Books published by The American University in Cairo Press

A collection of fourteen connected stories and a novella, that takes us deep into Upper Egypt and the village of Dayrut al-Sharif. To depict a world renowned for its poverty, ignorance, vendettas, and implacable code of honor, it deploys the black humor and Swiftian sarcasm of the insider who knows his society only too well.

Traditionally, Egyptian cooking has been best practiced and enjoyed at home, where generations of unrecorded family recipes have been the sustaining repertoire for daily meals as well as sumptuous holiday feasts. Abou El Sid, one of Cairo's most famous restaurants, is well known for its authentic Egyptian dishes, now presents over 50 recipes in a cookbook for the enjoyment of cooks all over the world.- 56 authentic Egyptian recipes from starters to main courses to desserts.- Each recipe illustrated with full color photographs.- Full spread for each recipe so you don't have to flip the page.

Showcases the experiences of ten entrepreneurial ventures from emerging markets in the Arab world. This book offers an insight on a variety of localized strategic, managerial, marketing, and innovative approaches and practices, which create challenges and opportunities in a region undergoing rapid political, social, and economic transformations.

A Book Riot 100 Must-Read Book on Ancient HistoryDeath, burial, and the afterlife were as important to the ancient Egyptians as how they lived. This well-illustrated book explores all aspects of death in ancient Egypt, including beliefs of the afterlife, mummification, the protection of the body, tombs and their construction and decoration, funerary goods, and the funeral itself. It also addresses the relationship between the living and the dead, and the magico-religious interaction of these two in ancient Egyptian culture.Salima Ikram's own experience with experimental mummification and funerary archaeology lends the book many completely original and provocative insights.

No matter where we come from, we all have our unique local expressions and proverbs that raise confused eyebrows when translated literally. These phrases usually carry humor and wisdom at their core, but are only fully understood in their native language. A Roving Eye explores some of these phrases and sayings from one of the world's most expressive tongues, Egyptian Arabic. Including some one hundred popular phrases and proverbs, all linked to parts of the body and features of the face, A Roving Eye uses striking black-and-white photography to bring these expressions to life.

Ibn Tulun (835-84), the son of a Turkic slave, became the founder of the first independent state in Egypt since antiquity, and builder of Egypt's short-lived third capital of the Islamic era, al-Qata'i' and its great congregational mosque. After recounting the story of Ibn Tulun and his successors, architectural historian Tarek Swelim presents a topographic survey of al-Qata'i', a city lost since its complete destruction in 905. He then provides a detailed architectural analysis of the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, which was spared the destruction and is now the oldest surviving mosque in Egypt and Africa.

Siwa is a remote oasis deep in the heart of the Egyptian desert near the border with Libya. Until an asphalt road was built to the Mediterranean coast in the 1980s, its only links to the outside world were by arduous camel tracks. As a result of this isolation, Siwa developed a unique culture manifested in its crafts of basketry, pottery, and embroidery and in its styles of costume and silverwork. The most visible and celebrated example of this was the silver jewelery that was worn by women in abundance at weddings and other ceremonies. Based on conversations with women and men in the oasis and with reference to old texts, this book describes the jewelery and costume at this highpoint of Siwan culture against the backdrop of its date gardens and springs, social life, and dramatic history. It places the women's jewelery, costume, and embroidery into social perspective, and describes how they were used in ceremonies and everyday life and how they were related to their beliefs and attitudes to the world. The book also describes how, in the second half of the twentieth century, the arrival of the road and of television brought drastic change, and the oasis was exposed to the styles and fashions of the outside world and how the traditional silver ornaments were gradually replaced by gold.

Cats were just as favored in ancient Egypt as they are today. Egyptian paintings of domesticated cats date back 3,600 years, and animal cults included worship to the cat goddess Bastet. This AUC Press Nature Foldout explores wild and domestic cats of Egypt.- Each species described and illustrated, alongside examples of their natural prey in the wild- Map of Egypt describing the various habitats of wild cats, as well as locations of ancient Egyptian sites where the cat was worshiped and mummified- Noted appearances of felines in hieroglyphs and reliefs- Conservation efforts for threatened cat species

The Holy Land-the birthplace of great religions-is also an environment of unique flora and fauna. Encompassing a vast, ancient region-lying between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, from Syria in the north down to Egypt in the south-the Holy Land has been home to an array of wildlife, some of which remain today, others of which have vanished for all time. The sacred stories of Noah's Ark filled with such animals, and the Garden of Eden exemplified the diversity and cohabitation of the natural world.This AUC Press Nature Foldout explores some of the most beloved wildlife revered as sacred and special in the Holy Land, past and present.

