ABSTRACT
The Bir Umm Fawakhir Survey Project of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago completed its third field season in the central Eastern Desert of Egypt in January 1996. This chapter, however, is not about what was found in the past three seasons of archaeological survey so much as what the site can tell us about gold mines and mining in Coptic/Byzantine Egypt, and more specifically about the miners themselves. As this is a relatively new site, however, it is necessary first to present a brief overview of some of the empirical results and then to discuss mining, miners and their milieu.
