Calamity in Cairo
Jonathan Downs reports on the fire last December that caused extensive damage to one of Egypt’s most important collections of historical manuscripts.
Just before Christmas 2011 the cultural world was rocked by the devastating news that Cairo’s Institut d’Égypte had been ravaged by fire. The repository of over 200,000 antique volumes and ancient manuscripts, many gathered by the original French savant scholars who accompanied Napoleon’s invasion in 1798, the Institute was the oldest of its kind in Egypt and the Middle East. That is until a protester’s Molotov cocktail flew through a window on December 17th.
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