Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

Almasy planned an expedition to Gilf Kebir with fellow travelers and sponsors Baron Robert Clayton and Robert’s
pretty wife, Lady Clayton. The three were immortalized in the 1996 movie The English Patient. The trio proposed to get
to Gilf Kebir by air with a single-engine Gipsy Moth airplane owned by the Claytons. Accompanying them were Patrick
Clayton of the desert survey unit (and no relation to Baron Clayton) and wing commander H. S. Penderel, who was to
pilot the airplane. Their objective was to search for the fabled lost oasis-city of Zarzora, a sort of Shangri-La of the
desert, which Almasy believed was tucked away somewhere in the newly discovered Gilf Kebir. With their fantastic
stories of an oasis lost to the world, Bedouins had long fantasized about the legend of Zarzora. They described it as
having wonderful springs and being surrounded by a white wall that hid magnificent castles and gardens. They believed it
was southwest of Dakhla, the farthest inhabited oasis in Egypt.
Figure 2.3. Early Egyptian desert explorers, clockwise from left: Ahmed Hassanein in 1922, Ralph Bagnold (see chapter
4) with desert vehicle in 1930, Prince Kemal el Din with tract vehicle in 1926, and Count Lazlo Almasy ca. 1930.
At Gilf Kebir, Almasy and his friends discovered the now-famous Caves of Swimmers at the mouth of a valley on
the west side of Gilf Kebir. These two caves—more like deep ledges—contained a plethora of rock art that was actually
drawn on the sandstone with vivid colors rather than carved. It depicted Black men, women, and children in social
activities, some clearly enjoying swimming and diving in a river or lake. (See chapter 5 for more description when we
recount our own expedition to Gilf Kebir.) Meanwhile, flying west from Gilf Kebir with the Gipsy Moth, Almasy and his
colleagues spotted a group of lush valleys with unusual amounts of trees and vegetation, which they thought was the
fabled oasis of Zarzora. Later, however, in 1932, when Almasy re-explored the region on the ground, he found no springs
or white walls—not even the slightest signs of human habitation, let alone stone castles. Instead, he found typical wadis
with the usual rugged acacia trees and a few shrubs here and there. In fact, there were three wadis (valleys) called Abdel
Malik, Hamra, and Talh, which were already known to the ancient Tebu people of the region and which, at least according
to Almasy’s account, the Tebu also called Zarzora.
Yet, like the fabled lost oasis of Shangri-La or the mythical Atlantis, the legend of Zarzora still persists to this day,
and, as we will see, it still lures eccentric explorers in search of adventure and glory. There is a strange irony about all
these modern explorations and their claims of discovering of this or that lost oases, however: none of these places were
lost at all. Instead, they were known to the ancients and were only rediscovered in modern times. Hassanein and Prince
Kemal were definitely not the first Egyptians to reach Jebel Uwainat and Gilf Kebir, for the ancient Egyptians had in fact
already beaten them to it by several thousands years.
THE EXPEDITIONS OF HARKHUF
About forty-two hundred years ago, on the very beautiful island of Elephantine near Aswan, a man of high rank named Iry
and his eldest son Harkhuf were preparing for the most daring desert expedition ever to be attempted in antiquity or,