volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

378 The Egyptian Temples in the Great Oasis.
natives dipping eggs into a solution of permanganate
of potash—in other words, preparing coloured eggs
for consumption on the following Sunday, which was
Easter Sunday. The mosque was built of stories taken
from the ancient Egjrptian temples and Coptic churches
in the Oasis, and the oldest part of it seemed to me to
date from the eleventh or twelfth century. From the
bazar our guides took us to the famous underground
dwellings and conducted us through several of them.
They are hewn out of the living rock, and consist of
large chambers, small passages, long corridors, etc.,
and are very old. When the natives were threatened
with attack by the nomads they used to drive their
flocks and herds into this place of refuge, and having
betaken themselves there with their wives and children,
they walled up the entrances from the inside, and waited
for their enemies to depart. We walked through many
very beautiful gardens, and then went and looked at
one or two of the largest wells, from which an abundant
supply of sweet, very warm water was obtained. The
Copt told me that there were more than 200 such wells
in the Oasis, and that they yielded 12,000,000 gallons
of water daily.
Having taken leave of our guides, we returned to
our house and devoted the rest of our time in the Oasis
to sight-seeing, for there was no business to be done.
In the Temple of Darius I collated the text of the famous
Hymn to Amen-Ra with Brugsch's copy published in
his Reise, and the inscriptions in the so-called " enigmatic
writing," and was able to make out the forms of
some signs which had been badly drawn by his lithographer.
The group of figures of the gods in one of the
small sanctuary chambers is of great interest, and some
of their forms appear to be of non-Egyptian origin. We
next went to visit the ruins of the Temple of Nadurah,
which was probably built by Antoninus Pius about
A.D. 140, and made our way northwards to the famous
Christian cemetery, where Messrs. Lythgoe and W%lock
were carrying on excavations on behalf of Mr. Pierpont
Morgan. The natives call the cemetery " Al-Baguat."