Each file is built on the same scaffold: a dated last-verified line, a hero photograph and a route map, a four-to-six-paragraph introduction, an "On the ground" block with current ticket prices and Arabic checkpoint signage, a "Reading" block with the bibliography we drew from, and a public change log.
The mountain of imperial porphyry. Five quarry villages, the wadi-floor checkpoint, the 28-kilometre access track from the Hurghada highway. Last verified 8 June 2026.
ReadThe Trajan-era granodiorite quarry. Surviving Roman administrative camp, fragmentary unfinished columns, the dossier of Greek ostraca. Approached from Safaga via the Wadi Belih route.
ReadThe 150-kilometre desert road from Coptos on the Nile to Quseir on the Red Sea. Predynastic petroglyphs, Senusret III inscriptions, the bekhen-stone quarries, the Roman fort of Bir Umm Fawakhir.
ReadThe Ottoman Hajj port at Quseir el-Qadim, the restored customs buildings now run as a small museum, the survival of the pilgrim trade into the early 20th century.
ReadVerified Bedouin-led 4×4 outfits in Hurghada, Quseir and Marsa Alam, with the operator-vetting note for each. Updated on a six-month cycle.
ReadGiftun islands, Abu Dabbab dugong site, Sha'ab Samadai dolphin shelter, Marsa Mubarak. House reefs by base, boat-day options, the seasonal calendar.
ReadThe southern Red Sea region from Marsa Alam down to Berenice — the one-page overview that points to the relevant deeper files. In the footer of every page.
ReadThe Roman emerald-mining district in the Eastern Desert south of Marsa Alam. File released in draft to Library and Field subscribers; public release planned for late 2026 after a third verification trip.
Request previewThe public file is the front door. The subscriber resources below are why people pay for the second month.
| Resource | Format | Available to | Update cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPS track library | GPX, KMZ | Library, Field | Annual after each field cycle |
| Operator full background notes | Library, Field | Six-monthly | |
| SCA inspector contact sheet | PDF, A4 single page | Library, Field | Quarterly |
| Bilingual SCA bulletin translations | Reader (titles only), Library/Field (full text) | As bulletins are issued | |
| Printed Field Notebook | A5 print, 64pp quarterly | Field only | Mailed quarterly from Cairo |
| Saqalan Annual Digest | Print + PDF | All tiers (PDF); Field (print) | Once per year, December |
| Bibliographic search of the Eastern Desert literature | All tiers on request, billed by hour | On demand |
We are primarily a publishing operation. The five services below are the only paid work we accept; each is aligned to the editorial mission rather than to scale.
You send a draft route by email or through the planner form on the home page; an editor returns a one-page memo of feasibility notes — drive times, current access, sensible cuts. Delivered within 24 hours of receipt. €45 flat. No booking action taken on your behalf.
If you are considering an operator we do not list, we will read their public material, check the SCA licence status, contact two previous customers if we can identify them, and write a one-page note. €120 per operator. We will tell you bluntly if we would not use them.
A bilingual search of the published literature on a defined topic — for example, every published reference to Roman porphyry working at Wadi Abu Maamel between 2000 and 2026. €15 per hour, typical brief 2–4 hours. Delivered as a PDF.
Translation of an SCA bulletin, a permit reply, or a local-press piece on the Eastern Desert. €0.10 per source-language word, minimum order one A4 page. Mostly Arabic to English; English to Arabic accepted for short documents.
A written briefing pack for a university programme planning an Eastern Desert segment, including the current-conditions snapshot of every covered site and the recommended order of visits. Priced per programme; contact the desk.
If your need does not fit A–E, write to the desk in plain language and we will say yes, no, or "we know someone who does that better." We turn down work we cannot do well, and we say so directly.
The terms below come from the standard engagement letter and are not negotiable for individual orders. Institutional clients with framework agreements may agree variations in writing before the work begins.
The published window is 24 hours from receipt of payment, in the Egyptian working week (Saturday to Thursday). In practice most briefs land in the client's inbox inside eight working hours, but the published window is the contract.
No. The route brief is a feasibility memo, not a marketing document. You can use the factual content in your own brochure with attribution; we will not lend the Saqalan name to commercial brochures.
No, but we do release dated photographs from our own field cycles under a teaching licence for non-commercial use. Subscribers at Library and Field tiers can request high-resolution copies.
A single one-page route brief (€45). Below that, the administrative cost exceeds the work.
