Re-Visiting Egypt
Like many people, I would guess, I grew up with a fascination about ancient Egypt. It probably pulled on my imagination more than any other country in the world. So it was very exciting when my father, a management consultant in Chicago, was put on a project to be in charge of a study of the water and sewage systems in Cairo.
This was in 1978 and I was in my last year of college at the time. I was rather envious that my father, mother, and younger sister got to go live there for the better part of a year and then spend a few months traveling in Europe. My sister Dee Dee was 16 years old at the time and spent her junior year of high school studying at the International school there. Particularly memorable for her was when the Grateful Dead played a concert at the Pyramids just a few weeks after her arrival. She was given a backstage pass to the concert, and she met all of the Dead, Ken Kesey, and other members of their entourage. She will never quite forgive herself for declining an invitation from Jerry Garcia to join the group in riding camels in the desert under the moonlight because she had school the next day.
I graduated from college a few months after my family had settled into Maadi, a suburb of Cairo, and my older sister Patty and I flew over to spend about six weeks living with them and traveling around the coutry. It was a fortuitous time for us to be there for several reasons. Jimmy Carter was working on the peace talks with Anwar Sadat and the attitude towards Americans was very positive. Because of my father working there, my mother teaching at Cairo University and my sister going to school there we had access to many opportunities that we wouldn’t have had on our own. And we were young, naÏve girls who were open to any new experiences, the more exotic the better.
I had already done a lot of traveling around the U.S. and Europe, but this was my first time in a third world country with a very different culture. I experienced culture shock upon finding myself not only in a very different country, but what felt like a completely different time in history. Crazy traffic jams in Cairo consisted not of only cars, but of donkey carts, riders on camels, and women balancing baskets of goods on their heads. Further out in the countryside we saw men plowing the fields with oxen and drawing water for irrigation in ways that could have been done thousands of years ago.
My parents showed us all around the many amazing sights in the Cairo area - the pyramids and Sphinx, the Citadel and the mosques, and my younger sister introduced us to the younger side of life and even shared her Arabic lessons with me each day when she got out of school. I loved going into the chaotic old Khan-al-Khalili bazaar area and using my very rudimentary Arabic skills to bargain for all kinds of handmade crafts.
As a family we took a weeklong trip over the winter break up the Nile (which means to the south) and visited Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, Aswan and Abu Simbel. A few weeks later my sister Patty and I took the train back to Luxor so we could spend some more time in this area that we found so fascinating. We also made a weekend trip to Alexandria and stayed in the beautiful compound of an elderly British woman who had lived there for many years.
I can spend days recounting stories of the many amazing experiences that we had during our weeks in Egypt. Spending a night climbing on the pyramids under the full moon with my sisters, having dinner in a mud hut with a family in Luxor, meeting Dr. Labib Habashi, the dean of Egyptian archaeologists and hearing his stories of how they moved the temple of Abu Simbel when the Aswan dam was built. Most memorable of all was attending the 75th birthday party of a woman named Omm Sety, who believed herself to be the reincarnation of a young girl who was studying to be a priestess at the temple of Isis in Abydos.
We met Omm Sety exactly two weeks after this photo of her was taken. She was a remarkable person who lived a remarkable life. If you are interested in learning more about her I recommend the book ‘The Search for Omm Sety’ by Jonathan Cott.
My time in Egypt was a pivotal experience in my life and I have wanted to make a return trip there ever since. I have been following Nancy Arthur Hoskins’ research and writing about ancient Egyptian textiles for a number of years - she has written a number of in-depth articles about phaoronic textiles in the Complex Weavers Journal over the past several years and has written a book on Egyptian Coptic textiles, among others.
When I saw that Nancy was leading a textile tour to Egypt in March of last year I thought it would be the perfect venue for a return trip there. However, I was already booked to teach a couple workshops during the time of the tour so I had to reluctantly take a pass on that opportunity. But now Nancy is planning on leading one last tour there this coming Sept/October and she has asked me to join the trip with the idea of following in her footsteps.
Nancy’s shoes will be big ones to fill, but I am very excited to be going back to Egypt, and I am enjoying immersing myself this year in reading books about Egypt, watching movies about Egypt and studying up a bit in Arabic. I’ve also scanned a couple carousel’s worth of slides that my parents took during their year there. I know I can’t expect things to be as they were 45 years ago and that there has been much modernization since that time, but some things will not have changed, and hopefully there is still much magic to be experienced.
I had just taken my first weaving class when I visited there in the late 70’s and hadn’t yet learned about the Wissa Wassef school of tapestry weaving, but it will be one of the stops on our tour this fall. Ramses Wissa Wassef was an Egyption architect who began this school in 1952. The tapestries have become quite reknowned over the years as the weaving has become increasingly masterful and the imagery of life in Egypt has become increasingly detailed.
There are high hopes that the new Grand Egyptian Museum, which has been under construction for about fifiteen years now, will be opening in time for our tour in the fall. When I was in Egypt on my previous trip the Tutankhamun exhibit was touring the U.S., so I have missed all the treasures from there in both countries. Just looking at photos of the facade of the museum makes me excited to see this new venue.
If any of you out there are interested in joining us on our tour, the dates are September 26 - October 11 and you can read the itinerary and get all the information about the tour at https://intenttravel.com.au/textiles-of-egypt-in-style-with-nancy-hoskins/. We would love to see you there!
