Photo courtesy of ShelterBox Book Club

Synopsis from the book cover:

In 2002, three young women with no business degrees, no formal training, and nothing to lose founded a fiercely independent bookstore. At the time, nothing like Diwan existed in Cairo. Culture was languishing under government mismanagement, and books were considered a luxury, not a necessity. Over the next decade, these three women would contend with censors, chauvinists, critics, one another and many people who said they would never succeed in establishing Diwan as Cairo’s leading bookstore.

Frank, fresh and very funny, Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller is a portrait of a country hurtling toward a revolution, a feminist rallying cry, and an unapologetic crash course in running a business under the law of entropy. Above all, it is a celebration of the power of words to bring us home.

Thoughts on the book:

This was my first ShelterBox Book Group read and of three books on offer for the club vote this wasn’t my first choice.

I found the book engaging and like that it is structured in topics rather than chronological order. This reveals the problems with setting up the bookshop and expanding the business in context with other life experiences, allowing the story to unfold throughout the book.

I learned more about the culture of Egypt and the difficulties of three women starting and running a business in a patriarchal society. One of the passages in the book describes how a man wanted to do business with the company but refused to shake Nadia’s hand…

The author, Nadia portrayed herself as an unlikeable person and there is a lot of unnecessary swearing in the book which detracts from the narrative. The way Nadia treated her staff was inconsistent, she admonished and deducted pay for small misdemeanours of untidy book displays whilst letting those thieving from her to get off with paying back what they stole. Was that because the thief was male?

I Loved reading about the conversations between Nadia and her driver, although, sadly they eventually parted ways.

Would I recommend the book?

YES

King Taharqa, ruler of Egypt and Kush, was the first Kushite pharaoh to be buried in a tomb at Nuri, cemetery of the captital city, Napata. During the Napatan Period, the adoption of pyramid tombs and objects such as shabtis reflect the extent of Egyptian influence on Napatan culture. The objects in this display were excavated in the royal pyramids at Nuri, and date to the Napatan period.*

*From a signboard next to the objects.

Synopsis (from book cover):

Shrouded in mystery for centuries, the sphinx of Giza has frustrated many who have attempted to discover its original purpose.  Accounts exist of the Sphinx as an oracle, as a king’s burial chamber, and as a temple for initiation into the Hermetic Mysteries. Egyptologists have argued for decades about whether there are secret chambers underneath the Sphinx, why the head-to-body ratio is out of proportion, and whose face adorns it.

In The Sphinx Mystery, Robert Temple addresses the many mysteries of the Sphinx.  He presents eyewitness accounts, published over a period of 281 years, of people who saw the secret chambers and even went inside them before they were sealed 1926 – accounts that had been forgotten until the author rediscovered them.  He also describes his own exploration of a tunnel at the rear of the Sphinx, perhaps used for obtaining sacred divinatory dreams.

Robert Temple reveals that the Sphinx was originally a monumental Anubis, the Egyptian jackal god, and that its face is that of a Middle Kingdom pharaoh, Amenemhet II, which was a later re-carving,  In addition, he provides photographic evidence of ancient sluice gate traces to demonstrate that, during the Old Kingdom, the Sphinx as Anubis sat surrounded by a moat filled with water – called Jackal Lake in the ancient Pyramid Texts – where religious ceremonies were held.  He also provides evidence that the exact size and position of the Sphinx were geometrically determined in relation to the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren and that it was part of a pharaonic resurrection cult.

Review:

The book presents an interesting and plausible theory that the Sphinx was originally carved as Anubis, the Jackal God and that the monument was original surrounded by water.  The author has visited the Giza plateau on numerous occasions and has used his knowledge of the area as it is in recent times along with the accounts of people who excavated and lived in the area from the 1700s – 1800s.

It details how the Giza plan is modeled round ‘the golden mean proportion’.   I found the chapter entitled ‘The Golden Angle of Resurrection’ particularly fascinating.  It explains how the artworks within the tombs and temples display this proportion.

The book is well researched and fully illustrated with diagrams and sepia photographs taken by the author and older photographs and postcards that the author has collected over the years.

For anyone interested in the pyramids or the sphinx, it will make them look at the area in a new way and challenge the ‘consensus reality’.

My brief review doesn’t do the book justice.  More information about the book and the theory, along with all the photographs from the book can be found on the book’s dedicated website:

• The Sphinx Mystery.

Image from Wiki

ABC Brisbane reports that missing fragments of the Egyptian Book of the Dead have been discovered stored in a Queensland museum:

World-renowned Egyptologist Dr John Taylor was viewing the museum’s Egyptian collection when a name on a papyrus fragment caught his eye.

Dr Taylor is the curator of the British Museum’s mummy collection. The British Museum currently has a mummy exhibition on display at the Queensland Museum.

He was taken to the museum’s storeroom to see more and says what came next is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.

“After a very short time it became apparent that we did indeed have many fragments of the Book of the Dead,” he said.

Dr Taylor says the rare specimens belonged to a high priest of the Temple of Amun, around 3,400 years ago.

“This is not the papyrus of just anybody, this is one of the top officials from Egypt at the peak of ancient Egypt’s prosperity,” he said.

“So it is a significant find, and if we can reconstruct the whole document that’s going to tell us a lot.

A new satellite survey of Egypt has discovered 17 lost pyramids.  The work has been pioneered at the University of Alabama at Birmingham by US Egyptologist Dr Sarah Parcak.  The BBC report that more than 1000 tombs and 3000 ancient settlements were also revealed by the infra-red images.  The satellites orbited 700km above the earth and were equipped with cameras that are able to pin-point objects less than 1m diameter on the earth’s surface.  Following the observations, test excavations took place:

Ancient Egyptians built their houses and structures out of mud brick, which is much denser than the soil that surrounds it, so the shapes of houses, temples and tombs can be seen.

“It just shows us how easy it is to underestimate both the size and scale of past human settlements,” says Dr Parcak.

And she believes there are more antiquities to be discovered:

“These are just the sites [close to] the surface. There are many thousands of additional sites that the Nile has covered over with silt. This is just the beginning of this kind of work.”

• The full article and details of  the ‘Egypt’s Lost Cities’ broadcast can be found on the BBC website.

Archaeologists unearthed one of the largest statues found to date of a powerful ancient Egyptian pharaoh at his mortuary temple in the southern city of Luxor, the country’s antiquities authority announced Tuesday.

The 13 meter (42 foot) tall statue of Amenhotep III was one of a pair that flanked the northern entrance to the grand funerary temple on the west bank of the Nile that is currently the focus of a major excavation.

The statue consists of seven large quartzite blocks and still lacks a head and was actually first discovered in the 1928 and then rehidden, according to the press release from the country’s antiquities authority. Archaeologists expect to find its twin in the next digging season.

Full story can be viewed here.