No, the two are separate. A service client whose work would benefit from the subscriber bibliography is offered a discounted first-month subscription at the close of the project; this is opt-in.
The bibliographic search indexes everything published in print or in academic-press digital editions on the Roman quarry sites, the Pharaonic and medieval trade routes, the Red Sea ports, and the reef-edge protected areas between January 2000 and the present. It is a flat index keyed by site, period, publication language and year. It is not a curated reading list — the point is that a subscriber can find every published reference and decide for themselves what to trust.
The four core publication series we index in full are: Bulletin de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale (BIFAO), the French primary publication of record for ifao excavations in the Eastern Desert; the British Eastern Desert Survey reports (Wright and others, ongoing); the Mons Claudianus series published by the Egypt Exploration Society in collaboration with the Polish mission; and the monthly SCA Quena inspectorate Arabic-language bulletins from 2010 onward. Outside these, we index any peer-reviewed publication that names one of our covered sites; the index has approximately 1,640 entries at the date of this page.
What we deliberately do not index: travel-blog posts, content-marketing pages from operators, unsourced compilations, and online encyclopedias that themselves cite none of the above. The point of an academic-grade index is that everything in it can be verified at the holding library; including unverifiable material would defeat the purpose. We do include the popular Egyptian-Arabic monthly Misr al-Athar for the period it was in print, because its access-conditions reportage from the Eastern Desert was contemporaneous and is not otherwise preserved in print English.
The most-used part of the index is the quarry concordance, which maps each Roman quarry site against its primary published reference and the surviving ostraca corpora. For Mons Claudianus alone the concordance carries 217 entries pointing into the published O.Claud volumes; the Mons Porphyrites concordance carries 94 entries pointing into the Maxfield–Peacock volumes. Library and Field subscribers can request consolidated PDFs of any concordance subset, delivered within two working days.
Beyond the four core series we also index the annual season reports of the Polish and Italian missions working at the Roman ports of Berenice and Myos Hormos, which between them have transformed the published understanding of the Indian Ocean trade in the Roman period. The Berenice volumes (Sidebotham and Wendrich, ongoing) are indexed by chapter for the periods up to 2019; the more recent volumes go in as they are released. For Myos Hormos the relevant index records point into the Peacock and Blue volumes from the British excavations at Quseir el-Qadim.
A small but important slice of the index covers the maritime and natural-history literature on the Red Sea reefs that fall within our coverage: the Vine and Ormond reef monographs, the Hellenic Marine Environment Protection Association surveys of the Egyptian protected areas, and the relevant chapters of the standard PADI dive-site guidebooks insofar as they remain accurate. The Coral Reefs file draws extensively from these, and the bibliographic index makes it possible for a subscriber to follow the citations into the underlying ecological literature.
The Desert Safari file lists seventeen operators in total. Each has been through the vetting standard set out below; the standard is not negotiable, and we have turned down operators who would otherwise have wanted to be on the list.
The vetting standard is one of the reasons the list is so short. There are probably forty to fifty operators on the wider Red Sea coast who run desert safaris; we have time and editorial capacity for seventeen.
Two anonymised examples below give the format. Both came from real subscriber commissions in the last six months; identifying details have been removed. The deliverable is always a single A4 PDF.
Client: solo academic traveller. Constraint: one day, return same evening to Hurghada hotel. Brief returned in fourteen hours. Recommended: 05:30 departure with operator B from the listed shortlist, on-site Mons Porphyrites 07:30–11:30, return Hurghada 13:30 for a 14:30 boat to Giftun Island. Flagged: the soft-sand stretch after Wadi Abu Maamel is currently unsuitable for the standard transport Land Cruiser; specified the operator's longer-wheelbase Toyota Hilux as the only sensible vehicle on this day.
Client: small specialist tour operator scouting the Mons Smaragdus draft file. Brief returned in twenty hours after a follow-up email exchange to clarify the second-night stop. Recommended: day one Marsa Alam → Sikait emerald mines (full day on a permit obtained via the desk's referral letter), overnight at the Wadi el-Gemal Bedouin camp; day two Wadi el-Gemal → Berenice port site → return Marsa Alam; day three reef morning at Marsa Mubarak before departure. Flagged: the Sikait permit currently takes a minimum of ten working days through the Marsa Alam SCA office.
Subscribe, commission a route brief, or read a public file. The pricing page and the contact page are the next two steps.