Hali and Siwan society
Roundabout 1203, seven families quit Aghurmi to found a new settlement further Fwest, called Shali (the Town). Their menfolk are still honoured as the "forty ancestors", and these pioneering families were probably the most vigorous of the surviving Siwans. Like Aghurmi, Shali was walled and built of kharsif : a salt-impregnated mud which dries cement-hard, but melts during downpours - fortunately, it only rains heavily here every fifty years or so. Fearful of raiders, Shali's agwad (elders) forbade families to live outside the walls, so as the population increased the town could only expand upwards. Siwan households added an extra floor with each generation, while the agwad regulated the width of alleys to one donkey's breadth in an effort to ensure some light and air within the labyrinth.

Siwan bachelors aged between twenty and forty were obliged to sleep in caves outside town, guarding the fields - hence their nickname, the "club-bearers". Noted for their love of palm liquor, song and dance, these zaggalah shocked outsiders with their open homosexuality . Homosexual marriages were forbidden by King Fouad in 1928, but continued in secret until the late 1940s. Today, Siwans emphatically assert that homosexuality no longer exists in the oasis.

Another feature of Shali was the tradition of violent feuds between two neighbourhood clans - the Westerners and Easterners - in which all able-bodied males were expected to participate. Originally ritualized, with parallel lines of combatants exchanging blows between sunrise and sunset while their womenfolk threw stones at cowards and shouted encouragement, feuds became far deadlier with the advent of firearms, occasioning gun battles "on the slightest grounds". (Even now, Siwans know which clan they're descended from, and the town council is sited exactly midway between the two neighbourhoods.) Yet they immediately closed ranks against outsiders - Bedouin raiders, khedival taxmen or European explorers.

Egyptian and British control
Visitors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries regularly experienced Siwan xenophobia . "Whenever I quitted my apartment, it was to be assailed with stones and a torrent of abusive language," Browne wrote in 1762. Having poked around the antiquities in Muslim guise, Frederick Hornemann was pursued into the desert, where "the braying of three hundred donkeys announced the arrival of the Siwan army", and only escaped thanks to his assistant's recitation of Koranic verses. Frederic Cailliaud was permitted to visit the gardens and ruins in 1819, but the town remained barred to strangers until six hundred troops sent by Mohammed Ali compelled the oasis to recognize Egyptian authority in 1820.

Although the Siwans subsequently revolted against their governor and defaulted on taxes (payable in dates) half a dozen times over the next sixty years, the oasis began to change. With the desert tribes suppressed, and Shali rendered unsafe by heavy rains, the agwad permitted families to settle outside the walls. From the 1850s onwards the great reformist preacher Mohammed Ibn Ali al-Senussi cast a spell over the desert peoples from Jaghbub Oasis just over the border, and Siwa - the site of his first zawiya - supported Senussi resistance to the Italian conquest of Libya (1912-30), until it became clear that their Senussi "liberators" would not restore Siwan independence. Thus in 1917, British forces were "welcomed by the cheering Siwans, who declared their loyalty as they always did with every new victorious conqueror" (Fakhry).

Anglo-Egyptian control of Siwa was maintained by the Frontier Camel Corps and Light Car Patrols. Agricultural advisors, a school and an orthodox imam were introduced following King Fouad's visit to the oasis in 1928. When the British withdrew as the Italians advanced across North Africa in 1942, the Siwans accepted Axis occupation with equal resignation. Unlike Rommel, who made a favourable impression during his flying visit, King Farouk dismayed the Siwans by wearing shorts, and asking if they "still practised a certain vice" when he visited the oasis in 1945.

More recently &
Paradoxical as it sounds, Siwa's biggest problem is an excess of fresh water, which gushes from springs and drains into salt lakes, increasing their volume and salinity. As the explorer Bagnold put it: "the air, hot and breathless, has a characteristic oasis smell, slightly sweet, of rank grass faintly charred, decaying through increasing saltiness". Smelly, mosquito-infested ponds all over town attest that the water table lies only twenty centimetres underground. Land reclamation projects have tried to tackle the problem since 1907, but creating drainage catchment areas in an oasis lying 18m below sea level has always proved hugely expensive.

While Egyptian military bases exist here on sufferance, the Siwans have welcomed developments in healthcare, education and communications. A public hospital treats patients who once had to travel to Mersa Matrouh. Over thirty Siwans have graduated from university, and returned to live in the oasis. The road to Matrouh (completed in 1984) has encouraged exports of dates and olives, and tourism to the oasis. In 1995, the prospect of the "discovery" of Alexander the Great's tomb, which a Greek couple proclaimed to the media, increased interest in Siwa. A year later, President Mubarak flew in to inaugurate the Siwa mineral water factory, north of town - although the new olive oil factory, nearby, actually contributes more to the local economy