Siwa Oasis

The Siwa Oasis is located in Egypt’s Western Desert and lies about 50 kilometers east of the Libyan border and 300 kilometers southof the Mediterranean coast. The oasis has been renowned since ancient times for the presence of a temple, built during the Twenty-Sixth Pharaonic Dynasty (664–525 BCE), which hosted the oracle of the god Ammon and allegedly attracted the visit of Alexander theGreat in 331 BCE. Apart from scattered descriptions, little is known about the history of Siwa in the Middle Ages. Archaeological andlinguistic research has, however, yielded useful insights on the history of the oasis, on the movements of its inhabitants, and on theircontacts with the wider world, while information about life in the oasis between the 18th and the 20th centuries can be found innumerous travel accounts composed mainly by European officials, geographers, and travelers and in a few anthropological studies.Siwa was formally brought under Egyptian control in 1820 by Muhammad Ali, but it remained strongly attached to Benghazi. During the19th century, the Sanussiyya, an Islamic sufi order with headquarters in the neighboring oasis of Al-Jaghbub, acquired considerablepolitical power, and it played an important role in the effective incorporation of Siwa into Egypt during the 19th and the 20th centuries.Today, Siwa and the smaller oasis of El-Gara, which lies about 100 km to the northeast, form a municipality within the Governorate ofMarsa Matruh, with over 31,000 inhabitants (2019 official census by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics). Themunicipality hosts the easternmost Berber-speaking community, whose language, called Siwi, shares many linguistic features with thelanguages of Sokna and El Fogaha in Libya, partially also with the Zenati group, and which has been heavily influenced by Arabic.While the majority of the population of Siwa is Berber, the oasis is also home to a Bedouin community related to the Awlad Ali, theShahibaat, as well as to a growing number of other Egyptian settlers. Currently the entire population of the oasis speaks Arabic aseither a first or a second language. For centuries, the economy of the oasis relied almost exclusively on its natural and agriculturalresources, specifically on its abundant spring water and date palms as well as the fine fruits from the latter, which are central to the lifeof the community. More recently, however, tourism and its corollary activities have gained considerable importance in Siwa’s economy,and they have contributed to redistributing wealth within the community and reshaping the landscape of the oasis.