The emeralds of an empire

Steven Sidebotham's work in Egypt extends beyond the port city of Berenike, a key point on the Roman Empire's ancient maritime trade route, to include investigations of wide swaths of the Eastern Desert.

One of the more prominent locations the University of Delaware history professor and his archaeological team have studied lies about 75 miles northwest of the Red Sea port in the mountainous region known to ancient Egyptians as "the Red Land." There, the remains of the Roman town of Sikait, with its buildings and temples constructed of stone or carved into the mountainsides, are still visible.

"This is one of the most inhospitable regions on Earth," Sidebotham says, where summer temperatures routinely exceed 130° Fahrenheit and a mere eighth of an inch of rain falls in a typical year. "But the city had a population of more than 1,000 for over 500 years. That's because it was the only source of emeralds available within the entire Roman Empire."

Emeralds, known as "green fire," were prized by the Romans, who, Sidebotham says, extracted millions of them from the mines near Sikait. The miners, believed to be willing workers rather than forced or slave laborers, used basic tools such as metal picks to extract the emeralds over hundreds of years.

Today, traces of pick marks mar many of the deep, narrow mining shafts the ancient workers dug into the mountainsides. They left behind oil lamps that provided their only illumination and fragments of pottery jugs that once contained their water supplies. Sidebotham and his team even found a well-preserved basket that may have carried the miners' food or may have been used to haul rocks to the surface.