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Turquoise is a hydrated phosphate of aluminium coloured by small quantities of oxide of copper. It was highly prized in ancient Egypt, being used in the production of jewellery.
The turquoise only occurs in one particular stratum of the rock and galleries were driven into the rock to extract it.
There are two major mining areas; Magharah and Serabit. The workings at Magharah date from the Old Kingdom, with some evidence of expeditions from the Middle Kingdom. At Serabit the evidence suggests some overlap use in the Middle Kingdom, but the main expeditions date from the New Kingdom.
Production at Maghara was stopped, it seems, not because the supply of turquoise dried up, but because Serabit proved to have a more readily accessible rich stratum which lay almost at the summit of the cliffs and, in places, practically outcropped on the plateau.
During the 19th Century, an English officer called Major Macdonald, tempted by accounts of the wealth of the turquoise mines, went to live in the wilderness, employing Arabs and searching for the precious stones. They turned out to be of little commercial value, and he returned to Cairo disappointed. He did, however, return with rubbings and drawings of many now lost ancient Egyptian inscriptions from this area.
The following description by the early twentieth century explorer Bauerman suggests how the mines were worked at Maghara:
"The turquoise are found lining the small open joints which cross the rock in a general North-South direction and also in solid sandstone a short distance from the joints, the best stones being found in the latter position where they usually occur in the centre of small red marly or ochreous nodules.
The system was to follow the joints, removing the rock adjoining the side, which is then broken small and sifted through a sieve of about half inch mesh. The whole of the coarser fragments kept back are then taken to the mouth of the cave and carefully picked over in day light. The likely-looking nodular pieces are rubbed down with rough gilt in order to see whether they contain turquoises or not."
Proto-Sinaitic Script
It was in the mining area of Serabit that a transformation from hieroglyphic style representations of words to phonetic symbols began to take place. The early alphabet discovered in 1869 within the mine shafts has been called the proto-Sinaitic script. It dates from the 15th/I 6th century BC. It is identical to the earlier 17th/18th century BC proto-Canaanite script, the earliest evidence we have of the alphabet, but the Serabit inscriptions provide a much larger source of the material. The scholar William Albright made some of the early steps in deciphering the inscriptions, although there is still much to be discovered.
