Aswan Aswan Aswan (; ) is a city in the south of Egypt, and is the capital of the Aswan Governorate. Aswan is a busy market and tourist centre located just north of the Aswan Dams on the east bank of the Nile at the first cataract. The modern city has expanded and includes the formerly separate community on the island of Elephantine. The city is part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the category of craft and folk art. "Aswan" is pronounced (. Spellings in other languages include ' ; Ancient Egyptian: '; '; '), and it was formerly
Aswan the summer solstice, a vertical staff cast no shadow. They noted that the sun's disc was reflected in a well at noon. This statement is only approximately correct; at the summer solstice, the shadow was only of the staff, and so could scarcely be discerned, and the northern limb of the Sun's disc would be nearly vertical. However, Eratosthenes used this information together with measurements of the shadow length on the solstice at Alexandria to perform the first known calculation of the circumference of the Earth. The Nile is nearly wide above Aswan. From this frontier town to the northern