Aswan
 | The Nile at Aswan, seen from Elephantine Island |
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| A view along the street connecting railway station and Nile. |
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| Another view along the street |
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| A street parallel to Corniche in Aswan |
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Aswan (
Arabic: أسوان
Aswān) or
Syene (
Greek: ) (, population 200,000) is a city in the south of
Egypt, the capital of the
Aswan Governorate. It stands on the east bank of the
Nile at the
first cataract and is a busy market and tourist center.
Aswan is one of the driest inhabited places in the world; as of early 2001, the last rain there was 6 years earlier. In
Nubian settlements they generally do not bother to roof all of the rooms in their houses.
Aswan sits on the ancient city of Syene, which was in antiquity the frontier town of
Egypt to the south. Syene stood upon a peninsula on the right (east) bank of the Nile, immediately below the first cataract, which extend to it from Philae. It is supposed to have derived its name from
Suan, an Egyptian goddess, the
Ilithya of the Greeks, and of which the import is the opener; and at Syene
Upper Egypt was in all ages, conceived to open or begin. The quarries of Syene were celebrated for their stone, and especially for the granitic rock called Syenite. They furnished the colossal statues, obelisks, and monolithal shrines which are found throughout Egypt, including the pyramids; and the traces of the quarrymen who wrought in these 3000 years ago are still visible in the native rock. They lie on either bank of the Nile, and a road, 4 miles in length, was cut beside them from Syene to Philae. Syene was equally important as a military station and as a place of traffic. Under every dynasty it was a garrison town; and here were levied toll and custom on all boats passing southward and northward. The city is mentioned by numerous ancient writers, including
Herodotus (ii. 30),
Strabo (ii. p. 133, xvii. p. 797,
seq.),
Stephanus of Byzantium (
s. v.),
Ptolemy (vii. 5. § 15, viii. 15. § 15),
Pliny the Elder (ii. 73. s. 75, v. 10. s. 11, vi. 29. s. 34), and it appears on the
Antonine Itinerary (p. 164).
The latitude of Syene – 24° 5′ 23″– was an object of great interest to the ancient geographers. They believed that it was seated immediately under the
tropic, and that on the day of the summer solstice a vertical staff cast no shadow, and the sun's disc was reflected in a well at noonday. This statement is indeed incorrect; the ancients were not acquainted with the true tropic: yet at the summer-solstice the length of the shadow, or 1/400th of the staff, could scarcely be discerned, and the northern limb of the sun's disc would be nearly vertical.
Eratosthenes used measurements at Syene to contest the
Flat Earth theory and attempt to determine the circumference of the Earth, using Syene as the originating point and
Alexandria as the terminal point of a measured arc (based upon shadow length at the solstice) to make an accurate estimate of the circumference of the Earth.
The Nile is nearly 3000 yards wide above Syene. From this frontier town to the northern extremity of Egypt it flows for more than 750 miles without bar or cataract. The voyage from Syene to Alexandreia usually occupied between 21 and 28 days in favourable weather.
See also: Aswan Dam,
Elephantine,
Kitchener's Island
