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🔗 Computing 🔗 Africa 🔗 Ancient Egypt 🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Women writers 🔗 Egypt

The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century is an 1827 three-volume novel written by Jane Webb (later Jane C. Loudon). It concerns the Egyptian mummy of Cheops, who is brought back to life in the year 2126. The novel describes a future filled with advanced technology, and was the first English-language story to feature a reanimated mummy.

After her father's death, making her an orphan at the age of 17, Webb found that:

on the winding up of his affairs that it would be necessary to do something for my support. I had written a strange, wild novel, called the Mummy, in which I had laid the scene in the twenty-second century, and attempted to predict the state of improvement to which this country might possibly arrive.

She may have drawn inspiration from the general fashion for anything pharaonic, inspired by the French researches during the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt; the 1821 public unwrappings of Egyptian mummies in a theatre near Piccadilly, which she may have attended as a girl; and, very likely, the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. As Shelley had written of Frankenstein's creation, "A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch," which may have triggered her later concept. In any case, at many points she deals in greater clarity with elements from the earlier book such as the loathing for the much-desired object and the immediate arrest for crime and attempt to lie one's way out of it. However, unlike the Frankenstein monster, the hideous revived Cheops is not shuffling around dealing out horror and death, but giving canny advice on politics and life to those who befriend him. In some ways The Mummy! may be seen as her reaction to themes in Frankenstein: her mummy specifically says he is allowed life only by divine favour, rather than being indisputably vivified only by mortal science, and so on, as Hopkins' 2003 essay covers in detail.

Unlike many early science fiction works (Shelley's The Last Man, and The Reign of King George VI, 1900–1925, written anonymously in 1763), Loudon did not portray the future as her own day with only political changes. She filled her world with foreseeable changes in technology, society, and even fashion. The hero, Edric Montague, lived in a peaceful and Catholic England under the rule of Queen Claudia. Her court ladies wear trousers and hair ornaments of controlled flame. Surgeons and lawyers may be steam-powered automatons. Air travel, by balloon, is commonplace. A kind of Internet is predicted in it. Besides trying to account for the revivification of the mummy in scientific terms—galvanic shock rather than incantations—"she embodied ideas of scientific progress and discovery, that now read like prophecies" to those later in the 19th century. Many of the incidents in the book can be seen as satirical or humorous. Her social attitudes have resulted in this book being ranked among feminist novels.

The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century was published anonymously in 1827 by Henry Colburn in three volumes, as was usual in that day so that each small volume could be easily carried around. It drew many favourable reviews, including one in 1829 in The Gardener's Magazine on the inventions proposed in it. In 1830, the 46-year-old reviewer, John Claudius Loudon, sought out the 22-year-old Webb, and they married the next year.

🔗 Ships 🔗 Egypt

The Yellow Fleet was the name given to a group of fifteen ships trapped in the Suez Canal (in the Great Bitter Lake section) from 1967 to 1975 as a result of the Israel-Egypt Six-Day War. Both ends of the canal had been blocked by the Egyptians with scuttled ships and other obstacles. The name Yellow Fleet derived from their yellow appearance as they were increasingly covered in a desert sand swept on board. After eight years, the only ships that were able to return to their home port under their own power were the West German ships Münsterland and Nordwind.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Egypt 🔗 Africa/Sudan

Bir Tawil (Egyptian Arabic: بير طويل, romanized: Bīr Ṭawīl, lit. 'tall water well', [biːɾ tˤɑˈwiːl]) is a 2,060 km² (795.4 sq mi) area of land along the border between Egypt and Sudan, which is uninhabited and claimed by neither country. When spoken of in association with the neighbouring Halaib Triangle, it is sometimes referred to as the Bir Tawil Triangle, despite the area's quadrilateral shape; the two "triangles" border at a quadripoint.

Its terra nulliuscode: lat promoted to code: la status results from a discrepancy between the straight political boundary between Egypt and Sudan established in 1899, and the irregular administrative boundary established in 1902. Egypt asserts the political boundary, and Sudan asserts the administrative boundary, with the result that the Hala'ib Triangle is claimed by both and Bir Tawil by neither. In 2014, author Alastair Bonnett described Bir Tawil as the only place on Earth that was habitable but was not claimed by any recognised government.

🔗 Egypt

The Siwa Oasis (Arabic: واحة سيوة‎, Wāḥat Sīwah, IPA: [ˈwæːħet ˈsiːwæ]; Coptic: ⲥⲓⲟⲩⲁϩ Siwah; Berber languages: Isiwan, ⵉⵙⵉⵡⴰⵏ ) is an urban oasis in Egypt between the Qattara Depression and the Great Sand Sea in the Western Desert, 50 km (30 mi) east of the Libyan border, and 560 km (348 mi) from Cairo. About 80 km (50 mi) in length and 20 km (12 mi) wide, Siwa Oasis is one of Egypt's most isolated settlements with about 33,000 people, mostly Berbers, who developed a unique and isolated desert culture and a distinct dialect and language different than all other dialects called Siwi, they are also fluent in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic which is called "Masry" meaning Egyptian.