With its emphasis on the primacy of change, this study arrives at a particularly auspicious moment, as the Middle East continues to be convulsed by the greatest upheavals in generations, which have come to be known as the Arab Spring. Originally prepared as the tenth-anniversary volume of the UNDP's Arab Human Development Report, Arab Human Development in the Twenty-first Century places empowerment at the center of human development in the Arab world, viewing it not only from the vantage point of a more equitable distribution of economic resources but also of fundamental legal, educational, and political reform.

Egypt is primarily a land of deserts and mountains, the habitable Nile Valley and Delta occupying less than 5 percent of the country. Although the ancient Egyptians lived on only a small fraction of the land, they made extensive use of resources from the less hospitable areas, exploiting the opportunities and adjusting to the constraints of their physical environment. This updated and expanded edition of The Geology of Egypt: A Traveler's Handbook describes these features and more, providing a guide for the visitor to Egypt interested in learning about its history from a different perspective.The author presumes no background in geology or related fields and provides an introduction to the relevant geological concepts, presenting examples to illustrate how the country's geological features influenced Egyptian civilization.The text is organized as a trip on the Nile from Lake Nasser downstream to the Delta, with chapters devoted to such popular sites as Aswan, Luxor, and Giza. Also covered are the Eastern and Western Deserts, as well as the Sinai Peninsula. Maps, illustrations, fifty color photographs, and an extensive glossary help make a complex but intriguing subject accessible to everyone.

In the pages of An Alexandrian Anthology, we follow the delight of travelers discovering the strangeness of the city and its variety and pleasures, its beaches and gardens, its elegant villas, duck shoots in the marshes, desert expeditions to ancient monasteries and vanished vineyards. Most of all they are haunted by the city's resplendent past-the famous Library, the temple built by Cleopatra for Antony, the great Pharos lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world, of which only traces remain-we follow our travelers here too as they voyage through an immense ghost city of the imagination.

In 1862, the Prince of Wales, eldest son of Britain's Queen Victoria, embarked on a grand tour of the Middle East, for his education and enlightenment. Accompanying the royal party was Francis Bedford, an accomplished practitioner of the still young art of photography, charged with taking views of the cities and historic places visited on the tour for the royal album. The result is an extraordinary collection of some of the best early photographs of Cairo and the temples of Upper Egypt, Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Lebanon and Damascus, Izmir and Constantinople.

The Treaty of Ghent signed in 1814, ending the War of 1812, allowed Americans once again to travel abroad. Medical students went to Paris, artists to Rome, academics to Gottingen, and tourists to all European capitals. More intrepid Americans ventured to Athens, to Constantinople, and even to Egypt. Beginning with two eighteenth-century travelers, this book then turns to the 25-year period after 1815 that saw young men from East Coast cities, among them graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, traveling to the lands of the Bible and of the Greek and Latin authors they had first known as teenagers. Naval officers off ships of the Mediterranean squadron visited Cairo to see the pyramids. Two groups went on business, one importing steam-powered rice and cotton mills from New York, the other exporting giraffes from the Kalahari Desert for wild animal shows in New York. Drawing on unpublished letters and diaries together with previously neglected newspaper accounts, as well as a handful of published accounts, this book offers a new look at the early American experience in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean world. More than thirty illustrations complement the stories told by the travelers themselves.

In eighteenth-century Palestine, on the shores of Galilee's Lake Tiberias, visionary political and military leader Daher al-Umar al-Zaydani undertakes a journey toward the greatest aim anyone could hope to achieve in his day: the establishment of an autonomous Arab state. To do so he must challenge the rule of the greatest power in the world at the time-the Ottoman Empire-while translating the ideals of human dignity, justice, and religious tolerance into concrete daily realities.

