Egypt [antikvár]

The Land and its People The word "Egypt" has always conjured up for us visions of pyramids, temples and sphinxes, of mosques and bazaars; today we must add associations like the Suez Canal, the Aswan Dam, and crude oil. The visitor to Egypt will not be disappointed, for he will find the colourful and varied land he seeks: the petrified but ever-living world of the Pharaohs, the richly creative Middle Ages, and the industrialised Egypt of the twentieth century. Here the civilisations of East and West, Christianity and Islam have met and merged, and, united, their development forms a continuous arc from the glorious past lying in ruins through an extraordinarily energetic present into a joyfully hopeful future. Egypt, this ancient land of men's dreams, still casts its spell over the stranger today, just as it captivated the minds of Strabo and Herodotus, Caesar and Anthony. Napoleon's engineers pioneered the science of Egyptology, which, in barely a century and a half, has pieced together from its investigations and excavations a picture of Egypt which shows us at first hand the country's civilisation and way of life during a period of close on 6,000 years, and this in detail such as can scarcely be surpassed. When Champollion successfully deciphered the hieroglyphics in 1822, conjecture gave way to certainty, and, at the same time, clues were provided to new discoveries and important sites. The archaeologists saw their labours crowned by the rediscovery of the grave of Tutankha-mon in the "Valley of the Kings" near Thebes (1922). All the buried treasures are still a long way from having been wrested from the desert sands, yet the experts are already setting to work to protect or dismantle temples and tombs before the reservoir to be formed by the new Aswan Dam buries them forever. However, the visitor who left, having seen only the ancient monuments and without any acquaintance with the cultures of Islam with its mosques and arabesques and of Coptic Christianity with its Byzantine art, would go away with a very one-sided idea of Egypt— for, after all, as a land it forms a bridge between the Occident and the Orient, and, in addition, there is a new Egypt coming into being that we cannot afford to neglect, a modern, but for all that fairy-tale, country, an almost paradoxical reality. Here you come across camels and donkey-carts alongside tram-lines and high modern buildings, or see Bedouin tents pitched against a background of 40,000 ton oil-tankers steaming through the Suez Canal, or, again, of city walls, built in the Middle Ages of Pharaonic stone, which Mamelukes, Bonaparte's Grenadiers and the globetrotters of the twentieth century have carved their names on. 3