Its fame lies primarily in its ancient role as the home to an oracle of Ammon, the ruins of which are a popular tourist attraction which gave the oasis its ancient name Oasis of Amun Ra. Historically, it was part of Ancient Egypt.

🔗 Crime 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece 🔗 Egypt

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 69 (P. Oxy. 69) is a complaint about a robbery, written in Greek. The manuscript was written on papyrus in the form of a sheet. It was discovered by Grenfell and Hunt in 1897 in Oxyrhynchus. The document was written on 21 November 190. Currently it is housed in the Haskell Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago (2061). The text was published by Grenfell and Hunt in 1898.

The beginning of the letter is lost. It is a petition to an unknown official describing the theft of some barley and asking that an investigation be carried out. The author is unknown. The measurements of the fragment are 178 by 115 mm. The description of the crime scene is quite detailed:

... they broke down a door that led into the public street and had been blocked up with bricks, probably using a log of wood as a battering-ram. They then entered the house and contented themselves with taking what was stored there, 10 artabae of barley, which they carried off by the same way. We guessed that this was removed piecemeal by the said door from the marks of a rope dragged along in that direction, and pointed out this fact to the chief of the police of that village and to the other officials.

10 artabae are equivalent to approximately 30–40 kilograms (66–88 lb) of barley.

🔗 France 🔗 Military history 🔗 British Empire 🔗 Military history/French military history 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Colonialism 🔗 Egypt 🔗 Israel 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Military history/Middle Eastern military history 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

The Suez Crisis or the Second Arab–Israeli War, also referred to as the Tripartite Aggression in the Arab world and as the Sinai War in Israel, was a British–French–Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956. Israel invaded on 29 October, having done so with the primary objective of re-opening the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba as the recent tightening of the eight-year-long Egyptian blockade further prevented Israeli passage. After issuing a joint ultimatum for a ceasefire, the United Kingdom and France joined the Israelis on 5 November, seeking to depose Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and regain control of the Suez Canal, which Nasser had earlier nationalised by transferring administrative control from the foreign-owned Suez Canal Company to Egypt's new government-owned Suez Canal Authority. Shortly after the invasion began, the three countries came under heavy political pressure from both the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as from the United Nations, eventually prompting their withdrawal from Egypt. Israel's four-month-long occupation of the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula enabled it to attain freedom of navigation through the Straits of Tiran, but the Suez Canal itself was closed from October 1956 to March 1957. The Suez Crisis led to international humiliation for the British and the French in the wake of the Cold War, which established the Americans and the Soviets as the world's superpowers. It also strengthened Nasser's standing.

Before they were defeated, Egyptian troops had blocked all ship traffic by sinking 40 ships in the Suez Canal. It later became clear that Israel, the United Kingdom, and France had conspired to invade Egypt. Though the three allies had attained a number of their military objectives, the Suez Canal itself was useless. American president Dwight D. Eisenhower had issued a strong warning to the British if they were to invade Egypt; he threatened serious damage to the British financial system by selling the American government's bonds of pound sterling. Historians have concluded that the Suez Crisis "signified the end of Great Britain's role as one of the world's major powers" vis-à-vis the United States and the Soviet Union.

As a result of the conflict, the United Nations established the United Nations Emergency Force to police and patrol the Egypt–Israel border, while British prime minister Anthony Eden resigned from his position. For his diplomatic efforts in resolving the conflict through United Nations initiatives, Canadian external affairs minister Lester B. Pearson received a Nobel Peace Prize. Analysts have argued that the Suez Crisis may have emboldened the Soviet Union, prompting the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Iran 🔗 Syria 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Arab world 🔗 Jewish history 🔗 Egypt 🔗 Israel 🔗 Israel Palestine Collaboration 🔗 Palestine

The Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries, or Jewish exodus from Arab countries, was the departure, flight, expulsion, evacuation and migration of 850,000 Jews, primarily of Sephardi and Mizrahi background, from Arab countries and the Muslim world, mainly from 1948 to the early 1970s. The last major migration wave took place from Iran in 1979–80, as a consequence of the Iranian Revolution.

