Explorers hunt gold in Egypt’s eastern desert
eastern desert (Egypt) — Off the off-road tracks deep in Egypt’s eastern desert, prospectors are ramping up the hunt for the treasure once revered by the Pharaohs as the “skin of the gods” — gold.
Essential for ancient artefacts like the famed burial mask of Tutankhamun and still highly desired in today’s world, gold has been mined in Egypt for millennia.
But experts say the country is heavily under explored and that modern technology now allows much deeper excavation of the ancient sites shown on Pharaonic treasure maps.
“Mining has been going on here for over 5,000 years, but in the 21st century it’s essentially virgin ground,” said Mark Campbell, president of the Canadian exploration company Alexander Nubia, which is increasing its drilling this year in a 1,070-square mile area in the desert.
“Exploring for gold and minerals in Egypt today with modern technology is like having a map where X marks the spot.”
The group has identified six potential mines in the area, filled with barren valleys and pink rock outcroppings known as the Arabian-Nubian Shield, which stretches south to Eritrea and east to Saudi Arabia. While veins close to the surface have been largely excavated by successive Pharaonic, Roman and even British colonial operations, the sites still hold gold concentrations deeper down that nowadays can be extracted with heavy machinery.
One former British colonial-era mine in the area, known as Abu Zawal, was abandoned in the mid20th century after president Gamal Abdel Nasser ended decades of laissez-faire capitalism in the country. The British also had been following in the tracks of the ancients — the site is still littered with Roman pottery fragments, an ancient fort and water well, as well as Pharaonic grinding stones that lie scattered alongside turn-of-the-century spent rifle cartridges.