The Society hosted Dr. Zahi Hawass,  Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities in South Africa on a short lecture tour – visiting Johannesburg where he gave a lecture on Monday 14th August 2006 at the Great Hall of  the University of the Witwatersrand with Egyptian Ambassador Mona Omar in attendance. Unfortunately problems with publicity resulted in a smaller attendance at Wits than expected. The subject of the lecture was  The Mysteries of the Pyramids. Dr. Hawass also gave a question and answer session to students at Wits University who took advantage of this unique opportunity of meeting the most famous Egyptologist in the world today.

Accompanied by Acting Chairman Jean Smith and Peter Mulder, Dr. Zahi Hawass arrived in Cape Town on Tuesday 15th August where he stayed at the Cape Grace Hotel at the Waterfront. Two lectures were given at the Baxter Concert Hall on 16th and 17th August with Cape Town City Mayor, Helen Zille as guest of honour.  On both occasions the Concert Hall was sold out with many people turned away. Following the first lecture a “Meet & Greet” event was arranged for guests and TESSA members. Many took the opportunity to have books by him duly autographed.

During his Cape Town stay, Dr. Hawass visited the University of Stellenbosch where he talked to students and enjoyed the hospitality of the university and that of Professors Sakkie Cornelius and Johann Cook.  The TESSA Committee ensured that Dr. Hawass saw as much as possible of Cape Town during his short visit.  He visited Cape Point, ascended Table Mountain by the cable car and was well entertained at various dinners where his exuberance and enthusiasm for Cape Town were well noted.  Dr. Hawass suggested that he would like to return to Cape Town and there is the hope and expectation that he will indeed do so.  We truly look forward to that.

Corporate member Egypt Today CC, plus EgyptAir and Marcus Brewster Publicity sponsored part of the costs and kind donations were  received from Mike & Shirley  Beaumont, Debbie Blinkhorn, Anlen Boshoff, Dr. Rob Brown, Colin & Marian Cohen and Norma Harris.

The entire project was co-ordinated  meticulously by Jane Mulder, assisted by her sub-committee – Peter Mulder, Nerine & Thomas Dorman and Robin Hammond.  Well done everyone and especially Jane Mulder. – Brava!

The Society has completed its first decade having achieved national and international visibility in line with the objectives of the Society to foster an  appreciation and understanding of ancient Egypt. There are few societies in Cape Town, perhaps even in South Africa, that are as active as ours – with a strong membership and attendance at meetings, financially secure and with excellent facilities. Members have access to a superb free specialised lending and reference library, regular meetings and lectures, national and international visibility with an unsurpassable record of world-ranking lecturers like Dr. Kent Weeks, Prof. Mostafa el Abbadi and the redoubtable Dr. Zahi Hawass. TESSA also has the benefit of superb local lecturers and some are shown in photographs in the special commemorative edition of SHEMU.

In the words of H.E. Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak, wife of the President of Egypt and Chair of the Board of Trustees of Bibliotheca Alexandrina: “The goal of this enormous project is to honour the past, to celebrate the present and to invent the Future . . . The role of the library is to promote dialogue of cultures specifically in the fields of knowledge, science, culture, art . . . a centre of excellence in research and documentation, and a source of pride for Egypt and the entire world”.

With these words ringing through the halls of the resurrected Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Dr. Peter Lor, National Librarian, National Library of South Africa, presented the opening address of ALEXANDRIA IN CAPE TOWN in the Baxter Concert Hall on Friday 12 April 2002.

Dr. Lor pointed out the positive cultural relationship established between South Africa and Egypt since the 1990′s and that the new library would serve to close the gaps created between peoples and their cultures over a span of many centuries. Chief guest speaker Professor Mostafa El Abbadi from the University of Alexandria was introduced by Dr. Lor and then presented the first paper of the five he was due to deliver over the two days. For convenience, the five papers presented by Professor El Abbadi will be covered first in this review..

Alexandria – “The Greatest Emporium in the Inhabited World”

Professor Dr. El Abbadi, an impeccable figure of elegance and charm, the moving “spirit” behind the re-establishing of the great library, told his audience that when first approached by the TESSA Chairman, Keith Grenville, to visit Cape Town, the prospect of such a journey appeared to be “an attempt of the impossible”. However, thanks to the persistent enterprise of Keith and his team, the “impossible” became the “possible”. The lecture covered the very beginnings of the harbour on the pre-Alexandrian site; the founding of this great city in 326 B.C. as an international centre and how it became the greatest trading centre of the world by 26 BC, when under Roman dominance, it controlled the sea route to India.

On the Transmittance of Egyptian Learning into Greek: 2nd Lecture.

