Unlike Vavilov — who had to content himself with sending the Italian student Gudzoni — Gary Nabhan was able to visit Egypt himself. Drawing on previous expeditions by the plant explorer Robert Humphrey Forbes, Nabhan found that much was the same, and much had changed. This is the first of his posts on Siwa. [1]
Robert Humphrey Forbes, from the Arizona Memory Project
Eighty years later, my own attempts to visit the palm oases of the Sahara landed me near the Egypt-Libya border in the heat of August, but no further west than that. And yet, the Berber and Bedouin oasis which I studied most intensively was much like those which Vavilov visited in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, and of the very same ilk of those which his coworker Gudzoni sampled in Egypt. Most fortuitously, a contemporary of Vavilov — plant explorer Robert Humphrey Forbes [2] — left detailed photographic and written records of his visit to the same oasis, Siwa, from an extended stay in 1919. Although Vavilov and Forbes apparently crossed paths only once — in 1930 at a lecture in Tucson, Arizona — their methodologies and goals were much the same: to seek out seeds and identify the adaptations of a diversity of crop varieties for evaluation and introduction into analogous environments. Thus, the benchmark data collected at the Siwa oasis by Forbes will serve as a surrogate for what Vavilov himself might have collected there if he had been allowed into the interior of Egypt.
During the era when Vavilov and Forbes wandered into the Sahara, it took several days by car and camel to reach Wahat Siwa, the Pearl of the Desert, from the port town of Marsa Matruh, Egypt. Wahat Siwa — the Siwan Depression sits — below sea level on the northern edge of the Great Sand Sea, some 315 kilometers south of the Mediterranean shores, and less than 100 kilometers from the present-day Libyan border. After hours of crossing the barren “gibbel” plains where only a few Awlad Ali Bedouins and their camels wander amidst the cobbles and gravel, the wondrous sight of a million date palms and dozens of lakes appears as if it were an improbable mirage. Suddenly, deep greens and blues replace the bleached-out tans and grays of the stony desert. The sharp aroma of oily, bitter desert herbs is replaced with the sweeter fragrance of orange blossoms, dates, mints, and hibiscus.
It is not a mirage; there are some thousand artesian springs feeding into Siwa’s lakes and ponds, with two hundred of those springs directly irrigating some 3800 hectares of date palms, fruit trees, gardens and grain fields. The twenty thousand inhabitants of Siwa represent the largest human settlement for five hundred kilometers in any direction other than that of Marsa Matruh.
Notes:- A more scientific account can be found in Agrobiodiversity change in a saharan desert oasis, 1919–2006: Historic shifts in tasiwit (Berber) and Bedouin crop inventories of Siwa, Egypt. [↩]
- Working in Egypt for the British, he later went on to serve in Arizona, where he lived to be 100 years old. [↩]
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