Based on the Hamilton A.R. Gibb Lectures given by Nelly Hanna at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University, this groundbreaking book will be of interest to all those looking for a different perspective on the history of south-north relations. Aiming to place Egypt clearly in the context of some of the major worldwide transformations of the three centuries from 1500 to 1800, Professor Hanna questions the mainstream view that has identified the main sources of modern world history as the Reformation, the expansion of Europe into America and Asia, the formation of trading companies, and scientific discoveries. She adds to the debate by showing that there were worldwide trends that touched Egypt, India, southeast Asia, and Europe: in all these areas, for example, there were linguistic shifts that brought the written language closer to the spoken word. She also demonstrates that technology and know-how, far from being centered only in Europe, flowed in different directions: for instance, in the eighteenth century, French entrepreneurs were trying to imitate the techniques of bleaching and dyeing of cloth that they found in Egypt and other Ottoman localities.

Christianity and monasticism have long flourished along the Nile in Middle Egypt, the region stretching from al-Bahnasa (Oxyrhynchus) to Dayr al-Ganadla. The contributors to this volume, international specialists in Coptology from around the world, examine various aspects of Coptic civilization in Middle Egypt over the past two millennia. The studies explore Coptic art and archaeology, architecture, language, and literature. The artistic heritage of monastic sites in the region is highlighted, attesting to their important legacies.

Back in the dog days of the early twenty-first century a pair of lovebirds fleeing a murder charge in Cairo pull in to Alexandria's main train station. Fugitives, friendless, their young lives blighted at the root, Ali and Injy set about rebuilding, and from the coastal city's arid soil forge a legend, a kingdom of crime, a revolution: Karantina. Through three generations of Grand Guignol insanity, Nael Eltoukhy's sly psychopomp of a narrator is our guide not only to the teeming cast of pimps, dealers, psychotics, and half-wits and the increasingly baroque chronicles of their exploits, but also to the moral of his tale. Defiant, revolutionary, and patriotic, are the rapists and thieves of Alexandria's crime families deluded maniacs or is their myth of Karantina-their Alexandria reimagined as the once and future capital-what they believe it to be: the revolutionary dream made brick and mortar, flesh and bone?Subversive and hilarious, deft and scalpel-sharp, Eltoukhy's sprawling epic is a masterpiece of modern Egyptian literature. Mahfouz shaken by the tail, a lunatic dream, a future history that is the sanest thing yet written on Egypt's current woes.

Sinai's allure is legendary. Its spectacular landscapes, thriving flora and fauna, and unique history, the store of centuries, have long held sway in the imagination of millions. The high mountains and wadis of the peninsula's south provide the fertile soil that feeds some of Egypt's highest diversity of plants, while foxes, vipers, lizards, and tortoises are just some of the animals that make their home in the north, which is characterized by lagoons and vast dunes of soft sand. Sinai: Landscape and Nature in Egypt's Wilderness transports us to the haunting grandeur of this peninsula with 150 breathtaking full-color photographs.

A journey of self-discovery between Cairo and Dublin

This new series of three books aims to develop the writing skills of students learning Modern Standard Arabic, enabling them to move from forming correct words, phrases, sentences, and simple texts, to writing simple paragraphs and ultimately producing texts with the competency of a native speaker. The Intermediate level volume introduces students to authentic Arabic writing styles; strengthens and enhances their grammar; includes more sophisticated key words, collocations, expressions, and idioms; reinforces linguistic accuracy; and trains them to use handwriting script.

Most scholarship has attributed Sudanese independence in 1956 to British dominance of the Condominium, historical animosity toward Egypt, or the emergence of Sudanese nationalism. Dividing the Nile counters that Egyptian entrepreneurs failed to develop a united economy or shared economic interests, guaranteeing Egypt's 'loss' of the Sudan. It argues that British dominance of the Condominium may have stymied initial Egyptian efforts, but that after the First World War Egypt became increasingly interested in and capable of economic ventures in the Sudan. However, early Egyptian financial assistance and the seemingly successful resolution of Nile waters disputes actually divided the regions, while later concerted efforts to promote commerce and acquire Sudanese lands failed dismally. Egyptian nationalists simply missed opportunities of aligning their economic future with that of their Sudanese brethren, resulting in a divided Nile valley. Dividing the Nile will appeal to historians, social scientists, and international relations theorists, among those interested in Nile valley developments, but its focused economic analysis will also contribute to broader scholarship on nationalism and nationalist theory.

For the first time, a single volume provides a comprehensive cultural history of the Copts and their achievements. It introduces the general reader and the interested non-specialist to Coptic culture in all its variety and multi-faceted richness. With contributions by twenty scholars.