Dr. Mostafa divided this huge dimension of learning between these two great peoples through the evolution of time into three phases: the first phase covered the significance of the ancient Nile flow – “the giver of life”. The second phase gave rise to uncovering the mysteries of the heavens which lead to the science of Astronomy and Time Measurement. The third phase uncovered the instruments of astronomy – technology. At this point, we as modern-day man of the 21st century, could only agree that whatever seems “amazing” in our world today, we owe to the incredible thirst for knowledge about our universe by the men of these ancient nations.

Alexander, the Egyptian Pharaoh: Lecture 3

What inspires greatness in man? Is it his own natural vision or an insatiable drive; or is it a birthright? According to the legend of the Alexander Romance, Alexander’s mother, Queen Olympias, consorted with an Egyptian magician/priest who appeared to her as the god Amun. She gave birth to a son who was to become one of the greatest Greek leaders of ancient time and was proclaimed “divine” pharaoh. His legacy of vision and courage has remained part of Greek/Egyptian history since his death in 324 BC.

The Alexandria Library, Past and Present: Lecture 4.

Professor El Abbadi modestly and briefly mentioned how he conceived the idea exactly thirty years ago of daring to imagine that the great ancient Library of Alexandria should be revived in modern times with similar aims and objectives.

It was the most inspiring and enriching lecture for me. The ancient library, established by Ptolemy I (Soter) in 288 BC, came alive and before me appeared the scholars from all over the known world speaking in their many different tongues on so many diverse subjects. Over 700,000 scrolls to pour over! Literary giants such as Plato and Aristotle, Aristarchus – the first to proclaim that the earth revolves around the sun; Hipparchus – the first to measure the solar year; Euclid – the father of geometry; Archimedes – the greatest mathematician; Callimachus – poet and the father of “Library Science” – the methodical cataloguing of books by topic and author. There was also the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek making it accessible to all learned people. This was the greatness of the Hellenistic culture and civilization with the city of Alexandria as its centre. The inevitable question remains: was Alexandrian culture and scholarship Greek or Egyptian? There is no doubt that both peoples should be proud of this timeless legacy.

Underwater Archaeology in Alexandria and Abou-Kir: Lecture 5.

The exciting underwater discoveries originated by amateur enterprise has attained official recognition in Egypt. The lecture examined the explorations undertaken illustrated with photographs of sculpture, jewellery, coins and artefacts found beneath the water. The future prospects of this comparatively new branch of archaeology has enormous potential.

An Egyptian image of Alexandria: special guest lecturer Professor Azza Kararah.

Professor Kararah’s mesmerising dramatic skill held us captivated as she gave a personal rendition of The Downfall of Cleopatra by Ahmed Shawqi (1869 – 1932), the “prince of poets” of the Arab world. This dramatic piece, written as a verse-play, shows the influence of Shakespeare whom the dramatist greatly admired.

The second piece, Miramar by Nobel Prize winning author Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s most highly acclaimed novelist, is set in a pensione on the Mediterranean sea front. It captures the Neapolitan nature of Alexandria in the 1960s – a turbulent political time and the writer shows great compassion as the characters face their dilemmas.

Professor Dereck Sparks (University of Cape Town) delivered a paper Alexandria – a bridge between East and West and illustrated a wealth of scientific inventions and accomplishments enabling scientific development during a rich period of history.

Stellenbosch University was well represented. Professor Sakkie Cornelius delivered a colourful and visually exciting view of The Many Faces of Cleopatra from Alexandria to Cyberspace. This informative lecture was well received at the end of the first day.

Also from Stellenbosch University was Professor Johann Cook’s The Alexandrian Origins of the Septuagint. This fascinating account of the translation of the Hebrew Pentateuch text into Greek was punctuated with examples of the development of the language. Professor Cook, with his customary energy, returned to the platform on the second day of the seminar with some details of the creation of the Coptic language in his paper Egyptian Coptic Culture.

Professor Anthony Humphreys (University of the Western Cape) delivered a very interesting and detailed paper Cleopatra: The Woman and her World which looked beyond the mythology of this extraordinary person and at the political pressures placed on her by the Roman empire.

A fascinating demo-lecture was presented by Dr. Barry Smith on the organ in the Concert Hall. He discussed the origins of the organ which was first invented as a “Hydraulis” by the engineer Ctesibius during the 3rd century. BC.

This truly memorable and enriching symposium, moderated throughout by Society Chairman Keith Grenville, was the strongest and most authoritative academic platform focused entirely on Egypt ever presented in South Africa – a mighty feather in the cap of The Egyptian Society of South Africa.

On September 5th 2000, Dr. Kent Weeks and his wife Susan arrived at Cape Town International Airport  for their first visit to South Africa and a 10-day National Lecture Tour arranged by the Executive Committee of The Egyptian Society of SA with the assistance of generous sponsors and benefactors.

