Contesting Antiquity in Egypt by Donald Malcolm Reid

Author:Donald Malcolm Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Published: 2015-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

56 Indian Summer of Classicism: The Alexandria Municipal Stadium and an ancient Roman statue personifying the Nile. The stadium hosted the First Mediterranean Games in 1951. Its classical portico featured Olympic-style athletes and was shown on a stamp commemorating these Games. An ancient Roman statue (now in the Vatican Museum) representing the fecund Nile as a human male was featured on a commemorative stamp set in 1949 and on the reverse of the five-pound banknote of 1946 and 1952. Stadium photo by D. Reid. Stamps and banknote from collection of D. Reid.

Indian Summer: Classics, Europeans, and Postwar Alexandria

The Société royale d’archéologie d’Alexandrie flourished for several years after 1945, moving to premises behind the Greco–Roman Museum and boasting 248 members in 1949.161 The Société conserved the Temple of Abusir; Kamal al-Mallakh, soon to discover Cheops’s boat at Giza, supervised the work.162 Judge Brinton was still president, and Alan Wace and Étienne Combe, who lectured at the university on Islamic history and Arabic epigraphy after retiring from the Municipal Library, provided scholarly input.163 Having a university in the city brought energetic new members onto the board: Abd al-Munim Abu Bakr (Egyptology), Aziz Atiya (medieval history), Zaki Ali (Greco–Roman history), and Rector Mustafa Amer.164

In a flourish of midcentury Mediterranean classicism, Egyptian postage stamps depicted the Vatican museum’s statue of a reclining male figure of the Nile from the temple of Serapis and Isis in Rome (see fig. 56).165 Three years earlier, in 1946, a £E5 banknote had shown the Vatican’s Nile statue on its reverse, balancing it off with the portrait of King Faruq and the Citadel’s Muhammad Ali Mosque on the front side. Another stamp set celebrated Alexandria as the site of the first Mediterranean Games in 1951; it showed a Roman triumphal arch—the entrance to the Alexandria Municipal Stadium which hosted the Games—and the seal of Alexandria, with the Pharos Lighthouse and a seaborne goddess.166 In a final flurry of classicism before the tide went out, in 1952 Muhammad Nagi completed his aforementioned painting which had been commissioned for the city hall.

The immediate postwar years were difficult for the Greco–Roman Museum, however. It reopened in March 1945,167 but then was long closed with a damaged roof. Curator Alan Rowe requested a transfer in order to excavate Cyrene, Libya. The Embassy begged him to “stay on at Alexandria since his successor would certainly not be British and probably not even a foreigner (so that Monsieur Drioton would regret Mr. Rowe’s departure as much as we).”168 In 1949, however, he left for the University of Manchester, which undertook to sponsor his excavation of Cyrene. Achille Adriani then made a remarkable comeback. Freed from internment in 1944, he had taught at the University of Palermo and inspected antiquities in Rome. After Rowe left, he leapt at the chance to resume direction of the Greco–Roman Museum, and in 1950 he reopened it to the public.

Time was running out, however, on the colonial and semicolonial “liberal age” during which classical discourse had so flourished.169 In 1947,

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