The Siwa Oasis Arabic: Its fame lies primarily in its ancient role as the home to an oracle of Ammon , the ruins of which are a popular tourist attraction which gave the oasis its ancient name Oasis of Amun Ra. Historically, it was part of Ancient Libya. The Ancient Egyptian name of the oasis was Sekht-am , which meant "palm land".
Early Arab geographers termed it Santariyyah. Its modern name Siwa , first appeared in the 15th century; the etymology of the word is unclear. Although the oasis is known to have been settled since at least the 10th millennium BC , the earliest evidence of any connection with Ancient Egypt is the 26th Dynasty , when a necropolis was established. Ancient Greek settlers at Cyrene made contact with the oasis around the same time 7th century BC , and the oracle temple of Amun Greek: Zeus Ammon , who, Herodotus was told, took the image here of a ram.
Herodotus knew of a "fountain of the Sun" that ran coldest in the noontime heat. The oracle, Alexander's court historians alleged, confirmed him as both a divine personage and the legitimate Pharaoh of Egypt, though Alexander's motives in making the excursion, following his founding of Alexandria, remain to some extent inscrutable and contested. Evidence of Christianity at Siwa is uncertain, but in the Siwans resisted an Islamic army, and probably did not convert until the 12th century.
A local manuscript mentions only seven families totaling 40 men living at the oasis in In the 12th century, Al-Idrisi mentions it as being inhabited mainly by Berbers, with an Arab minority; a century before Al-Bakri stated that only Berbers lived there. The Egyptian historian Al-Maqrizi travelled to Siwa in the 15th century and described how the language spoken there 'is similar to the language of the Zenata '.
The first European to visit since Roman times was the English traveler William George Browne , who came in to see the ancient temple of the Oracle of Amun. In the Spring of , German explorer and photographer, Hermann Burchardt , took photographs of the architecture of the town of Siwa, now stored at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. The Siwans are a Berber people, so demographically and culturally they were more closely related to nearby Libya, which has a large Berber population, than to Egypt, which has a negligible Berber population.
