Word: coptic
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...Sawiris comes from a wealthy Coptic family; the Copts are a Christian minority in Egypt that make up only about 10% of the population but is well represented in financial, government and intellectual circles. His father, Onsi, made his fortune in Egypt in the 1950s in the construction industry, but then lost it all when President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the business in the early '60s. The family moved to Libya and started afresh, but moved back to Egypt a decade later. There, Sawiris senior proceeded to build his fortune anew...
Mockler suggests the essentials of his characters in swift strokes. "I am not happy," Wingate confides to a subordinate. "But then, I have been thinking, no great man ever was really happy." And the author is an excellent guide through the winding complexities of Ethiopian culture, its ancient Coptic Christian religion and its legendary past (the first Emperor, Menelik I, was purported to be the son of the biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba...
...languages--not only Latin and Greek but also Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Chaldean. According to The Linguist and the Emperor (Ballantine; 271 pages), by Daniel Meyerson, Champollion was a dreamy, solitary kid who mouthed off in class, but as a schoolboy, he assembled a 2,000-page dictionary of Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language. Luckily for him, French soldiers in Egypt soon discovered the Rosetta stone, a chunk of gray and pink rock with the same text written on it in both Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics, which no one had yet deciphered. Unlocking hieroglyphics was Champollion's great work...
...remarkable library of Gnostic scriptures. Known as the Nag Hammadi Codices, for the town in southern Egypt near the site of their discovery, the library consists of twelve 4th century papyrus books containing texts that are thought to have been translated from the original Greek into Egypt's ancient Coptic language ... The Nag Hammadi texts are already adding new fuel to a long-standing debate over the relationship between Gnosticism and early Christianity. Scholars have long believed that some New Testament passages attack incipient forms of Gnosticism. The traditional explanation is that Gnosticism matured after the birth of Christianity...
...Cairo The Mena House Oberoi (oberoihotels.com) is one of the world's exceptional resorts, built in 1869 as a royal lodge for a khedive. The interior is a spectacular blend of Moorish, Ottoman and Coptic design. Most striking is the site?half a mile from the Great Pyramid of Cheops...