Village nubien

Gharb Soheil, "west Sehel", is a Nubian village on the west bank of the Nile at Aswan, reached by boat, and named after the island of Sehel opposite. The Egyptian Tourism Authority invites visitors to walk through the villages of Aswan's indigenous people, the Nubians, for their colourful architecture, traditions and food. It is a living community rather than a monument, and somebody's home.

The question to carry with you: what became of Nubia, and what does a Nubian home still hold?

Nubians lived for more than fifteen centuries in the Nile Valley between the First Cataract at Aswan and the Fourth Cataract in Sudan, and the cataract and the deserts kept them a distinct people with their own traditions, the architect Amany Abdelsadeq writes.

The twentieth century moved them. The first Aswan Dam of 1902, raised in 1912 and again in 1933, submerged the villages of the northern Nubians, the Kenuz, and forced them to rebuild higher each time; with their fields under water most of the year, many men went north to work in Egypt's cities. Then came the High Dam, which would put all of Egyptian Nubia under its reservoir, now Lake Nasser. The government resettled the Nubians around Kom Ombo, about 50 km north of Aswan: thirty-nine villages along 320 km of the Nile became thirty-three villages in a crescent of desert away from the river. Abdelsadeq's own village, Abu Hor, left its homes in December 1964.

The island of Sehel opposite is an older story. It held a temple of the cataract goddess Anukis, a rock stela of Thutmose II recording a campaign in Kush in the first year of his reign, and the Ptolemaic "Famine Stela", a prayer to the god Khnum for an end to seven years of low floods.

Houses in the photograph are vaulted and painted: white walls, bands of colour, patterns around doors and windows. Abdelsadeq describes the old Nubian house as a walled courtyard with vaulted rooms, built and decorated to suit the climate and the family, and the old villages as seen from the river by "the edges of their decorated walls". In our judgement the best way to see Gharb Soheil is slowly: from the boat first, then on foot, with a host rather than a schedule.