As a national society with international recognition it was time for us to ‘test the waters’ with this style of lecture tour by a world-renowned Egyptologist. Our objective was accomplished with a total of 6 lectures delivered country-wide by Dr. Kent Weeks. The first lecture at the University of Cape Town swiftly sold out and Kent Weeks willingly agreed to deliver a repeat lecture the same evening. The second lecture was very well attended. Subsequent lectures were enthusiastically received at the Universities of Stellenbosch, Natal, Witwatersrand and Pretoria. The success of the project was enhanced by wide radio coverage with Kent Weeks being interviewed on local and national radio, some press coverage, and culminating with a television interview on M-Net’s Carte Blanche on Sunday 10 September, accompanied by excellent visual material and presented by Ruda Landman.

In his lecture, entitled The Lost Tomb, Kent Weeks briefly covered the history of exploration in Egypt, with the plunder, exploitation, destruction of valuable papyri, artefacts and other excesses, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries. The presentation continued with details of the appalling threat to the existence of tombs and monuments by modern farming methods, the rising water table, pollution and the damaging effects of tourism and its development. Aware of this massive threat to the 6 square kilometre Theban necropolis and the need for a dependable and comprehensive atlas of this World Heritage Site, Kent Weeks founded the Theban Mapping Project (TMP) in 1978. The lecture then moved to the discovery by Dr. Weeks and his team of the lost tomb of the sons of Ramesses II (KV5) and his eventual breakthrough into areas of the tomb hitherto unknown and unrecorded since antiquity. It was from this point that he led the audience through a series of photographs showing the gradual and methodical exploration of the tomb, the painstaking excavation and conservation, the retrieval of items of jewellery, pottery, and painted fragments of limestone plaster. Finally, he spoke of the mummy of a royal male with arms crossed in the Osiris position found with three other skulls lying in a pit near the entrance to the tomb. It is supposed the mummy remains had been dragged to the entrance by tomb robbers in antiquity to search in the light for associated gold items. Having said that work in the tomb has revealed 150 chambers, Kent Weeks confidently prophesied that the number of chambers will increase to 200 by the end of the April 2001 excavation season. Undoubtedly the largest tomb ever found in Egypt, KV5 represents a unique royal family mausoleum which will continue to be excavated for many years to come and is likely to throw light on many aspects of the lives of Ramesses II, his sons and the New Kingdom period. Kent Weeks finished his lecture with a CD-ROM presentation showing an impressive example of the planned Theban necropolis database, comprehensive search and visual facilities to be available on a CD-ROM at a later date.

Susan Weeks accompanied her husband throughout the South African tour. She is an integral member of his team in Egypt, specialising in pottery. Her art work illustrates her husband’s book The Lost Tomb which was on sale at all lecture venues.

Their first day in a very wet Cape Town was spent entirely with live and recorded radio interviews, newspaper and a television interviews. Unfortunately, the hectic schedule allowed very little time for sightseeing but meals were taken at carefully chosen venues affording some impression of each of the cities. A short tour of the Cape Town area and peninsula, the drive to Stellenbosch and a free day in that area gave our guests a feeling of the Cape. In Durban a visit to the Valley of a Thousand Hills and the city environs, with lunch at Umhlanga was appreciated and then in Johannesburg a meeting with Professor Phillip Tobias and a private viewing of the Taung skull followed by a visit to the Sterkfontein caves proved to be a highlight of their short visit.

The Egyptian Society is delighted to have presented Kent Weeks in South Africa – a man whose name is as synonymous with KV5 as Howard Carter’s is with KV62, the tomb of Tutankhamun.

One aspect of Egyptology that has always caused me slight irritation – and probably many others too, is the continuing confusion over royal names, with one (mainly American) school of thought preferring to call the builder of the Great Pyramid “Khufu”, whilst the other (mainly British) preferring “Cheops”, and so on throughout all the major dynasties. The Khufu school, as one might call it, will refer to a certain 18th dynasty pharaoh as “Amonhotep”, whilst the Cheops school will call the same man “Amenophis”.

The trouble arises because, in most cases, we cannot know how the Egyptians pronounced their names, or  in fact, most of the words in their language. They did not leave us any helpful vowel sounds in hieroglyphic.  A great deal of detective work over the years has only made things more difficult – and we have been driven to various devices to make Egyptian words pronounceable at all; for example, inserting the modern “e” sound where the vowel-sound is unknown.

Sir Alan H. Gardiner tackles the problem head-on in his large and authoritative Egyptian Grammar stating, “Egyptology has … been committed to the classical royal names Menes, Cheops, and Mycerinus; and it is therefore quite reasonable to add to the number Ammenemes, for Imm-m-het, Sesostris for S-n-Wsret, … Ramesses for R’-ms-sw, etc.” Gardiner was British, and it’s the British who have traditionally been ‘committed’ to that approach.  He goes on to describe the difficulties that arise when we try different ways of transliterating Egyptian. Seeing how French and German Egyptologists can differ (not to mention Italian and Polish) one can see that he has a point. At least with the Greek-style  names left to us by Herodotus and Manetho there is some measure of agreement about who we are referring to.

