A Don’s Life

Old girls reunion

I have never been very keen on 'alum' events. I know that the new world of university fundraising means that it is very important to keep the old boys and girls feeling bonded, and I am genuinely interested in what my old students are doing (how could you not be? what they are doing in 10 or 20 years time is probably a better guide to your success than how many Firsts and 2.1s you get). All the same I'm still dont feel I'm made for the 'class of 73' style of culture. And I've got a long history of this. When I left school, me and my best mate were the only refuseniks who wouldn't join the Old Girls Association. (Actually I got caught on this one: I eventually got so curious about what they were all doing that I fell into the arms of Friends Re-United.)

That said, getting back together on your own terms is fun. So on Saturday six of us who had been true mates at Newnham in the mid 1970s met for lunch in leafy Harpenden. Some of hadnt actually seen each other for 35 years. (It was, as you will see alcohol assisted...).

What were we all now doing? Well the tally went like this: a GP (the hostess), a civil servant in the Dept of Health, a lawyer on a career break, an agricultural scientist, a psychotherapist, and me.

And did we still get on?

What's happening in Cairo (a Mum asks!)

Thanks one and all for your comments and emails. Just to keep you updated.

We heard from the boy in Cairo yesterday .. to say he was OK, and that he would call 'tomorrow'. Well, of course, he cant phone as the mobile networks have been cut, and so has the internet (did we realise that it was so easy to do that?).

So at this point Mum has to learn not to worry . . . and to go through the reasons in her head.

1) There is nothing whatsoever to be done, so worry is energy expended to no point whatsoever. OK that kind of argument isnt usually very efficacious when you feel a bit of anxiety coming on (that's the point of anxiety -- it isnt susceptible to a good dose of common sense). All the same, it's a good thing to reflect on.

2) Whatever's happening, this 'keeping in touch with the young' habit is ever so recent, ever so 21st century.

When we went away, back packing or studying or whatever, in the 1970s, it wasnt a bit like this.

Cairo riots: eye witness account

I dont usually use this blog for other people's words. But I have just had an email from the son in Cairo, who has seen and been in today's demonstrations. This is some of what he has to say:

"What follows is my personal and not very well informed view on the situation. The only benefit I have is that I have just returned from the protests so can at least offer my view as a Briton living in Cairo. I can never be quite part of the protest. People tell themselves that this is because it is the Egyptians' struggle but also, in my case, it is due in small part to fear. Getting arrested in Egypt is something almost all foreigners are afraid of and being deported would do nothing good for my Arabic studies.

I woke up late and was not particularly interested in the protests since all Egyptians I had spoken to said that nothing would ever happen. However, one of my friends said that they were going to Cairo University because Facebook had told them that was the place to go. We went on the Metro but found that there was very little going on. Apparently, the venue had been changed to surprise the police and we had not been informed. Someone said that the Egyptian government had shut down Facebook, which was not in fact the case to my knowledge, but there are rumours that they will and Twitter is out for the foreseeable future (sorry mum!).

The advantages of knowing Latin

Before we visited the temple of Philae (one of those moved and re-erected after the new Aswan dam), we spotted some interesting stuff in the Rough Guide. One of the bits of graffiti, it said, was written by a Roman -- because it was in Latin: "B Mure stultus est", "B Mure is stupid".

Hang on we thought. What kind of Roman name is B Mure. Either someone had copied the name down wrong, or sure as hell the graffiti wasnt Roman.

As you can see, the latter was the right answer. First B Mure had come along and scratched his name...then some Latin-ate nineteenth-century tourist, follower or enemy had come along later and written 'stultus est'... the Latin equivalent of 'B Mure is an idiot'.

So who was B Mure. Our guess is that it was Benoit Jules Mure (1809-1858) a "pioneer of homeopathy", who in the nineteenth century took homeopathy to Malta, Sicily and Brazil, before coming to Egypt and Sudan with his new medical science. If he went from Egypt to Sudan, then Philae would have been on his route.

So maybe the Latin graffiti-artist was a dissatisfied patient....rubbishing homeopathy as much as the practitioner.

