Letter from Cairo

Text 1

February 4, 2011

by Mike Elkin

"If the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, is safe, Egypt is safe," newly appointed Egyptian Minister of Antiquities Zahi Hawass wrote on his web page Thursday. Yet Egypt is anything but safe and the museum is on the front lines of the ongoing street battle between anti-government demonstrators and those loyal to President Hosni Mubarak.

While the safety of those peaceful protesters I met in Tahrir Square over the past week concerns me, so does the protection of Egypt's archaeological sites. As in any popular revolt, rumors fly faster than rocks and bullets. Local and foreign archaeologists have been calling each other daily and flooding the Internet with whatever bits of information they can come by. Yet, first-hand accounts of whether sites have been looted are hard to find. The official statements from Hawass say that only two heritage sites were damaged: the Cairo Museum and Quntara in Sinai.

"In Quntara, thieves broke into the storage facility, but they later returned 288 statues," Hawass told me over the phone on Thursday. "We think that nothing else is missing." Thieves broke into the Cairo Museum on Friday, January 28, damaging several artifacts—including a wooden statue from King Tut's tomb—and beheading two mummies. Hawass has said everything that was damaged can be restored and that the army and other security forces are protecting the museum. Information about damage to other sites around the country, however, is patchy because many archaeological teams are between digging seasons and only the local inspectors are nearby.

"We've all been talking, mainly finding out who is here, who isn't, who is leaving, and who is staying," said Miriam Seco, director of the excavation of the Temple of Thutmose III in Luxor, on Wednesday in her apartment in Cairo. The tympani-like chants of Mubarak supporters from a nearby square echoed throughout the interview. "I've been in contact with the curators at the Cairo Museum, and many are sleeping there at night. The army is outside, but they are staying there to protect the antiquities. In Luxor, there were warnings on January 29th and 30th about armed looters so all the Egyptian archaeologists, who live on the East Bank, crossed the river to take turns standing guard with sticks and anything else to protect the sites. Thank god there were no such attacks."

Seco said that as of Tuesday, the missions pressing on with work include Chicago House in Medinet Habu—the holy ground where the four primeval gods of Egyptian mythology are believed to be buried—and an excavation in Luxor.* A French team is still working at Karnak (a vast complex of temples devoted mainly to the god Amun) and a Polish team continues excavations at Deir el Bahri (the site of a temple and palace complex built by Hatshepsut in the 15th century B.C.)

What concerns the Egyptologists I spoke to, however, is the funerary site of Saqqara, which suffered a 36-hour gap in security before the army moved in around the site. Hawass insists that no looting took place. Some locks on tombs were broken, but the intruders caused no damage inside nor stole anything. "If anything had happened it would have been a disaster," he said.

Several archaeologists with contacts at Saqqara, who requested anonymity, confirmed this assessment. But they added that storage facilities were robbed, something the Supreme Council of Antiquities has denied. Inspectors, sources said, are evaluating the damage to the site with the army because the looters might be armed. The site is now closed to the public.

I spoke to an archaeologist at the French mission, who works at Saqqara and was in Cairo. "We've heard a lot of conflicting stories and many things on the Internet are wrong," he told me, based on calls to his Egyptian counterparts. "People were saying that my site in south Saqqara was destroyed, but in reality only two tents were damaged. We just have to wait and see, because now we have orders to stay out. On Sunday, looters were shooting at inspectors, who were very brave. Looting in Saqqara is nothing new, but before the army arrived, the site was left unguarded."

Egypt will likely undergo change in the coming months. Politically, the future is anyone's guess. Archaeologically, we will have to wait for the research teams to resume work before we learn about anything definitive about possible damage.

*Correcion: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Miriam Seco is currently excavating at Thutmose III's temple in Luxor. A different excavation at Luxor is taking place now.

