Siwa · Libyan Desert · Egypt
Sḫt-jmꜣ.t or “The Kingdom of the Two Deserts”
Association for the knowledge of the history of the Kingdom of Two Deserts whose political center was the oasis of Siwa.
During Pharaonic times, the Siwa oasis was the capital of a Libyan kingdom independent of Egypt.
There is now a consensus that the name of this kingdom was Sxt-jmA.t (Sétékimat). Visitors of the temple of Edfu can read this name fourth in the engraved list of the seven oases. We know that this fourth oasis is in the west of Bahrain and is in the area of the now uninhabited small oases of Sitra, Nuwemisa, Bahrain and El Areg.
And, our excavations in Bahrain, in 2003, showed that the temple that I discovered there, dated from the 30th Egyptian dynasty and had been built following the request of the same king of Siwa as the one who also built, in the oasis of Siwa, the mortuary temple of Umm Ubayda, this a few years later. So, I am deeply convinced that the fourth oasis on the Edfu list is the kingdom of Siwa since our field research has shown us that at least at the time of the last indigenous dynasty in Egypt, the small oases were part of this kingdom, of which the Siwa oasis was the capital.
This kingdom, at least in the period of maximum splendor between the reigns of Sutekhirdis and Wenamun, had a huge extension including the "two deserts", as engraved in the temples of Siwa, that is to say the desert area to the east of Siwa, at least up to the oasis of Sitra and Ain Dalla near the oasis of Farafra and in the west part up to the Libyan oasis of Jarabub.
News on the Site:
OFFICIAL LAUNCH OF THE BLACK LIONS LIBRARY IN SIWA
One of the major goals of our association was achieved on November 6, 2020. It is the opening of the Black Lions Library, located in the historic center of the Siwa Oasis.
Posts Gallery
Latest published research
Research for the toponyms of Siwa oasis in Roman times
I’m republishing an old 2017 post to resume the analysis of the toponym of the village of Siwa in the second century AD. In the papyrus Graux 27, dating back to the year 15 of Septimius Severus (207 AD), month of Mecheir, coming…
Fred Boissonnas and the Oasis of Siwa
In 1929, Geneva-born photographer François-Frédéric "Fred" Boissonnas (1858-1946), then seventy-one years old but already renowned for his reportage on Greece, was invited to Egypt by King Fuad I to produce a monumental…
A digital enhancement of a photograph taken by Hermann Burchardt in Siwa
A digital enhancement of a photograph taken by Hermann Burchardt in Siwa (spring 1893), processed to bring out the original structure and details of the Shali fortress during that period. These early visual records quickly became…
Pioneer in the Desert: Countess May Torok von Szendro
This last post in the "Pioneer in the Desert" series should have been the first, had I not long harbored doubts about the actual presence of Khedive Abbas Hilmi II's wife during his trip to Siwa in 1904-1905. The Khedive's…
Pioneer in the Desert: Beryl de Zoete
It appears that the previous post in the “Pioneer in the Desert” series was not actually the last. I recently rediscovered a book purchased years ago, "The Thunder and the Freshness", which contains a chapter entirely dedicated…
Title: Pioneer in the Desert: Lee Miller
In the seventh episode on Western Female Travellers, we focus on Lee Miller’s visits to Siwa. Lee Miller, one of the most innovative figures in twentieth-century photography, between 1934 and 1939, while living in Cairo with her…
