Faces of Egypt

Egypt is an Arab country, and indeed the Arab conquest came quickly to Egypt given its geographical proximity to the Arabian Peninsula. Nonetheless, Egypt represents a far more ancient culture, and Egyptian Arab identity, to me, seems a particularly distinct one compared to the Arab cultures of the Gulf or even the Levant, both areas in which the modern nation states do not seem to represent a distinct/discrete ethnic identity or culture.

Other than the Nubians originally from southern Egypt and perhaps the Bedouin in the Sinai, we did not encounter significant ethnic minorities, although perhaps it could be said that the Copts represent an Egyptian line with less Arab genetic input. Some pictures:

Vendor, Alexandria. In Alexandria we noticed that many Egyptians seem to have green eyes; it seemed less common in other parts of Egypt.














Scholar, Al Azhar Mosque. This man, to me, seemed somewhat "un-Egyptian" in appearance--he said that his family was from the Delta region.


Perhaps part of this is due to Ramadan, but Egypt feels far more religious than most of the other Islamic countries we have traveled to. The calls to prayer seem louder and more urgent and public worship far more common and conspicuous. Most shockingly (though perhaps that is too strong a word), there is an astonishing number of men who walk around with zebibas ("raisins"), which are forehead prayer bumps from repeated prostration during prayer. While some Egyptian men seem to wear these marks proudly as a testament to how devout they are, it is generally believed that they are intentionally inflicted (perhaps by scraping one's head on the carpet in an exaggerated manner while praying), rather than a necessary consequence of frequent prayer--little else could explain the absence of such marks on the foreheads of the devout in other Islamic countries.

Foreign Powers in Egypt

One of the things that I find surprising about Egypt is that, despite its development centuries ahead of other civilizations and its great material and cultural heights, it never really expanded too far outside the boundaries of the modern state of Egypt--never was there a real expansionary period, a great and lasting Egyptian empire. True, aspects of Egyptian culture spread far around the Mediterranean (perhaps most famously the cult of Isis, which finds echoes in the worship of the Virgin Mary), but Egypt was far more often part of a foreign political entity than the center of an empire. Perhaps this was because Egypt's most glorious years came well before the age of great empires, but the last 2500 years or so have seen numerous foreign powers in control. The Persians came in with Darius, the Greeks with Alexander the Great, the Romans with Marc Antony and Caesar; the early Arab conquest from Arabia was followed by the Fatimids from the Maghrib, Saladin from Syria and Turkic rule through the Mamelukes and the Ottomans; and most recently there were periods of quasi-colonial rule by the French and British.

It could be said that in general Egyptian culture was less affected by the outsiders than the outsiders were by Egyptian culture, especially before the Arab conquest--Egyptian forms of religion and art persisted stubbornly throughout the Persian, Greek and Roman periods, and even Christianity developed into a local church, the Coptic Orthodox (see post of 10.1). Outsiders who ruled Egypt, such as the Greek Ptolemies and the Turkic Mamelukes, eventually became essentially domestic dynasties, even if they were by blood foreign. Ancient Egyptian culture and history have an appeal that has persisted even in modern America: "Walk Like an Egyptian" (incidentally, a pose we did not see in ancient Egyptian art), Art Deco (see post of 9.15), countless movies, the list goes on. But, as I began, Egypt has for a very long time seen many foreign powers come and go, and in this post I wanted to share some photographs showing their relics--Egypt is not all pharaohs and mosques.

Greek

"Philosopher's Circle" of Greek thinkers (from Homer to Plato), at the pharaonic Saqqara funerary complex. The Saqqara complex originally dates from Djoser (2667-2648 BC)--these Greek sculptures were added much later during the Ptolemaic era.


Caduceus of Hermes at the Catacombs in Alexandria. The tombs are believed to date from the first to fourth centuries AD, and although there is a mix of Pharaonic and Greek imagery, it is believed that they were for the local Greek population, which had adopted some Egyptian iconography and styles.


The Greek presence in Egypt continued right through into the twentieth century, especially in the city of Alexandria, where a number of Greek coffeeshops remain as witnesses to the city's Greek past. Early twentieth century Egypt was a far more multicultural place than it is today; since then, most Greeks have moved elsewhere.


Greek Orthodox Church, Old Cairo. The Greek Orthodox Church also maintains the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai (see post of 10.1).


Greek Inscription, Elephantine Island, Aswan


Roman

Roman fortress of Babylon, now called Old Cairo. The Romans/Byzantines were decisively evicted from Egypt by the seventh century Arab conquest, but their Christian faith still persists today in a significant minority of the population.


Roman fresco, Luxor Temple


Latin inscription, Luxor Temple


"Pompey's Pillar" in Alexandria was actually hoisted by Diocletian, following his quelling of a revolt in Alexandria around 300 AD.


Some of Egypt's finest remaining temples date from the Greco-Roman era, including the Temple of Horus at Edfu and Temple of Isis at Philae, pictured below. The foreign powers continued Egypt's ancient religious traditions, placing themselves in the place of the pharaohs on the sculpted reliefs on the walls of the temples.




Jewish

Ruins of Abu on Elephantine Island. There is evidence of Jewish settlements on Elephantine, which is near present-day Aswan deep in Upper Egypt. According to Graham Hancock, the Ark of the Covenant was temporarily stored here in a Jewish Temple, before its journey to its current alleged resting place in Ethiopia.


