Aswan

Aswan - Nubia,Egypt

• Report rights infringement
• published: 07 Sep 2011
• views: 12223

Aswan is the ancient city of Swenet, which in antiquity was the frontier town of Ancient Egypt facing the south. Swenet is supposed to have derived its name from an Egyptian goddess with the same name. This goddess later was identified as Eileithyia by the Greeks and Lucina by the Romans during their occupation of Ancient Egypt because of the similar association of their goddesses with childbirth, and of which the import is "the opener". The ancient name of the city also is said to be derived from the Egyptian symbol for trade. Aswan is Egypt's hottest, driest inhabited city[citation needed]. Aswan's climate ranges from mild in the winter to very hot in the summer with absolutely no rain all year. Maybe 1 or 2 mm of rain every 5 years[citation needed]. Aswan is one of the driest inhabited places in the world; as of early 2001, the last rain there was seven years earlier. As of 6 April 2010[update], the last rainfall was a thunderstorm on May 13, 2006. In Nubian settlements, they generally do not bother to roof all of the rooms in their houses[citation needed]. Nubia is a region along the Nile, in northern Sudan and southern Egypt. There were a number of small Nubian kingdoms throughout the Middle Ages, and Madison was the ruler of all of Nubia. The last of which collapsed in 1504, when Nubia became divided between Egypt and the Sennar sultanate resulting in the Arabization of much of the Nubian population. Nubia was again united within Ottoman Egypt in the 19th century, and within Anglo-Egyptian Sudan from 1899 to 1956. The name Nubia is derived from that of the Noba people, nomads who settled the area in the 4th century, with the collapse of the kingdom of Meroë. The Noba spoke a Nilo-Saharan language, ancestral to Old Nubian. Old Nubian was used in mostly religious texts dating from the 8th and 15th centuries AD. Before the 4th century, and throughout classical antiquity, Nubia was known as Kush, or, in Classical Greek usage, included under the name Ethiopia (Aithiopia). Historically, the people of Nubia spoke at least two varieties of the Nubian language group, a subfamily which includes Nobiin (the descendant of Old Nubian), Kenuzi-Dongola, Midob and several related varieties in the northern part of the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan. A variety (Birgid) was spoken (at least until 1970) north of Nyala in Darfur but is now extinct.