Shellal

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"The river Nile at Shellal, photograph taken in the late afternoon on the 15th of February 1891." Photo: Queen Victoria. Egypt, 1891.
"The river Nile at Shellal, photograph taken in the late afternoon on the 15th of February 1891." Photo: Queen Victoria. Egypt, 1891.

Shellal (Arabic: شلاّل) is a small ancient village in the banks of the Nile, south of Aswan in Egypt. It was the traditional north frontier of the Nubia region with both the Egyptian Empire and the Roman Empire. During the ancient Egypt it was a very important quarry area for granite production. Nowadays it is possible to see some unfinished granite works on the site (that is soon to become an open-air museum), some of the objects on display include incomplete statues of Osiris and Ramesses II and unfinished Roman baths.

Shellal was mentioned in a text dating from the 6th century where the king of Nobatia prides himself on having driven Blemmyes out from his country northwards from Ibrim to Shellal, on the frontier with Roman Egypt.

It was also an important city during the muslim Arab early domination, in particular there are some ancient minarets dating from the 11th century that are now sumerged under the waters of the Lake Nasser, These minarets are know to reflect the direct influence of the Hijaz region of Arabia, rather that the domination of the powers of the lower Egypt.

During the XIX century, the Luxor-Aswan railroad line was connected with a narrow-gauge line from Aswan to Shellal. which had been constructed in 1884 by the British as a military line during the first Sudan Campaign to accelerate transport of military stores past the First Cataract. Then converting Shellal as the final southern station in the Egyptian railroad network.

In the late XIX century, Victoria of Baden, the Queen Victoria of Sweden, visited Egypt and traveled south to Shellal where she took a now famous photograph of the site on the late afternoon on 15th of February 1891. The photograph is the first known graphic document in existence, depicting the waters of the Nile at Shellal.

Today Shellal has a small port where boats depart to the near Philae temple and has a small market where the shopkeepers wait for the tourists returning from the temple.

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