Marcus Pasha Simaika (1864–1944) was born to a prominent Coptic family on the eve of the inauguration of the Suez Canal and the British occupation of Egypt. From a young age, he developed a passion for Coptic heritage and devoted his life to shedding light on centuries of Christian Egyptian history that had been neglected by ignorance or otherwise belittled and despised. He was not a professional archaeologist, an excavator, or a specialist scholar of Coptic language and literature. Rather, his achievement lies in his role as a visionary administrator who used his status to pursue relentlessly his dream of founding a Coptic Museum and preserving endangered monuments. During his lengthy career, first as a civil servant, then as a legislator and member of the Coptic community council, he maneuvered endlessly between the patriarch and the church hierarchy, the Coptic community council, the British authorities, and the government to bring them together in his fight to save Coptic heritage. This fascinating biography draws upon Simaika’s unpublished memoirs as well as on other documents and photographs from the Simaika family archive to deepen our understanding of several important themes of modern Egyptian history: the development of Coptic archaeology and heritage studies, Egyptian–British interactions during the colonial and semi-colonial eras, shifting balances in the interaction of clergymen and the lay Coptic community, and the ever-sensitive evolution of relations between Copts and their Muslim countrymen.
Marcus Simaika
Father of Coptic Archaeology
Samir Simaika
Nevine Henein
Introduction by
Donald M. Reid
10 October 2017
240 pp.
13 b/w illus
15X23cm
ISBN 9789774168239
For sale worldwide
29.95
Donald M. Reid
Related products
A History of Egypt
From Earliest Times to the Present
Jason ThompsonThis cohesive account of Egypt’s millennia-long past offers readers a sure guide through the sometimes labyrinthine corridors of Egypt’s past, from the mysterious predynastic kingdoms to the nation-state of the twenty-first century. The author addresses central scholarly issues such as how Egyptian history can be treated as a whole and how the west has shaped prevailing images of it, both through direct contact and through the lens of western scholarship. Drawing on current historical scholarship as well as his own research, Jason Thompson has written a remarkable work of synthesis and concision, offering students, travelers, and general readers alike an engaging one-volume narrative of the extraordinarily long course of human history by the Nile. This updated paperback edition contains new material on the 25 January Revolution and the fall of the Mubarak regime.
...read more
Paperback
412 pp.80 b/w illus.
15X23cm
18.95
Edward William Lane, 1801–1876
The Life of the Pioneering Egyptologist and Orientalist
Jason ThompsonFew Western scholars of the Middle East have exerted such profound influence as Edward William Lane. Lane’s Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), which has never gone out of print, remains as a highly authoritative study of Middle Eastern society. His annotated translation of the Arabian Nights (1839–41) retains a devoted readership. Lane’s recently recovered and published Description of Egypt (2000) shows that he was a pioneering Egyptologist as well as orientalist. The capstone of his career, the definitive Arabic-English Lexicon (1863–93), is an indispensable reference tool. Yet, despite his extraordinary influence, little was known about Lane and virtually nothing about how he did his work. Now, in the first full-length biography, Lane’s life and accomplishments are examined in full, including his crucial years of field work in Egypt, revealing the life of a great Victorian scholar and presenting a fascinating episode in east–west encounter, interaction, and representation.
...read more
Hardbound
760 pp.64 illus.
15X23cm
24.95
Egypt from Alexander to the Copts
An Archaeological and Historical GuideRevised Electronic Edition
Edited by Roger S. BagnallDominic W. Rathbone
After its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 bc, Egypt was ruled for the next 300 years by the Ptolemaic dynasty founded by Ptolemy I, one of Alexander’s generals. With the defeat of Cleopatra VII in 30 bc, Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire, and later of the Byzantine Empire. For a millennium it was one of the wealthiest, most populous and important lands of the multicultural Mediterranean civilization under Greek and Roman rule. The thousand years from Alexander to the Arab conquest in ad 641 are rich in archaeological interest and well documented by 50,000 papyri in Greek, Egyptian, Latin, and other languages. But travelers and others interested in the remains of this period are ill-served by most guides to Egypt, which concentrate on the pharaonic buildings. This book redresses the balance, with clear and concise descriptions related to documents and historical background that enable us to appreciate the fascinating cities, temples, tombs, villages, churches, and monasteries of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique periods. Written by a dozen leading specialists and reflecting the latest discoveries and research, it provides an expert visitor’s guide to the principal cities, many off the well-worn tourist paths. It also offers a vivid picture of Egyptian society at differing economic and social levels.
...read more
10 July 2017
e-book
320 pp.100 illus. incl. 25 color
14.95
This book is only available for purchase from Egypt
Doria Shafik, Egyptian Feminist
A Woman Apart
Cynthia NelsonCynthia Nelson brings to life a bold and gifted Egyptian of the mid-twentieth century who helped define what it means to be a modern Arab woman. Doria Shafik (1908-1975), an Egyptian feminist, poet, publisher, and political activist, participated in one of her country’s most explosive periods of social and political transformation. During the ’40s she burst onto the public stage in Egypt, openly challenging every social, cultural, and legal barrier that she viewed as oppressive to the full equality of women. As the founder of the Daughters of the Nile Union in 1948, she catalyzed a movement that fought for suffrage and set up programs to combat illiteracy, provide economic opportunities for lower-class urban women, and raise the consciousness of middle-class university students. She also founded and edited two prominent women’s journals, wrote books in both French and Arabic, lectured throughout the world, married, and raised two children. For a decade, she ignited the imagination of the press, where she was variously described as the “perfumed leader,” a “danger to the Muslim nation,” a “traitor to the revolution,” and the “only man in Egypt.” Then, in 1957, following her hunger strike in protest against the populist regime of Gamal Abdul Nasser, she was placed under house arrest. Within months her magazines folded, her name was officially banned from the press, and she entered a long period of seclusion that ended with her suicide in 1975. With the cooperation of Shafik’s daughters, who made available her three impressionistic, unpublished, and sometimes contradictory memoirs, Nelson has uncovered Shafik’s story and brings the life and achievements of this remarkable woman to a Western audience.
...read more
9 September 2015
e-book
345 pp.14 b/w illus.
14.5X23cm
14.99
This book is only available for purchase from Egypt