Wadi Hammamat, the quarry road

Three thousand years of graffiti along a quarry road

A dry riverbed in Egypt’s Eastern Desert halfway between Qena and Al-Qusayr, and for three thousand years the road from the Nile to the Red Sea. The ancient name Ro-Henu means mouth to the interior, and it was the most direct route from Thebes to the sea and on to Punt for incense and myrrh, or to Arabia and the Horn of Africa. It was also a mining district in its own right: the pharaohs took the dark bekhen stone from here for statuary and sarcophagi, and gold from the hills around it. What makes the wadi extraordinary now is that everyone who passed wrote on the walls. Three thousand years of inscriptions and graffiti are cut into the rock, from quarry expedition records to Ptolemaic and Roman notes, one of the densest such records anywhere.