The Enigma of Tantura B: Historical Documentation and the Lack of Circumstantial Documentary Evidence

Tantura B is by far the first early Islamic shipwreck to be discovered off the Palestinian coast. Scientific evidence indicates that this vessel sank some time between the mid-8th and the mid-9th centuries. Neither archaeological remains nor historical sources can ascertain its exact function and origin due to the lack of circumstantial documentary evidence. However, it has been argued that the vessel could be either a coaster, capable of entering rivers or estuaries, or a support vessel operating in the Arab fleet, i.e. , it may have had been used for either military or civil purposes, or both.
© 2005 The Nautical Archaeology Society     

中美关系史上一件"谜案"的历史考察 --"罗斯福下令史迪威除掉蒋介石之说"辨析

近年来,开罗会议期间罗斯福指令史迪威清除蒋介石的说法出现于国内许多论著中.本文从罗斯福对华政策、开罗会议期间罗斯福与蒋介石关系、美在华中国通对蒋介石的态度等方面对这一说法进行了辨析,指出开罗会议期间罗斯福指令史迪威干掉蒋介石的说法纯属子虚乌有.     

The politics of area conservation in Cairo

The historic core of the Arab‐Islamic city has always played an integral role in the formation of the identity of the contemporary Arab city. It serves as the reference for the city’s character. This is especially so in Cairo, where historic quarters still act as the city’s most influential social and cultural source of inspiration. Today, many forces of neglect and deterioration have diminished this role. While attempts have been launched to confront this situation, they have focused mainly on restoring the historic city of Cairo, itself a World Heritage Site. This paper probes the actual reasons for the deterioration of the historic core of Cairo, as well as those that dominate the current efforts for revitalisation. In these processes it is the political dimension that is the most influential in the decision‐making affecting the proposed urban changes in historic Cairo.1 The present inquiry was supported by a workshop organised by the author to examine the attitude of the professionals representing different organisations involved in conservation in historic Cairo. This workshop was held on 12 and 13 September 2001 at the Italian Archaeological Centre in Cairo as part of the empirical work of the author’s PhD research.      

The Battle of the Camel: Revolution,transition and tourism in Cairo

This article asks how the 25 January 2011 revolution in Egypt led to the entrenchment of existing forms of privilege and marginality. To answer this question, critical scholars have taken for granted the revolution's linear temporality and focused largely on institutional processes at the state level following the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. In contrast, I provide an original take on this question through extensive ethnographic engagement, focusing on moments of rupture and urban spaces of contestation at the time of the revolution and beyond. More specifically, I trace the significance of an understudied moment during the revolution: the ‘Battle of the Camel’, when horse/camel drivers who sell rides to tourists at the Pyramids charged at protestors in Tahrir Square. An ethnography of this moment allows me to draw out the complex temporalities of the revolution by recognizing diverse moments of contestation by marginalized subjects at its different ‘stages’. This article traces how these alternative temporalities were driven but also obscured by longer-term patterns of tourism and urban development. It finds that relations of power and marginality were reproduced through tourism and elite Egyptian visions of temporality and authenticity in the key urban spaces relevant to this battle – the Pyramids of Giza and Tahrir Square. These sites were positioned as spaces of Egypt's ‘authentic’ past and future respectively, reinforcing a colonial and neoliberal narrative of development that made possible the protection of tourism and elite priorities and the remarginalization of ‘underdeveloped’ camel drivers and street vendors in these sites.     

Gender, Public Space and Social Segregation in Cairo: Of Taxi Drivers, Prostitutes and Professional Women

Abstract:  Cairo's cityscape has transformed rapidly as a result of the neoliberal policies that Egypt adopted in the early 1990s. This article examines the spatial negotiations of class in liberalizing Cairo. While much scholarly attention has been devoted to the impact of neoliberal policies on global cities of the South, few studies have adopted an ethnographic focus to examine the everyday negotiations of such transformations. I examine the ways young female upper-middle-class professionals navigate Cairo's public spaces, both the safe spaces of the upscale coffee shops and the open spaces of the streets. Their urban trajectories can be read as the footsteps of the social segregation that has increasingly come to mark Cairo's cityscape. I conclude that the bodies of upper-middle-class women have become a battleground for new class configurations and contestations, literally embodying both power and fragility of Cairo's upper-middle class in Egypt's new liberal age.     

