Abstract
Far from confining themselves to the Nile Valley, the Egyptians have, since earliest antiquity, woven multiple and complex relationships with their various neighbors, the inhabitants of the Sahara. Although Egyptologists are dependent on a small number of sources, subject to the chance of discovery, variable according to the era and often frozen in a conventional monumental discourse, it remains possible to infer about these relationships in the diachrony. This presentation will outline the history of these relationships, from two perspectives: firstly, the way in which the " children of the deserts " were perceived by Egyptian power (figurations and texts), and secondly, the way in which this same power appropriated desert spaces. Looking for what [the sources] let us [hear], without having wished to say it ", the approaches taken to the material will be plural, from landscape archaeology to anthropology, from philology to semiology.
