Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/694

688 Pharaohs increased rapidly. At the opening of the New Empire, about 1530 the lavish use of this metal by the kings indicates the wonderful productiveness of the mines. Much gold is believed to have been brought into Egypt from Ethiopia and the eastern shores of the Red Sea, and gold dust (?) from the Soudan.

Within the last few years the ancient workings of many gold mines have been discovered in eastern and southern Egypt and in Nubia. The mining region of Egypt proper was the mountainous belt bordering the Red Sea from the Gulf of Suez to the southern part of the country, where it connected with the mining area of the Nubian Desert farther inland, and with that of Nubia proper. Charles J. Alford describes the northern part of this region as follows: "The larger mountain masses are usually formed of a hornblendic granite. Surrounding these, in lower ranges, and covering very extensive areas, is a rather fine-grained gray granite, passing in places into a gueiss, and that into mica schist, traversed by dikes and intrusions of greenstone, felsite, porphyry, and a very fine grained, white, elvan granite. It is in these rocks that most of the auriferous quartz veins were found to occur, and the more the granite was cut up by the instrusive rocks, the more frequent and more promising the quartz veins appeared to be."

In this region a number of mining sites were found which consisted of groups of round and square huts built of rough stone. Some of these villages are surrounded by walls. The old sand-filled workings follow the veins and ore-shoots, but with few exceptions the working faces and the bottoms of the shafts have not been uncovered by recent explorations. Near Um Rus on the Red Sea, there is an ancient camp of large size. A large number of quartz veins outcrop in a gray granite which is much cut by dikes of greenstone, porphyry and felsite. Nearly all the veins were worked in ancient times, and in places some of the rich ore-shoots have been completely worked out, while the leaner ore has been allowed to remain. The veins vary in thickness from one to over three feet, and all carry free-milling gold in varying amounts. The quartz is white to gray in color, and in places carries a little pyrite. The ore seems to have been reduced to a coarse powder by means of stone rolling pins on elliptical rubbing stones. It was then transferred to a circular mill consisting of an upper and a lower stone.

At one of the camps in the south, there is the ruin of a building 260 feet by 190 feet, which is supposed by some to have been the mill in which the gold was separated from the ore. At the old workings near Coptos, Lat. 26° N., may be seen the ruins of over 1,300 stone huts once occupied by the miners. Very extensive workings found still farther to the south are probably the mines for which the kings of the twelfth dynasty sacrificed the lives of many thousand men, and