However, many Egyptologists feel that the Greek names are far too removed from the Egyptian original – that even if we cannot be precisely on target with a pronunciation, we should at least try to get as close as we can. Take one example; “Ramesses” in the British tradition is a useful, pronounceable version of a name that  may, I emphasize “may”, have been pronounced “Ria-ma-sse-zu” – and that is how the contemporary Babylonians (who did leave us some guidance to their pronunciation) referred to him. The British version is more convenient – even to the Americans – and is unlikely to give way to a more accurate spelling.

My own preference has always been “Amunhotep” rather than “Amenophis”, and “Amunemhet” rather than “Ammenemes”.  I realise that even with Amunhotep there can be several versions, such as “Amonhotep”, and even “Amonhatpe”. Nevertheless, I feel somewhat closer to the man when using a “near-miss” version than when using what I might almost call a “cop-out” version taken from the Greeks.

It is useful to remember that among both schools of Egyptology there is general agreement that the names of ordinary non-royal Egyptians are usually written in the “Khufu” style, thus keeping the “Cheops” style for kings.  This is a handy way of distinguishing them when dealing with periods when many royal and non-royal people carried the same name. Not everyone called Charles is a Prince of Wales!

A last niggling thought: is Cheops pronounced “Chee-ops” or “Kee-ops”?

The fate of the original Great Library of Alexandria is shrouded in mystery. It was built during the reign of Ptolemy Soter, one of the Greek Ptolemies who ruled Egypt for the last 300 years of the first millennium BC. The library is said to have contained more than 500,000 texts from through-out the known world. After 245 BC, 120,000 scrolls were catalogued by Calimachus of Cyrene, who became librarian that year. Among the library’s alumni can be included Euclid, Archimedes, Philo, Plotinus and Plato. According to Seneca, Julius Caesar inadvertently set alight a book storage depot close to Alexandria harbour when he was under siege by Cleopatra’s brother Achilleas in the city in 47 BC. It is said he did not deliberately set the library ablaze, and the book store did not contain more than a fraction of the library collection.

Roman Emperor Theodosius I, in 385 AD, outlawed all teaching centres run by pagan philosophers causing the ancient library to be taken over by the Bishops of Alexandria who used the facilities to train aspirant priests in rhetoric and logic. The “Bishop’s School” was dissolved in 641 AD when Egypt was conquered by the Muslims. A fire broke out during the battle for the city – the conquering general is said to have ordered the rescue of the books coupled with instructions to destroy any that contradicted the Koran.

Fire was a common danger in ancient cities and the Alexandria library was threatened more than once. In additional to 641 AD, there were fires in the 300’s and 400’s when Alexandrian Christians rioted in response to theological arguments. Following each damaging fire before 641, the persons responsible for the library would have been able to replace the losses to a certain extent. There were, after all, other libraries in the Greek-speaking world.

Out of the ashes, the modern library grows – , when complete in late 2000, it will look magnificent on the 63,000 square metre site. The size of the bookshelves is the basic unit of the entire design, with the size of books therefore the basic unit of the building. The circular 10 storey building (32 metres), suggesting the disc of the sun, tilts forward at an angle of 20 degrees towards the sea to the north with the front part sunk below ground level. To the south, a windowless back wall of red granite from Upper Egypt will carry representative inscriptions in the varied scripts of the region. An imaginative use of light, facilitated by a complex arrangement of skylights which form the disk-like roof, will provide natural light at the same time deflecting the harsh Egyptian sun.

The future is symbolized by the two-thirds of the building that is above ground level, consigning the past 2,000 years to below ground.   An assorted array of letters and symbols from all languages will be carved into a rough-hewn wall encircling the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The budget for the project is $167 million from the Egyptian government, UNESCO and other subscribers.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s $1.5m annual book budget is intended to lead to the creation of a collection numbering 8 million books by 2002, along with up to 4,000 newspapers and periodicals, 50,000 manuscripts and rare books, as well as 50,000 maps. Alongside the traditional collection, the library intends to amass up to 250,000 audio and audio-visual aids, as well as establishing links to overseas computer databases and permanent internet access.

The library is envisaged as a resource centre for the study of Mediterranean civilization and, like its famous ancestor, the library will be connected to a complex of scholarly facilities and museums.  It is situated on the Corniche, near the city centre and the University of Alexandria’s arts faculty, close to the presumed site of the original library. The team of young Norwegian architects won an architectural competition with their earthquake-proof building, have also included in the complex a science museum, a calligraphy museum, a planetarium, a school of information science, exhibition areas and auditoria, a restoration and conservation laboratory and employment for a staff of 400.