Alexander the Great's desert oracle
A remote Berber oasis 560km west of Cairo, Siwa sits on the edge of the Great Sand Sea with 82 kilometres of sculpted orange dunes. Alexander the Great made a legendary desert crossing here in 331 BCE to consult the Oracle of Amun, and the mud-brick ruins of the medieval Shali fortress still crown its salt-lake horizon.
Siwa has been inhabited for at least 10,000 years and developed as an Amazigh Berber community largely independent of pharaonic Egypt. In 524 BCE an entire Persian army sent by Cambyses II to conquer Siwa disappeared without trace in the desert — one of antiquity's enduring mysteries. Alexander the Great made a gruelling 1,000-km desert detour here in 331 BCE; the Oracle of Amun declared him son of Zeus-Ammon, legitimising his claim to divine kingship over both Greece and Egypt. The town remained under its own Berber sheikhs until 1820 when Egyptian rulers finally absorbed it into the state,…