Archive for October, 2011

High-resolution images of the famed Amarna letters, the ancient 14th-century B.C. diplomatic correspondence between the New Kingdom pharaohs of Egypt and the kings of various Canannnite city-states, among others, have been placed online by Berlin’s Vorderasiatisches Museum, which houses more than 200 of the total of over 300 tablets that define the ancient corpus. Among... »

While Egypt is a Muslim country, it is much more progressive than other Arab nations. Some women wear a niqab (a veil covering the face), others wear a hijab (a covering of the hair and neck but not the face) and still others do not cover their heads at all. Women are not required... »

Boat anchors, overfishing and waste disposal are together with climate change posing a serious threat to one of Egypt’s most well-known treasures: the coral reefs. Egypt’s coral reefs are found mainly along the coasts of the Red Sea and near the Suez and Aqaba gulfs, where over 1000 fish species live among 250 kinds of... »

The  three-day “Characters of Egypt” festival kicked off on Thursday on Aswan’s Heisa Island, where 33 different ethnic tribes from across Egypt are set to meet and exchange cultural perspectives. The annual event aims to raise awareness of the cultural variances between Egypt’s multifarious ethnic groups. This cultural diversity will be recognised and celebrated at... »

Some 2250 years ago in Egypt, a man known today only as M1 struggled with a long, painful, progressive illness. A dull pain throbbed in his lower back, then spread to other parts of his body, making most movements a misery. When M1 finally succumbed to the mysterious ailment between the ages of 51... »

A small team of conservators at the Ashmolean Museum are finishing their painstaking work to restore and preserve dozens of Ancient Egyptian artefacts in time for the grand opening of the new £5m galleries next month. The new galleries of Ancient Egypt and Nubia will open to the public on Saturday, November 26, and set... »

Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Company signed a contract with Consolidated Contractors Company today for its projects in Cairo and Sharm El Sheikh. The contract allots $464.3m to the company’s “Nile Corniche” project in Cairo and $79.5m to its coastal resort project in Sharm El Sheikh. The Nile Corniche project is centrally-located, offering the best of... »

Three beautifully restored mummy portraits of well-off young people – an enigmatic, beguiling young woman and two handsome men – will go on permanent display at Oxford’s Ashmolean museum next month as part of the second phase of its redevelopment. The oldest, on linen, is of a young woman dating from 55-70AD, excavated by Flinders... »

Of the more than 300 cruise liners usually touring the Aswan part of the Nile, not more than 40 are still setting sail. The number of tourists visiting Egypt dropped by more than a third in the second quarter of 2011 compared to last year. Some 2.2 million people visited Egypt in the second quarter... »

When it comes to “oldest,” the sport of wrestling now is showcasing some ancient documentation to make its case. Written in Greek on an 18-inch wide fragment of papyrus and dated to between 100 and 200 A.D., it is a list of instructions on how to wrestle. The Greek word “pleckson” is seen throughout the text.... »