Our last destination in the chokepoint series is a place that was central to so many stories in history: the Sinai Peninsula.
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Pompey the Great was fleeing Julius Caesar’s army, having lost a decisive battle against his rival in Greece. He headed toward Egypt, where he hoped that the 14-year-old King Ptolemy XIII of Egypt would take him in. It was not to be. Plutarch tells us that Pompey’s wife watched helplessly from her ship as the official greeting turned into an assassination:
But at this point, while Pompey was clasping the hand of Philip that he might rise to his feet more easily, Septimius, from behind, ran him through the body with his sword, then Salvius next, and then Achillas, drew their daggers and stabbed him. And Pompey, drawing his toga down over his face with both hands, without an act or a word that was unworthy of himself, but with a groan merely, submitted to their blows, being sixty years of age less one, and ending his life only one day after his birth-day.
The murder, committed by Egyptians (and their Roman mercenaries) eager to keep the more powerful Caesar happy, was tragically pointless. Caesar, who had been intent on showing mercy to Pompey, wept after being told that his old ally-turned-rival had been killed, and had the assassins put to death.
Pompey’s head, which had been cut off as proof of the murder, made its way back to his villa for burial. But his body had been unceremoniously tossed aside. One of Pompey’s aides recovered it and buried it. According to the Greco-Roman geographer Strabo, it was buried on Mt. Casius, overlooking Lake Serbonis. Strabo does not make it seem like a great place. Sandy mountains lie to the south, overlooking the lake, which is not exactly a refreshing oasis in the desert:
[It] has water so very heavy that there is no use for divers, and any person who walks into it and proceeds no farther than up to his navel is immediately raised afloat. It is full of asphalt. The asphalt is blown to the surface at irregular intervals from the midst of the deep, and with it rise bubbles, as though the water were boiling; and the surface of the lake, being convex, presents the appearance of a hill. With the asphalt there arises also much soot, which, though smoky, is imperceptible to the eye; and it tarnishes copper and silver and anything that glistens, even gold…
[T]he people are sorcerers and pretend to use incantations, as also urine and other malodorous liquids, which they first pour all over the solidified substance, and squeeze out the asphalt and harden it, and then cut it into pieces…
Fun! Strabo here may be confusing some aspects of Lake Serbonis with the Dead Sea, but his message is clear: this is not a great place to be. Herodotus, centuries earlier, described the same place in equally dismal terms:
[T]he country belongs to the Syrians as far as the Serbonian lake, along the side of which Mount Casion extends towards the Sea. After that, from the Serbonian lake, in which the story goes that Typhon is concealed, from this point onwards the land is Egypt. Now the region which lies between the city of Ienysos on the one hand and Mount Casion and the Serbonian lake on the other, which is of no small extent but as much as a three days’ journey, is grievously destitute of water.
Pompey was only one of many great men who struggled with this crossroads. Herodotus tells us that the Persian king Cambyses was only able to cross this place thanks to camel skins filled with water, carried by other camels. Lake Serbonis, or the Serbonian Bog, as it came to be known, became a shorthand for a deadly morass where people, sometimes entire armies, get stuck. Milton references it in his description of Hell:
Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land
Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems
Of ancient pile, all else deep snow and ice;
A gulf profound, as that Serbonian bog
Betwixt Damiata and mount Casius old,
Where armies whole have sunk: the parching air
Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire.
So why would people like Pompey, Cambyses, and many others run this awful gauntlet? Well, according to Herodotus, “by this way only is there a known entrance to Egypt.”
This entrance exists thanks to a quirk of geology. The Sinai Peninsula is the only land bridge between Africa and the rest of the world. It’s a mountainous fragment of the African tectonic plate that stubbornly links the African and Arabian plates, which are otherwise drifting apart. That’s why Pompey and Cambyses risked travel in this unpleasant place. It’s been a chokepoint and a crossroads, a place where religions and cultures have been forced into contact because it was the only way to squeeze across the gap.
You can get a sense of the topography that holds the two continents together from this beautiful 1856 diagram:
This 1818 map of the area shows the Sinai as a mostly empty bridge between the Nile Delta and the Biblically important region of Palestine. You can see the Serbonian Lake and Mt. Casius on the northern part of the peninsula.
This map, from the 1880s, is more geographically accurate. Both maps show some of the ancient routes that crisscrossed Sinai. The ancient Egyptians called their road across Sinai the Way of Horus; archaeologists are still finding the forts that lined it. There are Roman roads, Muslim pilgrimage routes, and other paths winding through the desert and mountains.
