The Egyptian Sand Sea is the Egyptian part of the Great Sand Sea of Africa's Libyan Desert. Together with the Calanshio Sand Sea and Ribiana Sand Sea of Libya, the dunes of the Great Sand Sea cover about 25% of the Libyan Desert.
Although well-known to the Tuareg and Muslim traders who caravaned across the Sahara, Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs was the first European to document the Great Sand Sea. He began his Saharan expeditions in 1865, and named the great expanse of dunes the Große Sandmeer, but it was not until 1924 with the maps of Ahmed Hassanein that the full scope of the Great Sand Sea was appreciated by Europeans.
Famous quotes containing the words egyptian, sand and/or sea:
“He will to his Egyptian dish again.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“She had more sand in her than any girl I ever see: in my opinion she was just full of sand. It sounds like flattery, but it ain’t no flattery.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead—
There were no birds to fly.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)