© 2011 by the Archaeological Institute of America
www.archaeology.org/news/articles/cairo.html

Text 2

Encyclopedia > Fairy tale A fairy tale or fairy story is a fictional story that may feature folkloric characters (such as fairies, goblins,elves, trolls, witches, giants, and talking animals) andenchantments, often involving a far-fetched sequence of events. In modern-day parlance, the term is also used to describe something blessed with unusual happiness, as in "fairy tale ending" (a happy ending) or "fairy tale romance", though not all fairy tales end happily. Colloquially, a "fairy tale" or "fairy story" can also mean any far-fetched story. In cultures where demons and witches are perceived as real, and the teller and hearer of a tale see it as having historical actuality, fairy tales may merge into legendary narratives. However, unlike legends and epics, they usually do not contain more than superficial references to religion and actual places, persons, and events; they take place "once upon a time" rather than in actual times. The history of the fairy tale is particularly difficult to trace, because only the literary forms can survive. Still, folklorists have found these forms from every culture over many centuries. Thus the oral fairy tale may have existed for at least that long, although not perhaps recognized as a genre. The name "fairy tale" was first ascribed to them by Madame d'Aulnoy. Fairy tales, and works derived from fairy tales, are still written today. The older fairy tales were intended for an audience of adults as well as children, but they were associated with children as early as the writings of the précieuses; the Brothers Grimm titled their collection Children's and Household Tales, and the link with children has only grown stronger with time. Folklorists have classified fairy tales in various ways. Among the most notable are the Aarne-Thompson classification system, and the morphological analysis of Vladimir Propp. Other folklorists have interpreted the tales' significance, but no school has been definitively established for the meaning of the tales. Although the fairy tale is a clearly distinct genre, the definition that marks a work as a fairy tale is a source of considerable dispute. Vladimir Propp, in his Morphology of the Folktale, criticized the common distinction between "fairy tales" and "animal tales" on the grounds that many tales contained both fantastic elements and animals. Nevertheless, to select works for his analysis, Propp used all Russian folktales classified as Aarne-Thompson 300-749—in a cataloguing system that made such a distinction—to gain a clear set of tales. His own analysis identified fairy tales by their plot elements, but that in itself has been criticized, as the analysis does not lend itself easily to tales that do not involve a quest, and furthermore, the same plot elements are found in non-fairy tale works. The Russian tale Tsarevitch Ivan, the Fire Bird and the Gray Wolf features no fairies, but a talking wolf. One universally agreed-on factor is that the nature of a tale does not depend on whether fairies appear in it. Obviously, many people, including Angela Carter in her introduction to the Virago Book of Fairy Tales, have noted that a great many of so-called fairy tales do not feature fairies at all. This is partly because of the history of the English term "fairy tale" which derives from the French phrase conte de fées, and was first used in the collection of Madame D'Aulnoy in 1697. As Stith Thompson and Carter herself point out, talking animals and the presence of magic seem to be more common to the fairy tale than fairies themselves. However, the mere presence of animals that talk does not make a tale a fairy tale, especially when the animal is clearly a mask on a human face, as in fables. In his essay "On Fairy-Stories", J. R. R. Tolkien agreed with the exclusion of "fairies" from the definition, defining fairy tales as stories about the adventures of men in Faërie, the land of fairies, fairytale princesses, dwarves, elves, and not only other magical species but many other marvels. However, the same essay excludes tales that are often considered fairy tales, citing as an example The Monkey's Heart, which Andrew Langin cluded in The Lilac Fairy Book. Other tales that include no magic but are often classified as fairy tales include What Is the Fastest Thing in the World? and Catskin. Some folklorists prefer to use the German term Märchen to refer to the genre, a practice given weight by the definition of Thompson in his 1977 edition of The Folktale: "a tale of some length involving a succession of motifs or episodes. It moves in an unreal world without definite locality or definite creatures and is filled with the marvelous. In this never-never land, humble heroes kill adversaries, succeed to kingdoms and marry princesses." The characters and motifs of fairy tales are simple and archetypal: princesses and goose-girls; youngest sons and gallant princes;ogres, giants, dragons, and trolls; wicked stepmothers and false heroes; fairy godmothers and other magical helpers, often talking horses, or foxes, or birds; glass mountains; and prohibitions and breaking of prohibitions. Italo Calvino cited the fairy tale as a prime example of "quickness" in literature, because of the economy and concision of the tales.

Text 3

Поиск по сайту: