SYENE ; Sept. Eink), a city of Egypt, situated in the ThebaIs, on the southern extremity of the land towards Ethiopia (Ptol. iv. 5 ; Plin. Hist. Nat. v. 10 ; xii. ; Strabo, pp. 787, 815). Ezekiel, describing the desolation to be brought upon Egypt through its whole extent, says : Thus saith the Lord, I will make the land of Egypt utterly desolate, from the tower of Syene even to the border of Cush (Arabia) ;' or, as some read it, from Migdol to Syene,' implying, according to either version of the passage, the whole length of the country from north to south. Syenc is repre smted by the present Assouan, which exhibits few tetnains of the ancient city, except some granite columns of a comparatively late date, and the sekos of a small temple. This building has been supposed by late travellers to have contained the famous well of Strabo (Geog. xvii. p. 817), into which the rays of a vertical sun were reported to fall during the summer solstice, a circumstance, says the geographer, that proves the place to lie under the tropic, the gnomon at midday casting no shadow.' But although excavations have been carried on considerably below the pavement, which has been turned up in search of the well it was thought to cover, no other results have been ob tained than that this sekos was a very improbable site for such an observatory, even if 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
(n.c. 140, when the obliquity of the ecliptic was about 23° 511 20"), very far north of that line. The belief that Syene was in tbe tropic was however very geneml in the time of the Rotnans, and is no ticed by Seneca, Lucan; Pliny, and others. But, as Sir J. G. Wilkinson remarks, a well would have been a bad kind of observatory if the sun had been really vertical ; and if Strabo saw the meri dian sun in a well, he might be sure he was not in the tropic' (Nod. E,upt and Thebes, ii. 286). The same writer adds : Unfortunately the observations of the ancient Greek writers on the obliquity of the ecliptic are not so satisEctory as might be wished, nor are we enabled, especially as La Grange's theory of tbe annual change of obliquity being vari able is allowed to be correct, to ascertain the time when Assouan might have been within the tropic, a calculation or traditional fact in which, perhaps, originated the erroneous assertion of Strabo.' The latitude of Assouan is fixed by Wilkinson at 24° 5' 30; and the longitude is usually given as 32° 55'. —J. K.