Aswan

Discover Aswan Tour, visiting Philae Temple, Unfinished Obelisk and the High Dam around Aswan.  and Abu Simbel Temples. 3 Days Trip to Aswan. Aswan is a busy market and tourist centre located just north of the Aswan Dam on the east bank of the Nile at the first cataract.  Aswan includes five monuments within the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae (despite Aswan being neither Nubian, nor between Abu Simbel and Philae). These are the Old and Middle Kingdom tombs of Qubbet el-Hawa. The town of Elephantine, the stone quarries and Unfinished Obelisk, the Monastery of St. Simeon and the Fatimid Cemetery. The city is part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the category of craft and folk art. Aswan joined the UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities in 2017.

History

Aswan is the ancient city of Swenett, later famous as Syene. Which in antiquity was the frontier town of Ancient Egypt facing the south. Swenett got its name from an Egyptian goddess with the same name. This goddess later was famous as Eileithyia for 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”, or “market”. 3 Days Trip to Aswan.

Geography

In fact,the latitude of the city that would become Aswan – located at 24° 5′ 23″ – was an object of great interest to the ancient geographers and mathematicians. They believed that it was under the tropic. And that on the day of the summer solstice, a vertically positioned staff cast no shadow. This statement is only approximately correct; at the summer solstice, the shadow was only 1⁄400 of the staff, and so could scarcely be discerned, and the northern limb of the Sun’s disc would be nearly vertical. More than 2200 years ago, Greek polymath Eratosthenes used this information to calculate earth’s circumference.