The Mysterious Mines of Hathor
Serabit el Khadem
“Hathor visited me in my dream last night. She took my hand, and we walked under the dark desert sky sprinkled with bright stars. Then she stopped by a large rock and showed me where to dig for the blue stones.” said the priest to the Pharaoh, “and she pointed in the distance. You must honour me with a temple carved deep into the mountain.”
Humankind has harvested the Earth since the beginning of history, and ancient mines were found worldwide. One would say there’s nothing special about digging minerals and ores in the bellies of the mountains. That might be true, but there is a fascinating place on Earth where one must stand in awe.
The temple of Hathor at Serabit el-Khadim stands on a massive rocky outcrop on an expanse of about 200 meters at an altitude of 850m above sea level in the highlands of Sinai, roughly 50km from the coastal town of Abu Zenima.
On the plateau, an extended sloping path starts from a large cave dedicated to Hathor, deviates its course, and descends towards the southwest, with the ritual and liturgical service rooms built in later times. This cave is carved into the rock, with smooth inner walls. It has a large Pillar of Amenhotep III. in the center.
The upper part of the temple of Serabit, of which some vestiges still remain, consisted of a series of halls, sanctuaries, and courtyards built in sandstone and surrounded by an enclosure wall. The votive altars had a recessed front and ‘work’ surfaces at different heights. The ruins of a foundry crucible and two conical stones measuring 15x22 centimeters were found nearby.
Ancient Egyptians knew the Sinai well, traveling through and wandering around, and the Bedouin tribes had long known its existence. Still, the temple at Serabit el-Khadim was first reported by Carsten Niebuhr’s campaign in 1762, and several stela contain 19th century graffiti left by early visitors to the site. The remains of the monument gained recognition when the eminent British Egyptologist Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie first visited Serabit el Khadem and published his excavations there in 1904-1905. Petrie described its architecture and the various archaeological components in detail. In later times, the visits of archaeologists of all nations continued, even if somewhat irregularly.
The temple of Hathor lay in a vast area of turquoise mines dating mostly from the Middle Kingdom. Semite labourers built it during the 12th Dynasty on the site where it is said that a local deity, Soped, ‘Lord of the Eastern Desert’ or ‘Lord of the Foreign Lands’, was worshiped.
Hathor pillars
Who built this amazing complex?
In Arabic, Serabit el Khadem means ‘Pillars of the Slave’. These ‘columns’ are connected with the tall votive steles that tower over the temple’s ruins in Serabit and are now destroyed by time. But where does the term ‘slave’ originate? One hypothesis could be that in Egyptian iconography, the prince or king of a foreign country militarily defeated by the Pharaoh was defined as a ‘slave’ of the Pharaoh. The term ‘slave prince/king’ is understood as a submissive royalty and was a phrase frequently used in the exaggerating style of the Egyptian Pharaohs.
Petrie also reports that in a Stele of the Pharaoh AmenemHat III. found in Serabit, the chief of the Semitic miners is mentioned with the name of Khebde, bearing the title of ‘Brother of the Prince of Retjenu’ (‘Sn Hq n-Retcen’ in hieroglyphic). On two steles, this character is represented on the back of a donkey, while he has a guide in front and a man carrying a flask of water behind. His task was organizational and diplomatic as a royal “hostage” to maintain good diplomatic relations between the Retjenu and Egypt. Alan Gardiner (“Egypt of the Pharaohs”) reiterates: “At the end of the 12th Dynasty under Amen-em-Hat, the brother of the prince of Retenu, assisted the Egyptians in the turquoise work at Serabit el Khadem, in the Sinai Peninsula”. The ancient Egyptians used the term ‘Retcenu’ or ‘Rezenu’ to designate Galilee and Palestine.
‘Retcenu’ in ancient Egyptian
Scholars and historians still argue today that this temple and mountain is the site of the biblical Mount Sinai, as described in the Book of Moses, where his people celebrated and adored the Golden Cow statue.
Serabit site had a great development as a mining center for the extraction of turquoise in Ancient Egypt. Pharaohs of the 12th, 18th, and 20th Dynasties carried out particular enlargements and subsequent restorations of the Serabit temple. But there are also finds dating back to the 4th Dynasty, such as some inscriptions of the Pharaoh Snefru and even to pre-dynastic periods. As Flinders-Petrie (“Researches in Sinai”) informs us, there are indeed archaeological finds of Snefru of the 4th Dynasty, who the Pharaohs of the following Dynasties ritually remembered as the only ‘Founder’ of the temple. Snefru had been in Egypt, among other things, the Builder of three Pyramids: that of Meidum, for which he was particularly famous, and the bent pyramid and red pyramid, both in Dahshur. The mining activity in Serabit at the time of the Pharaohs was limited to November-April, considering the conditions of sultriness and heat, which were impossible for miners during the summer period.
The Egyptians largely depended on inspiration to find gems and metals, as little technology existed. This came from dreams in “Sleep Chambers” at the temples on the Sinai. As the revenues from the Sinai mines were considerable, the cult of Hathor quickly spread to the Nile’s banks upon the miners’ triumphant return. Ancient Egyptians carved scarabs from this gemstone and used pulverized turquoise to colour statues, jewellery, and cosmetics.
