Asyūṭ

Asyut stands on the west bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt, where the cultivated valley meets the desert. It was the Greek Lycopolis, and in Christian times its cliffs held monasteries and churches; the historian al-Maqrizi counted 360 monasteries on both sides of the river.

Asyut was the northern end of the Darb al-Arba'in, the Forty Days' Road to Darfur by way of the Kharga and Selima oases, which carried caravans of up to 12,000 camels at its peak in the fourteenth century. By the late eighteenth century an annual caravan brought ivory, ostrich feathers, hides and camels, and also enslaved people forcibly taken from lands farther south; merchants returning to Darfur carried textiles and other manufactures. The great scholar Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, who died in 1505, came from a family that took its name from the city. In 1799 the artists of Napoleon's expedition recorded the painted tombs in the cliffs above the town.