Issue No. 593
Opinion
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4 - 10 July 2002 Issue No. 593 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Monuments of life
I don't know why most of us see our ancient monuments as something irredeemably divorced from our present-day lives. It is sometimes as if people feel they belonged to beings from some other planet, that they were constructed by an alien species. Monuments are far from irrelevant. If you look at our lives, the conventions and traditions that we follow as Egyptians, you realise how little we have actually changed. Even certain aspects of our religious life -- they are not practiced in other Muslim societies and betray close links with ancient Egyptian religion.
Who is responsible for the current view of ancient Egypt? It is likely that the way in which we are introduced to our monuments at school, when we are children, carries much of the blame, instilling the notion that such relics are unreal and removed objects of fascination with which no real contact can be made. They are beyond our capacity to feel or to understand. Even school tours of the monuments and associated sites are treated as tourist affairs, conditioned by the thought that such a world no longer exists and bears no relationship to our own. My own early visits to ancient Egyptian and Coptic monuments, more often than not in the company of my mother, by contrast, felt just like our visits to Muslim shrines. That is why I have always felt that such monuments are an integral part of even the most contemporary of lives. Their resonance has carried down the ages, and can speak to us today with a relevance they never abdicated.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy
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