A cargo of lead ingots from a shipwreck off Ashkelon,Israel 11th–13th centuries AD

Shipwreck cargo of lead ingots, some marked, discovered off Tel Ashkelon, weighed about four tonnes. C14 analysis of charred wood from an ingot dated it to the 11th–13th centuries AD, Crusader times. Lead isotopic ratios provenanced the ingots to Mont‐Lozère, France. Various aspects of the lead trade are discussed, including: lead sources, extraction, casting, lead in the international maritime trade, weight units in medieval trade, prices, transportation, sale and storage, lead cargo and ballast, reconstruction of the wrecking event, salvage after the vessel was wrecked, Ashkelon as a trading coastal town in the 11th–13th centuries AD, and the possible destination of the cargo.     

Between books and politics: Cairo International Book Fair as a field configuring event

This article analyses the Cairo International Book Fair as a “field configuring event” (FCE), namely, as a recurrent mass event that both reflects the social fields surrounding it and contributes to the shaping of these fields. More specifically, it is argued that the Cairo International Book Fair constitutes a major FCE in Egyptian society, which plays a significant role, not only in the publishing field and in the cultural and economic fields at large, but also in the political field. Focusing on the political field, the article traces how the Cairo International Book Fair in recent decades both reflected key struggles and developments in the Egyptian political field and affected these struggles. In the 1980s, the fair served as a platform for voicing and negotiating various positions toward Egypt’s relations with Israel; in the 1990s, it served as a platform for negotiating the relations between Islamists and Liberals; and in the 2000s, it served as a platform for negotiating the “permitted” level of criticism toward Mubarak’s regime. The article thus shows that the Cairo International Book Fair constitutes a useful prism for examining developments in the Egyptian political field over the years.     

The Aramaic Levi—Comparing the Qumran fragments with the Genizah text

ABSTRACT

Among the extra-biblical texts from Qumran we find the so-called Aramaic Levi, which can be described as a somewhat different variant of the “Testament of Levi,” a part of the larger Greek text “The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs.”

Aramaic Levi, however, was already known from the Cairo Genizah. The following article is a linguistic comparison between the Qumran text and the version from the Cairo Genizah.

As Klaus Beyer has noticed, there are a lot of non-Hasmonean spellings and words in the Genizah text, but most of Beyer’s examples are from parts of the text that are not preserved in the Qumran fragments. Comparing the two versions, we now note that the deviations are of two kinds. As expected, the Genizah text often follows a later language than Qumran. This applies in particular to orthographic features and the use of status emphaticuswithout the definite sense. But in other places the Genizah text represents a language older than Hasmonean Aramaic, which we interpret as an adaptation to Bibli-cal Aramaic and sometimes to Hebrew.     

Urban spatial politics and collective action in revolutionary Cairo: Counter spaces and paradoxes of mobilisation

This article centres the role of Cairo's popular forces in the 2011 revolutionary Uprising in Egypt. It does so by bringing to focus the relationship between these forces' everyday spatial practices and forms of contention, on one hand, and revolutionary activism and protests in central places like Tahrir Square, on the other. It demonstrates that everyday life in popular neighbourhoods of Cairo is constitutive of a political domain in which ordinary citizens cultivate resources, dispositions and capacities for collective action and mobilisation of the kind witnessed in the January Uprising. It also shows how the lived experiences of ordinary citizens in the city's popular neighbourhoods are formative of the oppositional subjectivities enacted in the context of this revolutionary mobilisation.The article identifies and illuminates two primary paradoxes of revolutionary mobilisation. The two paradoxes arise out of a disjuncture between modalities of action pursued by Tahrir-oriented revolutionary activists (al-thuwwar) on one hand, and popular forces' tactics, strategies and conception of the Revolution, on the other. Tracing the engagement of popular forces in the context of the Uprising, this contribution reveals that in enacting their oppositional subjectivities popular forces articulated their own conception of the Revolution. More specifically, the article expounds on how they did so by shifting the locale of revolutionary action from Tahrir Square to Cairo's streets and popular neighbourhoods, and by widening acts of urban insurgency to advance rights claims to the city.     

Conserving by aesthetics,conserving by development: the rescaling and worlding of global south heritage

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the genealogy of rescaling the cultural armature of heritage in the Global South rooted within the colonial culture and postcolonial aid programs. Taking the case of historic Cairo, it explores how policies have developed through experimental practices of conservation to scale up authority, control, and power over residents and neighborhoods from the 19^th century to the present. The paper theorizes two paradigmatic approaches of conservation practices – by aesthetics and development – which have expanded Cairo’s inventory of monuments. The infatuation of heritage experts (the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l’Art Arabe and Aga Khan Trust for Culture) with old neighborhoods has fostered accumulation by dispossession, disrupting people’s environments to generate a worlding image of heritage. The paper concludes with the metaphor of conservation practices as re-construction sites, as they repurpose the relationships between heritage, people, and their means of governmentality.