Gebel el-Mawta

Gebel Al-Mawta

Gebel (Jebel) al-Mawta in the Siwa Oasis of Egypt is known, for fairly obvious reasons, as the Mountain of the Dead, because it is here in this conical mountain a little over a kilometer to the north of Shali along the main road from the escarpment that a number of tombs are situated. Local residents also call it Gebel (Qaret) al-Musabbarin (Missabbarin), meaning Mountain of the Embalmed. The tombs, which cover every inch of its base and are situated on its terraces and on all sides of the conical part, date from the 26th Dynasty, the Greek (Ptolemaic) and the Roman periods, though there appear to be no Christian burials.

Note that the view from atop the small mountain provides a spectacular panorama of the surrounding area.

This necropolis was one of the focuses of the early visitors to the Siwa. Browne was permitted to visit it in 1792, and at that time stated that the tombs contained neither inscriptions nor paintings. Hornemann, who visited the Siwa in 1798 mentions that the Siwans had found gold inside the tombs, and that they were ravaging the ancient burials in search of more. The first traveler to mention drawings and paintings in the tombs was Cailliaud, who visited Gebel al-Mawta on December 12th, 1819. He records that: "One of the most remarkable tombs contained three rooms, one after the other, whose total length is 11 metres. At right and left sides there are five chambers. On the walls of subterranean grottoes one finds the remains of hieroglyphs and Egyptian figures painted on the stucco; at the end there are two mutilated statues of a man and a woman cut in the rock, as it is generally seen in the Nile Valley."

Interestingly, this tomb seems to be unidentified at this time.

Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman ruler of Egypt, conquered the Siwa in 1820. The French consul from Cairo and other distinguished friends were allowed to accompany the troops and go wherever they wished, which was not always the case. They visited the mountain, but the notes of Drovetti add little to the writings of earlier visitors. However, later that same year, the German Consul from Egypt, Von Minutoli, visited the Siwa and he refers to the tombs, stating that some of them were painted with green, red, yellow and blue colors and contained hieroglyphs. He also mentioned that the Siwans lived in some of the tombs, and that during his stay a few hundred Bedouin of the Mjabir tribe from Tripoli were living in the tombs.

A. Silva White was perhaps the first to publish photographs of the tombs, after he visited the Siwa in 1897. Among other items, he acquired "a fairly large piece of painted wrapping", which was later described by Professor Sayce as:

"A mummy shroud, not incased in a coffin, but buried in the sand with bitumen. At the upper end is a picture of the deceased on his bier, with Anubis standing beside him and pouring the waters of life over the body, while a worshipper is standing on either side in an attitude of prayer. Below, on either side of the shroud, are figures of the four genii of the dead: Amost (Amesti), Duau-Mutef, Hapi and Qebehsenouf. The genii are placed one above the other two on each side and between them are bands of rosettes."

This shroud was presented to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford and was dated as Roman. Fakhry explains that:

"Although the author did not publish a photograph, we can easily understand from the notes of Sayce that the scene shows Osiris on his bier with the goddess Isis at his feet and Nephthys at his head, while Anubis is embalming he body. The four canopic jars representing the four sons of Horus are depicted below this scene."

Gebel al-Mawta is also where the emerald mines of the Siwa are thought to exist. According to G. E. Simpson in "The Heart of Libya", Cailliaud found emeralds on Mount Zabarah and presented ten pounds of them to Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt at the time.

Though there are some notable ones, most of the tombs on Gebel al-Mawta are barren, and bones once littered the mountain. Tradition maintains that Radwan, the king of Siwa at the time of the Arab invasion of Egypt, took the bodies from Gebel al-Mawta and threw them into many of the springs in an attempt to poison the enemy. Also, despite the fact that the people of the Siwa believe the mountain to be haunted and will not venture there at night, it is here, in times of great rains and invasions by modern armies, that the inhabitants go for protection, living in the caves with the dead. Unfortunately, they also destroyed many of the caves, chipping away the inscriptions and even violating the mummies in search of amulets.

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