Wilkinson, John Gardner: Topographie of Thebes, and general view of Egypt: being a short account of the principal objects worthy of notice in the valley of the Nile, to the second cataracte and Wadi Samneh, with the Fyoom, Oases and eastern desert, from Sooez to Bertenice (London, 1835)

Chap. VII.] TROPICAL WELL OF SYENE. 453

remains of an outer chamber and of a portico in
front. The only name now found in this building
is of Nero (Nerros), but on a former visit I also
observed that of Domitian. It was supposed by
late travellers to have contained the well of Strabo,
in which the rays of a vertical sun were reported to
fall during the summer solstice; a circumstance,
(says the geographer) that proves this place " to
lie under the tropic, the gnomon at mid-day casting
no shadow."

But though some excavations have been carried
considerably below the pavement, which has been
torn up in search of the tropical well, no other
results have been or are likely to be obtained than
that this sekos was a very improbable site for
such an observatory,* even had it ever existed ; and
that Strabo was strangely misinformed, since the
Egyptians themselves could never, in his time,
have imagined this city to lie under the tropic; for
they were by no means ignorant of astronomy, and
Syene was, even in the age of Hipparchus, very
far north of that line.f

* A well would have been a singular kind of observatory,
especially if the sun had been vertical; and if Strabo saw the
meridian sun in a well, he might have made up his mind he was
not in the tropic. Pococke supposed the aperture in the roof of
this temple to have been for astronomical purposes, but windows
are common of this form and in this situation in Egyptian
buildings.

t The obliquity of the ecliptic was then, B.C. 140, about
23° 51' 20".