Articles with keyword: Egypt

The author argues that images of the Egyptian deity Horus, dressed as Roman soldiers, are works of Roman propaganda. While the focus here is on the statue from the British Museum, EA 36062, the argument applies to similarly attired images of Horus. Several Egyptian cults spread across the empire, but were rarely depicted as soldiers, and for this reason, one must ask why Horus was shown in this way. The proposal is that such images intended to tell the native Egyptian viewer that since Horus was a servant of the empire through enrollment in the army, the viewer should be also.

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”.

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”.