I learnt from Selim Pasha, the Governor of Upper Egypt, who received us at Siut in the most friendly manner, that the Bedouins had some time since discovered quarries of alabaster two or three hours’ journey into the eastern mountains, the proceeds of which Mahommed Ali had presented him, and from his dragoman I ascertained that there was an inscription on the rocks. I therefore determined to undertake the hot ride upon the Pasha’s horses, which he had sent to El Bosra for this purpose, from El Bosra thither, in company with the two Weidenbachs, our dragoman and the _khawass_. There we found a little colony of eighteen workmen, with their families, altogether thirty-one persons, in the lonely, wild, hot rock gorge, employed in the excavation of the alabaster. Behind the tent of the overseer there were preserved, in legible, sharply-cut hieroglyphics, the names and titles of the wife, so much revered by the Egyptians, of the first Amasis, the head of the eighteenth dynasty, who expelled the Hyksos, the remains of a formerly much larger inscription. These are the first alabaster quarries, the age of which is certified by an inscription. Not far from the place were others, which were already exhausted in antiquity; from those now reopened they have extracted within the last four months more than three hundred blocks, of which the larger ones are eighty feet long and two feet thick. The Pasha informed me, through his dragoman, that on our return I should find a piece, the size and form of which I was myself to determine, of the best quality the quarry afforded, which he desired me to accept as a testimonial of his joy at our visit. The alabaster quarries discovered in this region are all situated between Bersheh and Gauâta; one would be inclined, therefore, to consider El Bosra as the ancient Alabastron, if its position could be reconciled with the account of Ptolemæus; at any rate, Alabastron has certainly nothing to do with the ruins in the valley of El Amarna, as hitherto thought, to which also the relation of Ptolemæus does not answer, and which seems to be quite different. The hieroglyphical name of these ruins recurs continually in the inscriptions. In the rock chains of Gebel Selîn there are again very early, but little inscribed, graves of the Old Empire, apparently of the sixth dynasty.