Anyway, without any clue about Latin and Roman names, you'd be taken in by the Rough Guide. A small victory (ok, only a small one) for Latin. But it so happened that when I was in Egypt I was reading a book on portraiture . . . a good one, but it could likewise have done with a bit more Latin.

Death on the Nile

We ended up seeing many of the sites of Upper Egypt from a cruise boat. I can't say that I had ever imagined that I would find myself on a Nile Cruise . . . but the husband and son agreed that we should give it a go, if only for the Agatha Christie experience.

The fact is that Nile cruising is not quite what it was. Because of security restrictions, you can no longer get on the boat at Cairo and chugg along to Aswan; you can only travel from Luxor to Aswan. It doesn't take long to realise that it is actually faintly silly to take four days to travel on a boat a distance you could drive in not much more than three hours. (Unlike a sea cruise, you do most of the 'sailing' in waking hours to maximise the illusion of distance.)

That said, there were some very good sides to the whole thing. We had picked on a boat called the Philae (owned by the Oberoi hotel chain), partly because it looked romantic and partly because every room has a balcony onto the river (why go on a Nile cruise if you cant gawp at the river whenever you want to?). We had also splashed out on a bigger room, which turned out to be well worth it, as there was bags of space to swing a cat or two.

The views were stupendous (I thought that I was immune to that kind of thing... 
but I kept burbling all the time about how stunningly beautiful it all was) and the food a treat (Oberoi is an Indian chain and the curries were to die for . . . and the chef was so proud of his kitchen that he let you wander round it). As for cultural experiences, the high point was not a great monument of Egyptian antiquity, but going through the Nile lock at Essna where, in an engaging variant of squeezy merchants at traffic lights, a host of little rowing boats crowded around us throwing up all sorts of merchandise for inspection and possible purchase. In the transaction, half of the stuff fell into the river (most of it in plastic bags... and most of it, but not all was rescued). Was this private enterprise? Or a nice side show organised by the Oberoi, I found myself wondering?

All the same I am not wholly sure that I am quite cut out to be a passenger on a cruise boat.

This isn't Caligula's tomb

The news this morning is full of the "discovery" of the emperor Caligula's tomb at Nemi, by the lake about 30 kilometres out of Rome. The details are pretty murky. The police apparently arrested a guy who was loading a statue of the monster young emperor into the back of a lorry.

I havent seen a picture of this yet. But how do we know it was Caligula? Because, they say, it was wearing the 'caligae" or sandals that gave the emperor his nickname (his 'real' name was Gaius). Errr? Aren't there loads of Roman statues that wear these?

And why do we think that it marked his tomb?

Simple. Because it makes a good story that gets a load of press coverage for the discovery made by these no doubt brave policemen (the illicit antiquities business is probably second only to drug running in its nastiness).

All the evidence we have from the ancient world suggests that this cannot be so.

The tomb of Tut -- what does Zahi Hawass intend to do?

Apologies to those with other interests; but this blog has had a brief splurge into Egyptology, thanks almost entirely to my Egyptian trip.

But not quite entirely. Today's Sunday Times carries a story that has been going around for some months - that the Egyptian Archaeological Service intends to ban visitors from the Tomb of King Tut, and eventually from all the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and to get us non-egyptologists visiting a series of clever replicas, rebuilt near the one-time house of Howard Carter. And so they hope to 'save' the monuments themselves.

I had vaguely noticed reports of these schemes before, but I paid more attention today as I had just visited the Tomb of Tut.

Two things to start with. First, there is obviously a big problem in the Valley of the Kings. If you have 60 odd tombs that for more than 3000 years were intended to be shut off from human contact, and you open them to widespread (though hardly "mass") tourism, you have a problem. Tourist sweat certainly erodes painting.

Secondly, I have never been much of an admirer of Zahi Hawass, the current supremo of Egyptian Antiquities . . . a master archaeological showman to be sure, but it is not yet clear how much more than that he is. It is apparently his brainchild to close off as many of the "real" tombs as possible to ordinary visitors. And it is certainly not clear how confident we should be in his proud claims to "know best". "I'm the guardian, I know what is good for their preservation" he is quoted as saying. 

