Palmyra Reviews

Anna Boghiguian, one of Egypt’s foremost contemporary artists, has traveled the globe and recorded her artistic reaction to each new place in drawings and paintings in the notebooks she carries everywhere. But her roads through India or Cambodia, Canada or France always come back to the land of her birth, Egypt. Her drawings of Egypt reflect her instinctive and emotional responses to the country’s many layers of history and myth, and to the people, ancient and modern, grand and everyday, who populate those histories and myths with such entrancing spirit. In this very personal presentation of Egypt, Anna Boghiguian shares both her visual and her verbal thoughts, as she leads us on a tour of this incredible land of fact and fiction, across space and in and out of time, through her words that paint pictures and her drawings that tell stories. This truly unique book is as much about the artist as it is about the land, and a treasure on both counts.

Just to the south of modern Cairo stands the historic enclave known as Old Cairo, which grew up in and around the Roman fortress of Babylon, and which today hosts a unique collection of monuments that attest to the shared cultural heritage of ancient Egyptians, Christians, Jews, and Muslims. In this lavishly illustrated celebration of a very special place, renowned photographer Sherif Sonbol’s remarkable images of the fortress, churches, synagogue, and mosque illuminate the living fabric of the ancient and medieval stones, while the text describes the history of Old Cairo from the time of the ancient Egyptians and the Romans to the founding of the first Muslim city of al-Fustat, focusing on the Jewish history of the area (exploring the famous Genizah documents found in the Ben Ezra Synagogue that tell so much about everyday life in medieval Egypt), the early Coptic Christian churches, some of the oldest in the world, and the arrival of the Muslims in the seventh century, their establishment of al-Fustat on the edge of Old Cairo, and the building of the oldest mosque in Africa.