Hopefully, nothing worse than seething traffic awaits visitors to downtown ASSYUT , whose street names (mostly in Arabic or outdated) are even less help than usual, though hotel billboards facilitate orientation. Happily for those hoping to escape as soon as possible, the bus, train and service taxi stations are right next to each other. Our account makes transport top priority, followed by places to stay and eat. The inclusion of sights and excursions that once attracted tourists is not a recommendation to visit, but it seems shameful to excise places that still exist, so we haven't.

Assyut has largely erased its own history. Scores of rock tombs west of town are the only sign of pharaonic Sawty, a nome capital which the Greeks renamed Lycopolis (Wolftown) after the local god, Wepwawet , "Opener of the Ways". Represented as a wolf or jackal of the desert, he was an apt symbol for a city which later prospered from slavery, for it was here that survivors of the Forty Days Road emerged from the desert to be traded wholesale. Trafficking may have continued until 1883, although Amelia Edwards saw nothing amiss a decade earlier, when she enthused over the "quaint red vases" and "bird-shaped bottles" in Assyut's souks.

Nowadays the souks purvey nothing worse than flyblown meat at the seedy end of the sprawling commercial district that opens with jewellers on Talaat Harb and peters out beside a fetid canal. A shopper's mecca it's not, but carpets are a local speciality, and there used to be pleasure in wandering the backstreets of decaying colonial mansions smothered in creepers, trying to locate a derelict khan that once stabled camels or the Hammam al-Qadim bathhouse, with its fine marble fountain.

On the other side of the tracks, Assyut's riverside quarter is freshened by breezes and greenery. Sharia el-Hellaly leads directly to the Nile, where a felucca can be rented to reach Banana Island ( Gezira el-Mohz), a lush picnic spot. Assyut's elite can be found in the Governorate building and private clubs en route to the British-built (1898-1903) Assyut Barrage , 2km downriver, which acts as a bridge across the Nile. The Lawyers', Engineers' and Sporting clubs are on the "mainland", the Officers' Club on the east bank.