Elephantine Island

A long island in the Nile at Aswan, directly opposite the corniche, reached in a few minutes by local ferry or felucca. It holds two Nubian villages, an archaeological site at its southern end, and some of the best walking in the city.

The southern end

An open-air site with the remains of four thousand years of continuous occupation stacked on top of each other — temples of Khnum and Satet, mudbrick housing, and a nilometer: a staircase cut down to the water with measurement marks on the wall, used to gauge the flood and set taxation.

The Aswan Museum is on the same site.

The villages

The northern two-thirds of the island are Nubian villages — Koti and Siou — where houses are painted in blue, ochre and white, lanes are too narrow for cars, and life is visibly slower than across the water. Walking through is welcome, and there are guesthouses and small cafés. Ask before photographing people or houses.

The island's ancient name was Abu, meaning both "elephant" and "ivory" — this was the point where ivory from the south entered Egypt. It sat exactly on the border between Egypt and Nubia, at the First Cataract, and for most of Egyptian history it was the country's southern frontier post: a customs house, a garrison and a trading station in one.

The governors buried in the cliff tombs on the west bank opposite carried the title "Keeper of the Gate of the South", and their tomb inscriptions record trading expeditions deep into Nubia — including one who brought back a dancing dwarf, which prompted a delighted letter from the boy-king Pepi II insisting that the man be guarded carefully on the journey north.

The Jewish garrison

The island's most surprising chapter is documented in Aramaic. In the 5th century BCE, under Persian rule, a community of Jewish soldiers was stationed on Elephantine — and they had built their own temple to Yahweh here, complete with sacrifices, several centuries before such a thing was supposed to exist outside Jerusalem.

Their archive survives: letters, contracts, marriage documents, and correspondence with the authorities in Jerusalem and Samaria asking for help after the temple was destroyed in a riot around 410 BCE. The Elephantine papyri are among the most important sources for Jewish life in the Persian period, and they describe a community whose practice differed markedly from the biblical picture.

Measuring the flood

The nilometer here was one of the most important instruments in the country. Because Elephantine was the first place the inundation reached, the reading taken here predicted the size of the flood downstream — and therefore the harvest, and therefore the tax rate for the whole of Egypt.