Interior Wall Scenes Sety I is admired by many art historians for the superb quality of the relief carvings made during his reign. This pharaoh's high standards is especially appreciated when it is compared to the often poor quality of reliefs carved during the reign of his son Ramesses II and later in the Ramesside era. One scholar,  Herbert Winlock , went so far as to write an elaborate description of Sety as an art connoisseur! The finest reliefs made during the reign are found in the temple of Sety I at  Abydos . In this  temple , flawless blocks of limestone were used to their full advantage by sculptors who embellished the reliefs with exquisite details usually done in paint. Only the fine grain of the limestone permitted this high level of detail. A highly detailed relief of the goddess Isis offering life to Sety I's in his temple at Abydos. The fine grain of the limestone used to build the temple allowed for the intricacy of the work. Relief showing Sety I ...

  Net fishing in Alexandria April 19, 2018 Aliza One of the great pleasures Alexandria has to offer is a morning walk on the Corniche. You can wander up and down, people-watching to your heart’s content, despite the constant flow of noisy traffic on the six-lane highway separating the seaside walkway from the rest of Alexandria. You almost always see people fishing with incredibly long poles (I estimate they’re about 15 feet). But this morning we got to see something completely new to us: a large group of men wielding a huge net, and dragging their catch in to shore. We stopped to watch when we saw about six men pulling on a rope that led out to sea. We had no idea what they were doing until we noticed a curving line of little red floats beyond the rope. One of the men saw us watching, and called out to Alan. He gestured eastward, saying that there was another group working with them. Sure enough, as we looked up the beach, we spotted another group, also pulling a rope. That’s...

HERE ARE 10 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE ANCIENT LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA. 1) The ancient library of Alexandria was founded by Demetrius of Phaleon , an Athenian politician who fell from power and fled to Egypt. There, he found refuge at the royal court of King Ptolemy I Soter , who ruled Egypt between 323 and 285 BCE. Impressed by the extensive knowledge and deep learning of Demetrius, Ptolemy assigned him the task of creating a library. 2) The ancient library of Alexandria was part of an institution of higher learning known as the Alexandrian Museum. The library was intended as a resource for the scholars who did research at the Museum. 3) The books at the library were divided into the following subjects: rhetoric, law, epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, medicine, mathematics, natural science, and miscellaneous. The library is believed to have housed between 200,000 and 700,000 books, divided between two library branches. 4) Book were acquired for the library through pur...

  guidebook says there’s not much to see at Kom el Dikka (“mound of rubble”), but I respectfully disagree. The archaeological work is ongoing here (and has been since 1960), and you can easily spend an hour or more at Kom el Dikka, looking at the ruins of the city, the beautiful mosaics in the Villa of the Birds, or just enjoying a respite from the noise and traffic of modern Alexandria. (By the way, if you want to look up this location, there are several spellings in English transliteration. The most common alternative is Kom El Dekka.) The Roman amphitheater here was originally discovered in 1959 when developers began to excavate for a new housing block. Now the excavated area is very large, as archaeological digging has extended far beyond the original find. The group in charge of the dig is Polish, and they’ve provided informative signboards throughout the site, which makes it very easy to imagine what this portion of the city was like from the third through the fifth centuries...