Egypt

Egypt's Coptic Museum

Al Masry Al Youm

One that I would really love to visit!

The Coptic Museum in Cairo has more to offer its visitors than is generally thought. Still, only a small group of Egyptian school children and Coptic families, who visit the museum after church service, get to realize that the Coptic period is not only about Coptic Christian theology and art. The museum’s collection--the most comprehensive collection of Coptic artifacts in the world--records around eight centuries of Egypt’s diverse social, cultural, economic, religious and political life in the first millennium. Alongside icons of the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ and monks, crosses constructed in stone reliefs and biblical manuscripts, are representations of Greek mythology, Roman iconography and Coptic styles that are very connected to Islamic art.

As soon as visitors pass the Gallery of the Masterpieces, they are met with a pilaster (a flat column) of a scene from a Greek myth in which Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, is portrayed along with Heracles, the Greek divine hero, dressed up in his wife’s robes. The inclusion of pagan art might surprise visitors who are familiar with the words Copt or Coptic pertaining only to the Christian faction that follows the Egyptian Orthodox Church. In reality, the history of Coptic art is much more inclusive.

The Coptic Museum is located in historic Old Cairo next to the Roman Fortress of Babylon and surrounded by Cairo’s oldest churches.

- Exhibition: Coptic Art Revealed
Al Ahram Weekly (Nevine El-Aref) The first ever locally curated exhibition on Coptic art was unveiled to the public yesterday, when the open courtyard of the Amir Taz palace in the district of Al-Khalifa hosted dozens of Islamic and Coptic religious leaders,...

- Will The Coptic Language Rise Again?
RantRave Some people agonise over endangered species. My pet cause is endangered languages. When I hear that a dialect is dying out or that young people aren’t passing on an obscure language, it saddens me. It is one thing to examine shards of pottery...

- Revisiting Coptic Cairo
Egyptian Gazette (Navigate to Tourism section to find the story, which will expire in the next few days) Old Cairo (Masr al-Qadima in Arabic) describes the area that grew up around the Roman fortress of Babylon, built in the time of Augustus after his...

- Interview With Dr. Gawdat Gabra
http://www.ambilacuk.com/coptic/index.html Thanks to Howard Middleton-Jones for sending me the link to his interview with the Coptologist Dr. Gawdat Gabra in Munster Germany, posted on the Coptic Research site. Please click on the photograph on the above...

- Coptic Language's Last Survivors
Daily Star As usual with the Daily Star, if you are using Firefox as a browser I recommend that you switch briefly to Explorer instead. Considered an extinct language, the Coptic language is believed to exist only in the liturgical language of the Coptic...

Egypt