The exceptional beauty of Egypt’s monuments and landscapes has thrilled visitors for centuries.
From the beaches of the Red Sea Coast to the lush palm groves of Egypt’s oases, from the heritage of the Roman and Coptic periods to the architectural riches that followed the arrival of Islam, from the magnificent tombs and temples of ancient Egypt to medieval souks to Cairo’s bustling energy today, there is just so much to feast on in Egypt.
Featuring 165 color photographs and captions explaining the stories behind each image, Egypt is a stunning visual journey through an astonishing country.
Trevor Naylor is the author of Egypt Inside Out (AUC Press, 2020) and Cairo Inside Out (AUC Press, 2016, hardbound; AUC Press, 2020, paperback) and co-author of A Roving Eye: Head to Toe in Egyptian Arabic Expressions (AUC Press, 2014). He has been a visitor to, and resident of, Egypt since 1986.
Cairo is a 1,400-year old metropolis whose streets are inscribed with sagas, a place where the pressures of life test people’s equanimity to the limit. Virtually surrounded by desert, sixteen million Cairenes cling to the Nile and each other, proximities that color and shape lives. Packed with incident and anecdote, Cairo: City of Sand describes the city’s given circumstances and people’s attitudes of response. Apart from a brisk historical overview, this book focuses on the present moment of one of the world’s most illustrious and irreducible cities. Cairo steps inside the interactions between Cairenes, examining the roles of family, tradition, and bureaucracy in everyday life. The book explores Cairo’s relationship with its ‘others,’ from the French and British occupations to modern influences like tourism and consumerism. Cairo also discusses characteristic styles of communication, and linguistic memes, including slang, grandiloquence, curses, and jokes. Cairo exists by virtue of these interactions, synergies of necessity, creativity, and the presence or absence of power. Cairo, City of Sand reveals a peerless urban balancing act, and transmits the city’s overriding message: the breadth of the human capacity for loss, astonishment, and delight.
In 1862, the Prince of Wales, eldest son of Britain’s Queen Victoria, embarked on a grand tour of the Middle East, for his education and enlightenment. Accompanying the royal party was Francis Bedford, an accomplished practitioner of the still young art of photography, charged with taking views of the cities and historic places visited on the tour for the royal album. The result is an extraordinary collection of some of the best early photographs of Cairo and the temples of Upper Egypt, Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Lebanon and Damascus, Izmir and Constantinople. From timeless views of the Pyramids, the Dome of the Rock, Baalbek, and Hagia Sophia to scenes from another age of the streets of Cairo or tall ships on the Bosphorus, 120 of Bedford’s most outstanding photographs are showcased here in this fascinating visual tour of ancient lands in royal company.
From the earliest resthouses serving travelers on the Overland Route between Britain and Bombay to the grand Edwardian palaces on the Nile that made Egypt the exotic alternative to wintering on the Riviera, the hotels of Alexandria, Cairo, Luxor, and Aswan were always about far more than just bed and board. As bridgeheads for African exploration, neutral territories for conducting diplomacy, headquarters for armies, providers of home comforts for writers, painters, scholars, and archaeologists in the field, and social hubs for an international elite, more of importance happened in Egypt’s hotels than in any other setting. It was through the hotels that visitors from the west—the earliest adventurers, then the travelers and, finally, the tourists—experienced the Orient. This book tells the stories of Egypt’s historic hotels (including the Cecil, Shepheard’s, the Mena House, Gezira Palace, Semiramis, Winter Palace, and Cataract) and some of the people who stayed in them, from Amelia Edwards, Lucie Duff Gordon and Florence Nightingale to Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Winston Churchill, and TE Lawrence.
Strap on your sturdiest sandals and start planning your trip to Egypt in 1250 BC. You may have heard the rumors: the language is perplexing, there are no tourist facilities, and an aggressive, egocentric pharaoh rules the land. But Egypt will be a must-see vacation destination for millennia to come! So don’t delay—visit now, before the Roman tourist hordes arrive. Drawing on contemporary sources and years of experience excavating in Egypt, archaeologist Donald P. Ryan guides the time-traveling tourist on a journey up the Nile, taking in the sights of Memphis, the pyramids, Thebes, and beyond. En route he offers useful advice on everything from deciphering hieroglyphs to deciding which god to petition in the event of a scorpion sting. So leave the protective amulets at home and banish all fear of being sold as a galley slave. This imaginative guide is all you need to survive and enjoy your visit to Egypt in its glorious age of empire.