Pharaoh Snefru - 5th Dynasty
The cave sanctuary of Hathor was cut into the rock in the times of Amenhotep III., Flinders-Petrie and his team found an Amarna statue-head of Akhenaton’s mother, Queen Tiye, with her cartouche set in the crown.
Most of the other relics Petrie’s team found were not out of the ordinary. But what riveted the archaeologist’s attention were three things: a metallurgist’s crucible, “a strange extremely pure white powder (ash) of unknown origins and tons of it …” (Petrie), and a vague term, ‘mfkt’, which enjoyed repeated mention on the temple walls and several stelas.
But what was a metallurgist’s crucible doing in a religious chamber, and what was the white powder? And what was the ‘mfkt’?
In the outer temple were numerous stone-carved rectangular tanks, circular basins, and various curiously shaped bench-like altars with open fronts and split-level surfaces. The explorers found a metallurgist’s space in which metals or other substances might have been melted or subjected to very high temperatures.
But the most mysterious find was a considerable amount of pure white powder concealed beneath carefully laid flagstones without residues of coal or embers, dating probably from the 12th Dynasty, which “extended along an area of 100x50 feet with a thickness ranging from 3 to 18 inches, totalling at least 50 tons of powder overall.” (Petrie). The nature of this powder puzzled Petrie himself. He rightly excluded that it was slag from copper processing, which instead left behind a dark material found in abundance in the nearby mines of Bir Nasib, as he also excluded that it was slag from the extraction of Manganese, worked in the adjacent mines of Umm Bughma. He thought that they weren’t dealing with residues of alkali combustion, which had been found near Jerusalem, in the vicinity of temples arranged on hills or high ground. Petrie hypothesized that it could have been fires with a religious background, as in the case of incense fumigations, of Semitic origin, considering the presence of pillar altars, unknown to the Ancient Egyptians but well known to the Jews. The hypothesis that animals were also sacrificed according to the Canaanite-Jewish rite is excluded by him due to the systematic and verified absence of biological residues within these white ashes. These ashes had always appeared to be of remarkable purity, even if the custom of making sacrifices with small fires on the top of hills or mountains was considered typically Semitic by him.
Entrance to Hathor's Temple cave
Entrance to Hathor's Temple cave
Head of a statue - Queen Tiye
Serabit el Khadem
Steles at Serabit el Khadem
Interestingly, there were over 50 tons of this fine, white powder there when Petrie inspected the site, scattered around the complex and buried underneath the temple floor, yet today there is none to be found anywhere. If 3,200 years of desert winds could not remove all of this powder, how could 100 years? Some say that by opening the floors to the desert winds, Petrie allowed the remaining white powder to blow away. Yet even then, some powder should remain in some faraway corner. Still, not one grain of it has been found anywhere on or under the temple complex, impossible unless some cautious people did a very vigorous cleaning job.
As for the word ‘mfkt’, it had been mentioned in ancient Egypt’s sacred writings known as The Pyramid Texts from the earliest times of ancient Egyptian dynasties. The full extent of this script is written on the walls of the pyramid tomb of King Unas (5th Dynasty). This inscription describes ‘mfkt’ as a stone, but (in correlation with other words) it also meant for Egyptian Pharaohs as a substance named as the ‘A giver of life’.
Adding the other fact that the Temple of Serabit was known in Ancient Egypt as a place of worship where sometimes miraculous healings took place. The fame of the sanctuary is due to the numerous votive steles of thanksgiving, following the benefits reported that people of medium-high social extraction erected on the site and of which some fragments remain. It is no coincidence that the same Pharaoh Amenhotep III., old and sick in the 36th year of his reign, resided there with his wife Tiye and his entire court for several months, hoping to benefit from it for his health.
View of a mine entrance
The ruins of the miner's huts Serabit el Khadem
Entering one of the mining caves
The first written words
Serabit el Khadem is the most important and unique pharaonic archaeological site in the Sinai, where temples, the tombs of the miners and many stone steles full of hieroglyph inscriptions written by the ancient Egyptians hide in an unusual but stunning landscape. Along the path to the temple, some curious lines are carved into the rocks. In many scholars’ opinion, they are the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions which we cannot decipher even today. Some argue that this was the ancestor of the Phoenician and the south-Arabian alphabet dating from the Middle Bronze Age.
Drawings of the first known Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, as published in "The Egyptian Origin of the Semitic Alphabet", by Alan H Gardiner, 1916-01-31
Proto-semitic writing on a sphinx statuette
in Serabit el Khadem
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Proto-semitic writing Serabit el Khadem
Red sandstone sphinx, ca.1800 BC from Serabit el Khadem
Rock-Cut Shrines at Serabit el-Khadim (Eckenstein 27)
How to get there?
Serabit el Khadem is situated about 150 km from Cairo, close to the west coast of Sinai, and it is not particularly easy to reach. You need a jeep and a guide who knows the area well. There are no paved roads leading to the site, which we can only get to by foot, so turning off from the highway, the road leads on a pathway that takes about 2 hours. You need to bring a good pair of shoes, a headcover and lots of water, while there is nothing but desert during this walk. There are agencies to book a trip in Sharm el Sheikh or Cairo, and the local Bedouins of Sinai are also welcoming with guides.
Consider this jeep excursion as a trekking trip with the amazing prize of the ancient site, which offers an unusual and fascinating sight into the Mists of Time.
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