ABSTRACT
The site of El Kanais lies around 55 km east of Edfu in the Wadi Mia, along one of the major routes through the eastern desert between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea. Like many sites in the eastern and western deserts of Egypt, the rockface at El Kanais, which lies near a small pharaonic temple, proved attractive to graffi ti writers over a long period of time. The graffi ti with which the present study will principally be concerned consist of a corpus of 92 (published) Greek texts, covering a period of probably 400 to 500 years in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, but the earliest epigraphic activity recorded here is a set of Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions connected with the foundation of the temple (see Darnell et al. 2002 for sites along the Theban desert road in the Qena Bend, where the same locations may have written and pictorial graffi ti from the predynastic period until Late Antiquity). Subsequent graffi ti at El Kanais include some Arabic writings (mentioned but unfortunately not recorded by Bernand 1972: xviii) and a number of graffi ti by nineteenth-and twentieth-century travellers. Among these are a French graffi to on the temple by a Cretan named Leonidas Lychounes, recording visits in 1843 and 1846 (Bernand 1972: pl. 6.2), and another which appears to read ‘C. ODEH 1914’ (Schott 1961: pl. 6; I have not been able to fi nd any further information on either of these individuals, although Odeh is an Arabic name). We therefore have a record of graffi ti and inscriptions at El Kanais stretching over more than 3,000 years: an excellent opportunity to look at change and continuity in the relationship of travellers to this site, as well as inter-textuality between their writings.