May be that's true. But we have, of course, heard that before -- from generations of expert, well meaning, highly-qualified conservationists charged with looking after the world's heritage. And as many disasters as successes have been the result.

The face of Paris -- and Cleopatra

The next bit of graffiti we have been chasing is the rather rough and ready image of Paris at the head of this post. It is scratched on a column in one of the main halls of the Egyptian Temple at Luxor. It is headed "Paris", though you can only just see a trace of this at the very top. And, so far as we can tell,it shows a statue (at least it's on a base) of the Trojan (anti-)hero, holding an apple in one hand and a quiver in the other.

We were looking for this in the temple (though -- fair dues -- it was the son who actually found it). One idea, according to some article I read, is that this is a Greco-Roman graffiti, which represents the famous lost statue of Paris by Euphranor.  But, more than that, so the same article claims, it is also a reflection of the idea, made famous in Euripides' play Helen, that Helen of Troy did not actually go to Troy at all, but only an image of her (an eidolon).

How come? Well, this graffito has been scratched right next to a statue of Nefertari. So here, the
argument goes, the Roman scratcher has seen an image which he has interpreted as the eidolon of Helen and depicted Paris next to it.

It was the husband who pointed out that this doesn't quite add up. But something quite close to it does.

 

The Colossi of Memnon? When are graffiti not graffiti?

I have wanted to see the Colossi of Memnon for ages. These are two huge statues of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III which have stood since the fourteenth century BC outside the remains of his "mortuary temple" not far from Luxor in Southern Egypt. It isn't their Egyptological history that interests me particularly (in fact even after a few days in Egypt, I'm just as bad as I ever was at telling my Nefertaris from my Nefertitis . . .  or my Amenhoteps from my Akhenatens; and indeed I have been known to glaze over when having them explained).

For me these statues are important because they were a Roman tourist attraction -- and it is fun to be gawping at monuments that Germanicus or Hadrian gawped at a couple of thousand years ago. Not exactly for the same reasons, it must be allowed. One of the colossi was especially renowned in the early Roman empire because, thanks to some damage (possibly in an earthquake in the first century BC), the effect of the stone warming up in the morning made the statue emit a strange sound like singing. It the Romans said that it was not Amenhotep at all, but an image of the hero Memnon, son of Dawn...who miraculously sang to greet his mother each morning. Or, he sang most mornings; there were some unlucky visitors who didn,t hear the singing. 

The Romans loved the sound and also finished it off. The statue was repaired in the second century and never sang again.

Predictably perhaps, the tourist guides here (who have never heard of Memnon) tell a brave new version of the story... that they were believed to be statues of AGAmemnon who wept at dawn. In such ways new myths are born.

A day in Cairo

I was extremely grateful for the suggestions from all of you about what we should do in Cairo,  but I have to confess that the one full day we had here was given up to pleasure more than intellectual improvement (though that came in its usual back door route). This wasn't so reprehensible, as I have been to Cairo a few times before -- and have been pretty energetic in the Archaeological Museum, the Old City (with Dr Alcock's guide). etc.

This time, given we had just a day, I was in the end keener to suss out what the son was doing, the style of student life in Cairo. He is learning Arabic in a serious way there, like I always intended (and no, I haven't actually got further than the most basic restaurant-speak).

So we wandered through the streets of Garden City, near our hotel, past the British Embassy (which looks like a bunker..), around the antique shops (full of fakes? or real nineteenth century French furniture? or nineeteenth century Egyptian copies of French furniture? or modern Egyptian copies of nineteenth  century French furniture - - - I couldnt honestly tell),and the cake shops (the calories that Islamic culture saves in alcohol, it makes up for in sweeties) until we got to the son's flat on the eighth floor of an old(ish) block downtown.

I am pleased to say that he and his mates have followed local tradition and bought a couple of budgies, at about 3 quid a head (seen in the picture at the top -- and don't worry they do get plenty of time out of their cage, swooping round the flat).