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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > January/February 2002

Nawamis of Sinai

Exploring 5,000-year-old desert tombs

By Avner Goren

They look like flattened igloos—mysterious ancient round burial tombs, called nawamis, in southern Sinai. To Canadian archaeologist Charles Currelly, who studied them in 1904 as part of British archaeologist Flinders Petrie’s expedition to Sinai, these 6-foot-high sandstone structures resembled beehives scattered across the desert floor. 020 Their name, nawamis, means mosquito. According to Bedouin legend, the nawamis were built as protection against mosquitoes by the Israelites of the Exodus during their wanderings in Sinai. The Bedouin also give the more likely explanation that the term namusiyeh (plural, nawamis) refers to any separate or freestanding structure. We shall simply […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Linda C. Eneix, “The Twin Temples of Gozo,” Destinations, AO 04:04.

Endnotes

1.

See Ofer Bar-Yosef, Anna Belfer, Avner Goren and Patricia Smith, “The Nawamis near ‘Ein Huderah (Eastern Sinai),” Israel Exploration Journal 2–3 (1977), pp. 65–88.

2.

This was confirmed by our later excavation of nawamis at Gebel Gunna, about 20 miles east of Ein Huderah. Almost all of the bones we found were disarticulated and lying near the outer walls. See O. Bar-Yosef, Anna Belfer-Cohen, A. Goren, I. Hershkovitz, Ornit Ilan, H.K. Mienis and B. Sass, “Nawamis and Habitation Sites near Gebel Gunna, Southern Sinai,” Israel Exploration Journal 3–4 (1986), pp. 121–167.