Category: Africa

Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa: Alexandria’s Greco-Roman World

The façade of the principal tomb, where Egyptian funerary form meets Greek architectural detailing carved nearly two thousand years ago. In September 1900, on the western edge of Alexandria, a donkey pulling a cart broke through the ground and dropped into a shaft that Roman-era stonemasons had cut some 1,800 years before. What lay beneath […]

Wadi el-Seboua: The Valley of the Lions on Egypt’s Lake Nasser

Wadi el-Seboua: The Valley of the Lions on Egypt’s Lake Nasser Wadi el-Seboua’s relocated temple complex on the shore of Lake Nasser. Most visitors to Egypt’s ancient temples arrive by road. Reaching Wadi el-Seboua means boarding a boat instead, since its sandstone halls sit on the remote western shore of Lake Nasser, well south of […]

Lake Nasser Cruise: Egypt’s Remote Nubian Temples and History

Lake Nasser Cruise: Egypt’s Remote Nubian Temples and History A Lake Nasser cruise vessel crossing open water, with the desert headlands of Nubia rising on either side. Most travellers who cruise Egypt never see this stretch of the country. Once the boat leaves Aswan behind and the Nile widens into the still, blue expanse of […]

Bibliotheca Alexandrina: Rebuilding Egypt’s Ancient Library

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s tilted, discus-shaped roof rises above Alexandria’s eastern harbour. The original Library of Alexandria has been gone for so long, and so completely, that no one can say with certainty when it actually disappeared. What survives instead is an idea: that a single institution once tried to gather all the world’s written knowledge […]

Abu Simbel: Ramses II’s Temples and Egypt’s UNESCO Rescue

Abu Simbel: Ramses II’s Temples and Egypt’s UNESCO Rescue Twice a year, at dawn on 22 February and 22 October, sunlight travels sixty metres into the rock-cut sanctuary of the Great Temple at Abu Simbel and strikes the seated figures of three gods, while the fourth, Ptah, a god connected with the underworld, stays deliberately […]

Kom Ombo Temple: Why Egypt’s Double Temple Honours Two Gods

Kom Ombo Temple: Why Egypt’s Double Temple Honours Two Gods Most Egyptian temples were built for one god and one purpose. Kom Ombo, rising on a bend of the Nile between Edfu and Aswan, was built for two. Its architects mirrored every hall, every sanctuary and every doorway down the temple’s central axis, so that […]

Dendera Temple: Hathor’s Sanctuary and Egypt’s Famous Zodiac

Dendera Temple: Hathor’s Sanctuary and Egypt’s Famous Zodiac Few temples in Egypt reward a slow look the way Dendera does. Roughly an hour north of Luxor, on the west bank of the Nile, the Temple of Hathor rises almost intact from the desert floor, its facade held up by six massive columns carved into the […]

The Unfinished Obelisk of Aswan: Egypt’s Ancient Granite Quarry

The Unfinished Obelisk of Aswan: Egypt’s Ancient Granite Quarry On the east bank of the Nile at Aswan lies a slab of pink granite more than three thousand years old, still fused to the bedrock it was cut from. Had it been freed and raised, the unfinished obelisk of Aswan would have stood taller than […]

Edfu Temple: Horus, Myth and Egypt’s Best-Preserved Ptolemaic Temple

Edfu Temple: Horus, Myth and Egypt’s Best-Preserved Ptolemaic Temple For well over a thousand years, Edfu Temple lay buried under drifting Nile sand, its roofline barely visible above the mudbrick village that grew up around it. That accident of neglect is precisely why it survives today as the most completely preserved cult temple in Egypt, […]

Temple of Hatshepsut: Egypt’s Grandest Monument to a Female Pharaoh

Temple of Hatshepsut: Egypt’s Grandest Monument to a Female Pharaoh Rising in three broad limestone terraces against the cliffs of western Thebes, the Temple of Hatshepsut is unlike anything else the ancient Egyptians built. Its architect, a court official named Senenmut, faced an unprecedented problem: how do you build a monument for a female pharaoh […]

Egypt Itinerary for Mature Travellers: Cairo to Lake Nasser

Egypt Itinerary for Mature Travellers: Cairo to Lake Nasser An Egypt itinerary that does the country justice needs room to breathe. Cairo alone holds enough history to fill a week, and that is before the Nile carries you south past temples that have stood since the Bronze Age. This 18-day route moves in the order […]

Old Cairo, Egypt: A Guide to Coptic, Jewish and Islamic Heritage

Old Cairo, Egypt: A Guide to Coptic, Jewish and Islamic Heritage Cairo’s oldest quarter sits inside the walls of a Roman fortress, where a single laneway can carry you past a fourth-century church, a synagogue tied to the legend of the infant Moses, and the alabaster minarets of an Ottoman-era mosque. Old Cairo compresses the […]

Deir el-Medina: The Artisans’ Village of Egypt’s Valley of the Kings

Deir el-Medina: The Artisans’ Village of Egypt’s Valley of the Kings Deir el-Medina sits in a shallow desert hollow on the West Bank of the Nile at Luxor, a short walk from the tombs its residents spent their working lives carving and painting. For roughly 450 years during Egypt’s New Kingdom, this walled village housed […]

National Museum of Egyptian Civilization: Cairo’s Royal Mummies, Egypt

National Museum of Egyptian Civilization: Cairo’s Royal Mummies, Egypt Cairo has no shortage of extraordinary museums, but the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization takes a different approach from its famous neighbours. Rather than concentrating on a single dynasty or discovery, it lays out the whole arc of Egyptian civilization in chronological order, from prehistoric settlements […]

Step Pyramid of Djoser: Egypt’s First Pyramid at Saqqara

Step Pyramid of Djoser: Egypt’s First Pyramid at Saqqara About thirty kilometres south of Cairo, on a low desert plateau above the ruins of Memphis, a six-tiered limestone monument rises out of the sand. It has none of Giza’s polished symmetry, and that is precisely the point: the Step Pyramid of Djoser is where Egyptian […]

Discover West Africa: Ghana, Togo, Benin, and more

The Story of West Africa West Africa consists of the modern nations of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Across the region is a story of resilience, complexity, and extraordinary cultural richness. Long before European ships arrived on its […]

Colonisation of Africa

The Partition of Africa The Scramble for Africa, occurring in the late nineteenth century, saw European powers divide and claim nearly the entire continent. Formalized during the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, European nations established rules for colonization without African representation, leading to arbitrary borders that ignored indigenous cultures and political landscapes. This period transformed Africa, […]

Empires of the Sahel

Gold and Empires of the Sahel European expansion is often seen as the trigger for modern history, but in reality, globalisation came even earlier to West Africa’s Sahel region, underpinned by the gold trade. Analysis by archaeologists of the gold coins used in Tunis and Libya suggests a major change around the ninth century CE, […]

Tipasa, Algeria

Tipasa Lying on the present-day Algerian coast, 65 km (40 miles) west of Algiers, are the fascinating remains of the ancient city of Tipasa. Phoenician, Roman, early Christian, and Byzantine ruins all lay scattered alongside the golden beaches of the bay, spread out between a blue sea and rolling hills covered with pine trees. Once […]

Africa’s Gold Coast

Africa’s Gold Coast and the Gold Trade West Africa’s fabled ‘Gold Coast’, the former region on the Gulf of Guinea now known as Ghana, was once best known for its relationship with the expanding global money supply. Providing gold for the Atlantic trade from the 15th century, this was a spin off from an even […]

Fez, Morocco

Fez is the oldest city in Morocco, located in the northern part of the country on the banks of the Wadi Fez. The old town was originally composed of two fortified quarters divided by the river.