By Rosemary Bailey
This article was published in the August 2015 edition of Soul Search, the Journal of The Sole Society
Ex-member, John Sewell, sent us some photographs of his recent holiday in Egypt where he saw some graffiti done by an F Sewell. John and his wife were visiting their son who works in Cairo and were in Aswan for a short break.
The graffiti, which is shown below, is on Trajan’s Kiosk which is part of an ancient Egyptian temple complex originally located on the island of Philae, near the lower Aswan Dam. The complex was dismantled and moved to the island of Agilika in the 1960s by UNESCO to save it from being flooded by the construction of the Aswan High Dam.
The British Army didn’t occupy Egypt till 1882 so F Sewell was unlikely to have been a soldier. John Sewell thought the carving must have taken some time to complete and would have required tools and suggested he may have been an archaeologist. With just a first initial and a date, it is impossible to identify him.
Coincidently the day before I write this I visited the Tower of London where, in the Beaumont Tower, there is a lot of medieval graffiti done by the prisoners held there.
