In an Antique Land Read Online Free Page A

millennium, and most of the cultures and civilizations with which it has old connections have accepted its own self-definition. The languages of India, for example, know Masr by variations of its Arabic name: ‘Mishor’ in Bengali, ‘Misar’ in Hindi and Urdu. Only Europe has always insisted on knowing the country not on its own terms, but as a dark mirror for itself. ‘Egyptian darkness,’ says the Oxford English Dictionary, quoting the Bible, ‘intense darkness (see Exodus x.22).’ Or ‘Egyptian days: the two days in each month which were believed to be unlucky’; and: ‘Egyptian bondage: bondage like that of the Israelites in Egypt.’
    Like English, every major European language derives its name for Egypt from the Greek Ægyptos, a term that is related to the word ‘Copt’, the name generally used for Egypt’s indigenous Christians. Thus German has its Ägypten, Dutch Egypte, Polish and Estonian Egipt: old resonant words, with connotations andhistories far in excess of those that usually attach to the names of countries. A seventeenth-century English law, for example, states: ‘If any transport into England or Wales, any lewd people calling themselves Egyptians, they forfeit 40 £’—a reminder that words like ‘gypsy and ‘gitano’ derived from ‘Egyptian’.
    Europe’s apparently innocent ‘Egypt’ is therefore as much a metaphor as ‘Masr’, but a less benign one, almost as much a weapon as a word. Egypt’s own metaphor for itself, on the other hand, renders the city indistinguishable from the country; a usage that brims with pleasing and unexpected symmetries.
    Like Egypt, Cairo dwindles into a thin ribbon of settlements at its southern extremity; towards the north it gradually broadens, like the country itself, into a wide, densely populated funnel. To the south lies Upper Egypt, the, a long thin carpet of green that flanks the Nile on both sides; to the north is the triangle created by the river, as perfect as any in Nature, the Delta. Egypt’s metaphor, Egypt itself, sits in between like a hinge, straddling the imaginary line that since the beginning of human history has divided the country into two parts, each distinct and at the same time perfectly complementary.
    To most Egyptians outside Cairo, their metaphor stands for the entire city: the whole of it is known as Masr—the city’s formal name al-Qâhira is infrequently used. But Cairo, like Delhi or Rome, is actually not so much a single city as an archipelago of townships, founded on neighbouring sites, by various different dynasties and rulers.
    When the people of Cairo speak of Masr, they often have a particular district of the city in mind. It lies towards the south, and it goes by several names. Sometimes it is spoken of as Old Cairo, Masr al-Qadîma or Mar al-‘Atîqa, sometimes as Mari Gargis, but most often as FusâMar, or simply Fusâ. On amap, the quarter seems very small, far too small to be so rich in names. But in fact, small as it is, the area is not a single island within Cairo, but rather a second archipelago within the first.
    It was a small enclave within this formation that eventually became home to Abraham Ben Yiju, the master of the Slave of MS H.6: a Roman fortress called Babylon.The fort was built by the emperor Trajan in 130 AD , on the site of an even earlier structure, and the Romans are said to have called it Babylon of Egypt, to distinguish it from the Mesopotamian Babylon. The name may have come from the Arabic Bâb il-On, ‘The Gate of On’, after the ancient sanctuary of the Sun God at Heliopolis, but there are many contending theories and no one knows for sure. The fort has had other names, most notably Qar al-Shama‘, Fortress of the Lamp, but it is Babylon that has served it longest.
    The entrance to Babylon was once guarded by two massive, heavily buttressed towers: one