19 mi) in the Western Desert between the White Desert in the south and the Bahariya Oasis in the north.
The White Desert is a national park, first established as a protected area in 2002. It is located in the Farafra depression, 45 km (28 mi) north of the town of Qsar El Farafra. The park is the site of large white chalk rock formations, created through erosion by wind and sand. It is thought that over-grazing and climate change led to desertification and the current geography.
The White Desert of Egypt.
The Great Sand Sea
The Great Sand Sea is a roughly lung-shaped area of sandy desert lying astride the border with Libya, 320 km (200 mi) inland from the Mediterranean. The sea is divided by a long peninsula of rocky desert along the border, leaving the eastern lobe in Egypt and the western in Libya, where it is called the Calanshio desert. On the Egyptian side it was known historically as the "Libyan Desert", taking its name from Ancient Libya, which lay between the Nile and Cyrenaica. In Roman times, the term Libya was limited to Cyrenaica and the region between there and Egypt, organized as the provinces of Libya Superior and Libya Inferior.
The Great Sand Sea stretches about 650 km (400 mi) from north to south and 300 km (190 mi) from east to west. On satellite images this desert shows a pattern of long sand ridges running in a roughly north-south direction. However, despite the apparent uniformity the Great Sand Sea has two large areas with different types of megadunes. The Egyptian sand sea lies parallel to the Calanshio Sand Sea of Libya, with which it is contiguous in the north.
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The Great Sand Sea.
Historical Context
To the ancient Egyptians the desert to the west signified death: it was where the sun god Ra went to die each day, and where the souls of the pharaohs went following their interment in tombs west of the life-giving Nile.
In 525 BC, the Lost Army of Cambyses, a military expedition by the Persian king Cambyses II got lost in the desert while searching for the Oracle of Ammon, at Siwa. With the absorption of the kingdom of Egypt into the Roman Empire, the desert region was organized into the province of Libya Inferior, while Cyrenaica became Libya Superior. In time the region came under the jurisdiction of the Byzantines and their successors, the Arabs, Mamluks and Turks.
The 20th century saw the Western Desert become an arena of conflict; during the First World War it was the location of the Senussi Campaign against the British and Italians. The 1930s saw an upsurge of exploration and mapping expeditions by British Army officers, such as Ralph Bagnold and Pat Clayton, laying the basis for war-time operations by such forces as the Long Range Desert Group. This period was also marked by the search for Zerzura, a mythical oasis in the deep desert.
Playfair described the Western Desert of 1940 as 390 km (240 mi) wide.
The Nile River: Egypt's Lifeline
Despite covering only about 5% of the total area of Egypt; the Nile Valley and Nile Delta are the most important regions, being the country's only cultivable regions and supporting about 99% of the population. The Nile valley extends approximately 800 km from Aswan to the outskirts of Cairo. The Nile Valley is known as Upper Egypt, while the Nile Delta region is known as Lower Egypt.
The Nile enters Egypt a few kilometers north of Wadi Halfa, a Sudanese town that was completely rebuilt on high ground when its original site was submerged in the reservoir created by the Aswan High Dam. As a result of the dam's construction, the Nile actually begins its flow into Egypt as Lake Nasser, which extends southwards from the dam for 320 km to the border and for an additional 158 km within Sudan.
The Nile Delta covers approximately 22,000 km2 (roughly equivalent in area to that of Massachusetts). According to historical accounts from the first century AD, seven branches of the Nile once ran through the delta. Since then, nature and man have closed all but two main outlets: the east branch, Damietta (also known as Dumyat; 240 km long), and the west branch, Rosetta (235 km long). Both outlets are named after the ports located at their respective mouths. A network of drainage and irrigation canals supplements these remaining outlets.
The construction of dams on the Nile, particularly the Aswan High Dam, transformed the mighty river into a large and predictable irrigation ditch. Lake Nasser, the world's largest artificial lake, has enabled planned use of the Nile regardless of the amount of rainfall in Central Africa and East Africa.
Archaeological research indicates that people once lived at a much higher elevation along the river than they do today, probably because the river was higher or the floods more severe. The timing and amount of annual flow were always unpredictable.
The Giza Pyramid Complex
The Giza pyramid complex (مجمع أهرامات الجيزة), also called the Giza necropolis and also known as the Pyramids of Giza or Egypt, is the site on the Giza Plateau in Giza and Greater Cairo, Egypt that includes the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Pyramid of Khafre, and the Pyramid of Menkaure, along with their associated pyramid complexes and the Great Sphinx of Giza. All were built during the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, between 2600 and 2500 BC.