Earlier, I almost described the Sinai, in all its rugged difficulty, as a godforsaken place, but that won’t do because the Sinai Peninsula is in what you might call a religiously rich area. The peninsula lies between the home of the ancient Egyptian religion and the heartlands of the Abrahamic ones. Its travel routes played a key role in the wanderings of the Jewish people in the stories of the Exodus (you have seen some evidence that this led to a proliferation of 19th-century maps of the area!). Some of the same roads that carried armies and caravans carried prophets and pilgrims.
The religious history of the Sinai highlights its geographic realities. It’s remote and unforgiving, but also a crucial bridge between cultures.
You’ll see on the maps above that there’s a northern set of roads across the Sinai, where Pompey and Cambyses traveled. There are others, mostly trade routes and Muslim pilgrimage routes, that cut across the middle of the peninsula. And then there are those that loop down to the mountains in the south, because many people believe that, somewhere down there, Moses received the Ten Commandments from God.
People argue about which mountain appears in the Bible stories, but the Byzantine Emperor Justinian staked his claim when he established a monastery at the foot of a mountain called Jebel Musa in the middle of the 500s. It’s the oldest continuously inhabited monastery in Christendom. I really like this 19th-century painting of it:
The official name of the place is the Sacred Autonomous Royal Monastery of Saint Catherine of the Holy and God-Trodden Mount Sinai, which gives you some sense of the significance of this place for believers. People claim that it is built around the burning bush that Moses encountered; it contains the relics of St. Catherine of Alexandria, who, the story goes, defeated a bunch of pagan philosophers in a debate, converting them to Christianity. The Romans then tortured and killed her.
The site became an important stop for religious pilgrims in the Middle Ages. Most of the depictions of it show travelers winding their way toward the monastery:
The monastery’s library has a solid claim to be the oldest in the world. It once contained the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest Bible manuscripts in existence. This text is now, unsurprisingly, in the British Library, but got there indirectly, having been acquired by a German scholar (who claimed, unconvincingly, that it had been in the monastery’s trash), sold to the Russian Tsar in 1869, and then sold by Stalin to the British Museum in 1933. The library still possesses a 1,500-year-old Syriac translation of the Gospels:
The monastery is also full of icons, including my personal favorite, the “Ladder of Divine Ascent,” where demons try to yank people away from godliness:
For most of its history, this monastery at the crossroads of world religion has been ruled, politically at least, by Muslim states. You’ll notice in the images above that it’s fortified, and that’s for good reason. It has been attacked from time to time, but not by Muslim authorities; the attacks have come in disorderly times, from bandits and other lawless groups.
The monastery’s library possesses a document, purportedly from Mohammad himself, protecting the monks from mistreatment by Muslim authorities. The original ended up in Ottoman hands, but the monastery has a copy from the 1500s:
In the tales passed down by the monks over the centuries, Mohammad visited the monastery and engaged in conversations with Christians there. Whether that happened (or whether this document really came from Mohammad — some dispute it), the document symbolized a long history of respect and coexistence between this monastery and the Muslims who lived around it. There’s even a small mosque on the monastery grounds, built in the 1100s, which you can see in this photo from around 1900:
For 1,500 years, this remote monastery in the arid, unforgiving desert mountains persisted as armies trundled past it on campaign and empires rose and fell. It’s been a symbol of the religious richness of the Sinai and both a beneficiary and cause of the travel that crosses it. It’s survived pretty much everything at this crossroads between Asia and Africa.
So I guess we’ll see if it can survive modern capitalism. The Egyptian government wants to turn Sinai into a more tourist-friendly area in order to capture more revenue from the religious pilgrims who visit the area (and revive Egypt’s flagging tourism industry). Though it used to sit in a desolate, lonely valley, as in the 1844 painting below, now the monastery is in a construction zone.
New construction projects have displaced local Bedouin tribes, and Egyptian court rulings have declared that the monastery’s land actually belongs to the government of Egypt, which worries some that the government is laying the groundwork for taking control of the monastery or eliminating its ability to sustain itself. People fear that the Egyptian government wants to turn the monastery into a tourist attraction instead of a site of serious religious scholarship and contemplation. There’s been a furious pushback from Orthodox religious and Greek political leaders. For now, the monastery survives, but we’ll see if being at the center of a more modern crossroads of trade will be its undoing.
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