Articles with keyword: Alexandria

As Okasha El Daly has highlighted, qalam al-Tuyur“script of the birds” is one of the Arabic names used by the writers of the Ayyubid periodand earlier to describe ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The name may reflect the regular choice of Nile birds as signs for several consonants in the Ancient Egyptian language, such as the owl for “m”. However, the term also finds an ancestor in a rarer practice of hieroglyph users centuries earlier. From the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods and before, cursive manuscripts have preserved a list of sounds in the ancient Egyptian language, in the sequence used for the alphabet in South Arabian scripts known in Arabia before Arabic. The first “letter” in the hieroglyphic version is the ibis, the bird of Thoth, that is, of knowledge, wisdom and writing. In this paper I consider the research of recent decades into the Arabian connections to this “bird alphabet”.

The poets Posidippus of Pella and Callimachus of Cyrene, writing under Ptolemy II, actively construct a new Mediterranean geography in which people and luxury goods, even divinities, move from the Northern and Eastern Mediterranean to the new city of Alexandria. The building of the Alexandrian library provides a more concrete demonstration of that same trend, as the Ptolemies under the influence of both Greek thinkers like Demetrius of Phaleron and of Egyptian cultural practices like the great temple libraries strive to move the center of Greek learning from Athens to Alexandria. This paper explores the ways in which Posidippus and Callimachus shift Greek culture south.

This paper seeks to examine Harry Tzalas’ Seven Days at the Cecil (2009) as a specimen of nostalgic writing, highlighting the way subjective recollections are transformed into a shared collective experience; a rendering of an intangibly fleeting past into a work of art. Nostalgic literary works may thus be regarded as not only a means of preserving personal memories, but also as a means of vivifying places, historical eras, anecdotes and figures. What unfolds throughout the novel is a nostalgic revisiting of the past; of an Alexandria that had once accommodated the characters, but is now in the realm of the distant, the inaccessible and the vanishing. Their remembering of the past is not elegiac; rather it is life-giving and self-defining. By a fortuitous meeting, a varied cast of characters find themselves entangled with each other. Each day, for a period of seven days, they visit different places in the city of their childhood; places of yesteryear that are still alive in their memories, though some of which could not withstand the ravages of time. The locus of their encounter is the Cecil Hotel. Arriving there acts like opening a floodgate of reminiscences through which Tzalas probes into the nature of nostalgia and the whole gamut of human emotions it invokes. The choice of the Cecil Hotel is particularly apt, for despite the renovations it has witnessed, it is still coloured in hues of the past, very much like the city itself. It thus serves as a causeway between the past and the present. To the author and his characters, Alexandria is not a symbolic homeland or an ecological niche, nor is it a relic of the past; rather it is a sensuous city, vibrant with scents, tastes, colours, tactile sensations, audible sounds, and the lithe rippling of the sea waves - all of which remain alive in their memories. As it has occurred to them, the grip of their Alexandria is too tenacious to let go of them, and this leads the narrator to contend at the end of the novel: “The Alexandrians don’t need a guidebook to their city, they carry her in their soul”.

Alexandria was theoretically an ideal place to become a center of sophistic activity during the period of the Second Sophistic (c. middle of the first century to the beginning of the third century AD). The fact is, however, that the centers of this cultural, educational, and intellectual activity were to be found in various cities of Asia Minor and Greece (e.g. Athens, Smyrna, Ephesus), while Alexandria is not mentioned among them. Philostratus, who gives a panoramic view of the sophistic movement of this period, does not include any sophists from Alexandria in his list, while the city itself is not mentioned at all. Moreover, Philostratus mentions four sophists from the neighbouring Naucratis, and gives the impression of a certain sophistic activity there, but not in Alexandria. Then, the questions that arise here are whether the sophistic movement had also developed in Alexandria and, if so, why Philostratus does not regard any of its sophists worthy of mention. The existing evidence shows that there was a significant development of the sophistic culture in Alexandria already from the early first century AD. As to the second question, I maintain that there was a clear incompatibility between Philostratus’ political ideas and the way he understood the role of the sophists, on the one hand, and the general tenets and practices of Alexandrians and Alexandrian sophists, on the other. I argue that this incompatibility was the main reason for Philostratus’ silence.