My journey to Egypt began over a decade ago when I laid hands on Amitav Ghosh's 'In an Antique Land'. I was a masters student of architecture in France, working in Western Africa, struggling and enthralled at the same time with diverse cultures and geographies. Ghosh's expansive tale starts from a little note he finds in an ancient library that suggests to him the journey of an individual from the Malabar coast to Europe via Egypt. Ghosh writes about ancient trade routes and present-day settings, that of a doctoral student studying an ancient form of Arabic under a scholar in rural Alexandria, and the Kuwait war forcing Egyptians to return home, painting Egypt as a civilisation both frozen in time as well as grappling with contemporary realities.
International
Exploring The Ancient Wonders Of Egypt
An exhausting but richly rewarding tour of one of the cradles of human civilisation