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:
“...the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Exodus 1:19.
Egyptian midwives to Pharaoh.
“Unhappy is the man for evermair
That tills the sand and sawis in the air;
But twice unhappier is he, I lairn,
That feidis in his hairt a mad desire
And follows on a woman thro the fire,
Led by a blind and teachit by a bairn.”
—Mark Alexander Boyd (1563–1601)
“In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)