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This chapter quickly looks at desert exploration and covers the history of Egypt’s deserts from prehistoric times to the present, its pre-1950 attempts at development, and the main geographical features of the three components: the Western Desert, the Eastern Desert, and the Sinai Peninsula.

This chapter examines the beginnings of the Western Desert Painting movement at Papunya in central Australia in 1971–1972. The paintings that came out of that place and time—as well as a number of the artists—are world-famous now, but the role played by Geoffrey Bardon, the white teacher who facilitated this extraordinary event, is little known. Far from standing outside the creative situation, Bardon cast himself in the role of instigator, play-actor, provocateur, and collector. He realized that the so-called dot-and-circle style of painting embodied a profoundly non-linearist conception of the environment and of human obligations to it, and that these were rooted in a conviction that the human and non-human worlds were unified through movement forms that were at once mythological, participatory, creative, and recreative. Ultimately, the key point of the Papunya drawings was that they were both plans, or maps of place, and traces of passage.

This chapter looks at the geological environment of Wadi Natrun that made it possible to establish and sustain such a vibrant community in that part of the Western Desert of Egypt. The geological history of Wadi Natrun is written in its rocks. It can be read by examining these rocks, putting them in chronological order and attempting to decipher the environment in which they were formed. The survey of the geological history of Wadi Natrun shows that the wadi lies at the confluence of two great groundwater reservoirs: the older Moghra reservoir of non-renewable fossil water and the more recent present-day Nile reservoir of renewable source of water. A table of the major events is presented, which led to the evolution of the present-day Wadi Natrun. The years are marked in the millions.

Chapter 10 examines the rediscovery, between the early 1920s and the 1950s, of the Graeco-Roman Near East, particularly Egypt. It considers the writings and activities of archaeologists, explorers, modernist writers, and journalists, who experienced and represented Near Eastern remnants of a Hellenism associated with the short-lived world empire of Alexander the Great and its Ptolemaic successors. After briefly considering writings on Graeco-Roman Transjordan, the chapter looks at the imagining and representations of Ptolemaic Alexandria, focusing on the writings of E. M. Forster, Mary Butts, Henry Vollam Morton, and a host of British, American, and Egyptian intellectuals, authors, and explorers. These authors perceived and experienced modern Alexandria as a Greek rather than an Egyptian city and comprehended it by invoking a cosmopolitan Graeco-Roman past. Alexandria served as a launching board to revivals of Alexander’s travels in Egypt’s Western Desert, to the oasis of Siwa, reputed place of his deification. The chapter traces re-enactments of classical texts on Alexander, as a form of appropriation by repetition and interpretation, of an imperial Graeco-Roman past. It demonstrates how imperial visions and itineraries were coupled with technologies of mechanized mobility in the desert in specially developed desert automobiles, iconized as emblems of imperial mobility and modernity. It thus showcases the relationship between the rediscovery of antiquity, technologies, and imperial defence. These are illustrated in the activities of explorer and military man and physicist Ralph Alger Bagnold. Some of the writings examined here expand beyond the formal end of British rule in the Near East, indicating the persistence of British imperial presences in the region immediately before and after the formal end of empire.

In comparison to other countries, the South African contribution to the war in North Africa was small, making the country's role to be part of a larger team. But during the most crucial battle of the campaign, the 1st battle of El Alamein, the South Africans played a vital role. After this, the Axis forces could never again muster enough forces to win the war for possession of the Nile Delta. After July 1942, the South African contribution reverted back to that of a minor role player, albeit one that contributed substantially taken into account the country's small population and industrial base.

Separating the Western Desert from the Nile River, the natural landscape of the Libyan Plateau's terminal escarpment reminds one of a breaking wave, the rising crest of its Theban Mountain attempting one final crescendo before rolling ashore. Despite the imagery, the Western Desert's Theban Mountain and its foothills have generally been construed during recorded history more in terms of their cultural qualities than their natural characteristics. This chapter seeks to locate al-Qurna within the intellectual space of academic concerns that has given rise to this ambiguity, to reevaluate al-Qurna toponymically, and to situate al-Qurna both geographically and in real time. Its aim is to clarify and to place on record the spatially dispersed nature of the al-Qurna community. Geographical precision establishes a baseline against which the historical development of larger al-Qurna and the dispersal of smaller community units across the foothills can be charted.

After the equinox but not until June 23 1827, Hay and Lane, and presumably Kalitza, set sail for Upper Egypt and Nubia. Two day's sailing brought them to Beni Soueif at midmorning, where they left the boat to make an excursion into the Fayyum, the large, intensely fertile area to the west of the Nile. Passing through a break in the western valley escarpment, it then flows down into the Fayyum, one of several large depressions that dot the Western Desert of Egypt. At the other end of the passage through the hills, Lane made a much more careful examination of the Pyramid of Hawara. It had once been cased with limestone and had likewise slumped into ruin when the casing stone was stripped, exposing its mud brick core, yet retaining an impressive appearance.