Jewish synagogue, Alexandria. Most Jews have left Egypt, just as they have left most other Middle Eastern Arab countries.


Colonial

Napoleon arrived in Egypt near the end of the eighteenth century, and is responsible not only for subduing Ottoman control, but also for the first scientific survey of Egypt's archeological treasures. This inscription in the Temple of Isis at Philae records the French military expedition in Egypt.


In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Egypt was run essentially as a colony of the British Empire. During this time, a Belgian entrepreneur by the name of Edouard Louis Joseph (Baron Empain) developed the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis, building for himself this mansion (now known as the Baron's Palace) in the form of a Hindu temple.


Old Winter Palace Hotel, Luxor, built in 1886 during Egypt's colonial period

Christian Egypt

Chapel, Monastery of St. Paul, on the Red Sea (the animal depictions of the four Evangelists are said by some to resemble the Egyptian funerary gods depicted on canopic jars)


Egypt is a predominantly Muslim country, yes, but like many Muslim countries (see posts of 4.16, 5.17 and 8.16) it has an important and numerous Christian minority. As in the Levant, the Christians of Egypt go back to Biblical times and well predate the advent of Islam, and are the remnants of what used to be the dominant religious group, in this case the local Orthodox sect known as the Coptic Orthodox Church. The Copts still form around 10% of the Egyptian population, are economically quite powerful and take a great deal of pride in their cultural identity. Among other things, the Copts believe themselves to represent the continuation of the Egyptian line from Pharaonic Egypt through Greco-Roman Egypt to the present, holding the Muslim Egyptians as relatively newcomers who came with the seventh century Arab conquest (southern Egypt or Nubia remained largely Christian until as late as the 14th century).

The Copts have suffered more persecution in Egypt than other Christian groups have in other Muslim countries, but the Copts have responded to their recent persecution and the rise of Islamic conservatives in Egypt by banding together strongly and making significant investments in their community, including the ancient Christian establishments of Egypt that are some of the highlights of a visit to the country.

The greatest assemblage of Christian buildings in Egypt is Old Cairo, or Coptic Cairo. Old Cairo is called Old Cairo because it was there before there even was a Cairo, itself a relatively modern city that was founded by the Arabs and then the Fatimids in the seventh and tenth centuries, respectively. Old Cairo is the modern name for the Roman fortification of Babylon, which in Byzantine times grew into an important Christian religious center with a high concentration of churches. Even today the holiest churches of Cairo are in Old Cairo, representing not only the Coptic Orthodox Church but also the Greek Orthodox Church. There's even a Jewish synagogue.




More important to me than Coptic Cairo, however, was a visit to the monasteries of the Red Sea. These were the first Christian monasteries in the world--yes, the Egyptian desert is the birthplace of the Christian monastic movement--and so are arguably some of the most important Christian sites in the world for their impact on the development of the faith. Christian monasticism began with a desert hermit named St. Paul, who lived out his life alone in a cave in the desert, and was followed by St. Anthony, who in trying to follow the solitary life of a hermit actually ended up founding the world's first monastery (and quite a large one at that, with up to 2,000 monks) not too far from St. Paul's cave. St. Anthony's hagiography was later written by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, whose influence helped establish St. Anthony's fame and the rise of the monastic movement throughout Christendom.

St. Paul and St. Anthony


Seeing the monasteries of St. Paul and St. Anthony was very meaningful to me, because I wrote my college senior paper on the Life of St. Anthony by Athanasius (one of my majors was Ancient Studies). I've also always thought that I would have made a good monk in another life. The desert monasteries, however, gave me a slightly different impression of the lives of St. Paul and St. Anthony than I had imagined. When I read about Anthony's experiences in the desert, I imagined a very harsh existence full of heat and sun and thirst. I pictured a world of blinding light, where sheer deprivation and exposure led to visions of demons and God.

But of course such harsh conditions--total exposure in the desert--are not endurable; people cannot survive. The reality is that the monasteries are quite close to the Red Sea, which even if not the highway of international commerce that it is today would still have provided a transportation route to the hermits, as did the tracks to the Nile. And, even in the Egyptian desert, temperatures are quite bearable in the shade, whether that of a cave or of a thick-walled monastery or church. Both monasteries also benefit from springs (of course essential to the maintenance of life), and the water from the springs have been channelled to create little oases in the monastic grounds. In the case of St. Paul's the spring is a very small one indeed--a drip--but the spring of St. Anthony sustains a small population, and the water properly used supports a beautiful garden with food plants and palm trees. The hermits lived in the desert wilderness, yes, but created for themselves areas of surprising beauty, life and tranquility, protected from the raw elements.

Monastery of St. Paul, on the Red Sea, founded after the death of St. Paul



Monastery of St. Anthony, on the Red Sea


Finally, the most famous Christian site in Egypt: the Monastery of St. Catherine's in the Sinai. This site is important not only because it's been the site of a Christian monastery (in this case Greek Orthodox, and not Coptic) since the fourth century, but because the location is believed to be of Biblical importance: where Moses spoke to the burning bush and received the Ten Commandments from God. The bush was silent during our visit.



Exodus Chapter 3: Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, "I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up." When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, "Moses! Moses!" And Moses said, "Here I am." "Do not come any closer," God said. "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." Then he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. . . ."