The maps and plans in this collection were created when Christopher Scaife, an amateur archaeologist, visited the Eastern Desert in Egypt in the 1930s.
Scaife recorded visits in 1931/32 and 1933 in a short note published in Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts (Cairo Fouad University) I (1933), 144-145, where he states that he made 'plans and measurements of the fort and village in wady Me'mil and of the village at the quarry in the eastern mountain (Lykobetus of Schweinfurth's map) also .....' . He returned in 1938, as noted by G.W. Murray (Dare me to the Desert (1967)).