The Giza pyramid complex consists of the Great Pyramid (also known as the Pyramid of Cheops or Khufu and constructed c. 2580 - c. 2560 BC), the somewhat smaller Pyramid of Khafre (or Chephren) a few hundred metres to the south-west, and the relatively modest-sized Pyramid of Menkaure (or Mykerinos) a few hundred metres farther south-west. The Great Sphinx lies on the east side of the complex. Current consensus among Egyptologists is that the head of the Great Sphinx is that of Khafre.
The Great Sphinx of Giza is a limestone statue of a reclining sphinx, a mythical creature with the head of a human, and the body of a lion. Facing directly from west to east, it stands on the Giza Plateau on the west bank of the Nile in Giza, Egypt. The original shape of the Sphinx was cut from the bedrock, and has since been restored with layers of limestone blocks. It measures 73 m (240 ft) long from paw to tail, 20 m (66 ft) high from the base to the top of the head and 19 m (62 ft) wide at its rear haunches. The Sphinx is the oldest known monumental sculpture in Egypt and one of the most recognisable statues in the world.
The Giza Pyramids.
Travel Information
By bus or long-distance taxi are common travel options. There are no flights, and trains no longer run to Siwa or Kharga.
Warning: Several western governments have issued travel warnings to many areas in Egypt.
Egypt has coastlines on the Mediterranean Sea, the River Nile, and the Red Sea. Egypt borders Libya to the west, Palestine and Israel to the east and Sudan to the south (with a current dispute over the Halaib triangle). The longest straight-line distance in Egypt from north to south is 1,420 km (880 mi), while that from east to west measures 1,275 km (792 mi). Egypt has more than 2,900 km (1,800 mi) of coastline on the Mediterranean Sea, the Gulf of Suez, and the Gulf of Aqaba. Egypt is predominantly desert. 35,000 km2 - 3.5% - of the total land area is cultivated and permanently settled. Most of the country lies within the wide band of desert that stretches eastwards from Africa's Atlantic Coast across the continent and into southwest Asia.
In the 1971 census, 57 percent of Egypt's population was counted as rural, including those residing in agricultural areas in the Nile Valley and Delta, as well as the much smaller number of persons living in desert areas. Rural areas differ from the urban in terms of poverty, fertility rates, and other social factors. Agriculture is a key component of the economy in rural areas, though some people are employed in the tourist industry or other non-farm occupations. In 1992, the percentage of Egypt's population employed in agriculture was 33 percent.
A great aquifer of sandstone and limestone lies beneath the Western Desert, containing "fossil water" - rain that fell some 40,000 years ago, a non-renewable resource. In natural depressions (which are often extensive) this comes to the surface or is easily reached by wells. However these depressions have been scoured out by wind-blown sand and salt, and the water is only usable if it's not salty.
The Sahara is believed to alternate between fertile and desert over the 20,000 year cycle of the precession of the earth's axis of rotation, which alters the season of the North African Monsoon. So it turned to desert 5,000 years ago, leaving dried river beds with crocodiles in isolated pools, ruins among the sand dunes, and pushing migration and social change in pharaonic times. Unless disrupted by other climate change, it could again become savannah in another 15,000 years. But if the fossil waters are 40,000 years old, that's two cycles ago, suggesting that the latest "green" was poor, and so the next might be.
One group of travellers who came to grief trying to get in was the army of Cambyses II, son of Cyrus the Great of Persia. Circa 534 BCE he faced rebellion in Egypt and dispatched a great army (which grows and grows in the telling) from Luxor towards Siwa. They vanished utterly. Herodotus a century later wrote that they were engulfed by desert sand storms. This seems unlikely, and no trace has ever been found, despite the capabilities of metal detectors and satellite photography. Perhaps they were heading somewhere else and people have looked in the wrong place.
The abundance of life in the Sinai Peninsula may not be immediately apparent. This again has its roots in the way in which the animals of the desert have adapted to life here. Many species, mammals especially, but also reptiles and even birds such as owls, are nocturnal. They spend the daylight hours in the relative cool of burrows, under boulders or in crevices and cracks in the rock. Many of these creatures will only be apparent from their tracks and trails or from a fleeting glimpse of a diminutive gerbil, or zig-zigging hare, in the car headlights at night.
Egypt : Oasis - Little Known Egypt - Western Desert
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