A number of small-scale Jewish exoduses began in many Middle Eastern countries early in the 20th century with the only substantial aliyah (immigration to the area today known as Israel) coming from Yemen and Syria. Very few Jews from Muslim countries immigrated during the period of Mandatory Palestine. Prior to the creation of Israel in 1948, approximately 800,000 Jews were living in lands that now make up the Arab world. Of these, just under two-thirds lived in the French and Italian-controlled North Africa, 15–20% in the Kingdom of Iraq, approximately 10% in the Kingdom of Egypt and approximately 7% in the Kingdom of Yemen. A further 200,000 lived in Pahlavi Iran and the Republic of Turkey.

The first large-scale exoduses took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from Iraq, Yemen and Libya. In these cases over 90% of the Jewish population left, despite the necessity of leaving their property behind. Two hundred and sixty thousand Jews from Arab countries immigrated to Israel between 1948 and 1951, accounting for 56% of the total immigration to the newly founded state; this was the product of a policy change in favour of mass immigration focused on Jews from Arab and Muslim countries. The Israeli government's policy to accommodate 600,000 immigrants over four years, doubling the existing Jewish population, encountered mixed reactions in the Knesset; there were those within the Jewish Agency and government who opposed promoting a large-scale emigration movement among Jews whose lives were not in danger.

Later waves peaked at different times in different regions over the subsequent decades. The peak of the exodus from Egypt occurred in 1956 following the Suez Crisis. The exodus from the other North African Arab countries peaked in the 1960s. Lebanon was the only Arab country to see a temporary increase in its Jewish population during this period, due to an influx of Jews from other Arab countries, although by the mid-1970s the Jewish community of Lebanon had also dwindled. Six hundred thousand Jews from Arab and Muslim countries had reached Israel by 1972. In total, of the 900,000 Jews who left Arab and other Muslim countries, 600,000 settled in the new state of Israel, and 300,000 migrated to France and the United States. The descendants of the Jewish immigrants from the region, known as Mizrahi Jews ("Eastern Jews") and Sephardic Jews ("Spanish Jews"), currently constitute more than half of the total population of Israel, partially as a result of their higher fertility rate. In 2009, only 26,000 Jews remained in Arab countries and Iran. and 26,000 in Turkey.

The reasons for the exoduses are manifold, including push factors, such as persecution, antisemitism, political instability, poverty and expulsion, together with pull factors, such as the desire to fulfill Zionist yearnings or find a better economic status and a secure home in Europe or the Americas. The history of the exodus has been politicized, given its proposed relevance to the historical narrative of the Arab–Israeli conflict. When presenting the history, those who view the Jewish exodus as analogous to the 1948 Palestinian exodus generally emphasize the push factors and consider those who left as refugees, while those who do not, emphasize the pull factors and consider them willing immigrants.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Egypt

Taqi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ma'ruf ash-Shami al-Asadi (Arabic: تقي الدين محمد بن معروف الشامي‎, Ottoman Turkish: تقي الدين محمد بن معروف الشامي السعدي‎, Turkish: Takiyüddin) (1526-1585) was an Ottoman polymath active in Cairo and Istanbul. He was the author of more than ninety books on a wide variety of subjects, including astronomy, clocks, engineering, mathematics, mechanics, optics and natural philosophy.

In 1574 the Ottoman Sultan Murad III invited Taqī ad-Dīn to build the Constantinople observatory. Using his exceptional knowledge in the mechanical arts, Taqī ad-Dīn constructed instruments like huge armillary and mechanical clocks that he used in his observations of the Great Comet of 1577. He also used European celestial and terrestrial globes that were delivered to Istanbul in gift-exchange.

The major work that resulted from his work in the observatory is titled "The tree of ultimate knowledge [in the end of time or the world] in the Kingdom of the Revolving Spheres: The astronomical tables of the King of Kings [Murād III]" (Sidrat al-muntah al-afkar fi malkūt al-falak al-dawār– al-zij al-Shāhinshāhi). The work was prepared according to the results of the observations carried out in Egypt and Istanbul in order to correct and complete Ulugh Beg's Zij as-Sultani. The first 40 pages of the work deal with calculations, followed by discussions of astronomical clocks, heavenly circles, and information about three eclipses which he observed at Cairo and Istanbul. For corroborating data of other observations of eclipses in other locales like Daud ar-Riyyadi (David the Mathematician), David Ben-Shushan of Salonika.

As a polymath, Taqī al-Dīn wrote numerous books on astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, and theology. His method of finding coordinates of stars were reportedly so precise that he got better measurements than his contemporaries, Tycho Brahe and Nicolas Copernicus. Brahe is also thought to have been aware of al-Dīn's work.

Taqī Ad-Dīn also described a steam turbine with the practical application of rotating a spit in 1551. He worked on and created astronomical clocks for his observatory. Taqī Ad-Dīn also wrote a book on optics, in which he determined the light emitted from objects, proved the Law of Reflection observationally, and worked on refraction.