Egypt- India relations
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History
Animal imports from India: c. A.D. 1
Chandrima Banerjee, September 18, 2020: The Times of India
“Don’t worry about the cats. Someone has been paid to look after them.” It seems like an odd message to find on a 2,000-year-old ceramic fragment, an ostracon, at Berenice in Egypt. The imagination of animals in antiquity is often grounded in two extremes — worshipped as abstract divine entities or enslaved as utilitarian creatures. But the relationship between animals and people in history may have been far more complex. Owners cared deeply about the animals that kept them company. And last month, researchers found that many of these animals went from India to ancient Africa and Europe two millennia ago.
The find, tracing animal trade routes from ancient Egypt to India, was built on a discovery made eight years ago. “Since 2012, we have been exploring a unique object in Berenice, a cemetery of animals for companionship,” Prof Marta Osypin ska, a Polish archaeozoologist, told TOI. That year, they discovered two monkey burials — young individuals, covered with a woollen cloth, like a child’s blanket. The following year, they found more. “The monkey was lying on its side, with hands at its face, like a sleeping baby.” The only one with burial furniture was that of a young bonnet macaque.
“Initially, we assumed the monkeys were local vervetsgrivets living in Africa. They are depicted in Egyptian art as animals kept on leashes. However, we were concerned that we were clearly dealing with two species: smaller and slightly larger,” Osypin ska said. “It was only during a recent trip to India that I saw rhesus monkeys and their relationship with humans. With 3D scans of monkey skulls from Berenice — Egyptian law doesn’t allow artifacts to be taken outside the country — and comparisons with reference specimens in Delhi, we realised these were Asian, not African monkeys.”
The remains, it turned out, were those of royal rhesus macaques from western and northern subcontinent and bonnet macaques from southwestern India. The 16 monkeys had died young, perhaps unable to acclimatise to the salty desert. “We know dogs and cats were fed with fish. However, fresh fruits (for monkeys) would have been a problem.” Two years ago, Osypin - ska’s team found evidence of cats imported from India.
Architecture
R.V.Smith, June 12, 2017: The Hindu
From: R.V.Smith, June 12, 2017: The Hindu
Over 45 years ago, one met an Egyptian scholar, Mahomet Ali who was staying in the same hotel in the Walled City in which this scribe stayed for a decade.
Mahomet Ali was not a staunch Muslim. He was more interested in the Egyptian gods and goddesses, probably because he claimed to be a descendant of an old family which did not convert fully and stuck to its beliefs of Isis, Osiris, Sethi and Sun god Ra of the land of Khem. Mahomet Ali had come to trace Indo-Egyptian links. The biggest link was found in South India from where women of Malabar were employed as maids in Pharaonic palaces. Cleopatra had several who, besides other duties, also massaged her and put her to sleep with their songs of love and longing. Otherwise Indian interaction was limited, despite museum mummies.
Egyptian effect
It was only when the Delhi Sultanate came into being that Egyptian influence surfaced and continued from Slave, Khilji, Tughlaq, Sayyid and Lodi to the Mughal dynasty. Mahomet Ali had noticed that the fortress of Tughlakabad had sloping walls influenced by Egyptian architecture. Also Akbar’s tomb at Sikandra, Agra had many traces of it. The same pattern was followed in Safdarjang’s Tomb.
One stormy evening in June, Mahomet Ali held forth on Egyptian civilization while sharing tall glasses of beer. Egyptian gods and goddesses have some counterparts in the Hindu Pantheon but otherwise they have their own distinct identity. However, the cult of the Mother Goddess was common to both and so also animistic forms of divinity. His main contention was that the Roman empire, the spread of Islam and earlier Christianity had sounded the death-knell of ancient Egyptian culture. The deep mysteries embedded in the Pyramids were belatedly discovered by British and American explorers, despite the curse of the Pharaohs.
Once he was caught in a labyrinth in a pyramid and began to despair if he would get out alive. Just then an owl flew in from somewhere and began to circle over his head and then winged away, thereby showing him a way to get out and see the sunlight again. He was reminded after his great escape of a tragedy that befell some of European explorers. Only one man came out alive from the pyramid in which they had lost their way. He pointed out that the bhulbhuliayan of Adham Khan’s tomb in Mehrauli was a labyrinth made on the Egyptian model just as the burial pattern in the pyramids had been followed in Akbar’s tomb. Sultan Ghari’s tomb on the Mehrauli-Palam Road also has Egyptian features because of its subterranean architecture. Even Humayun’s Tomb has traces of it, as does Akbar’s new capital at Fatehpur Sikri. For that matter, said Mahomet Ali, Mohammad Bin Tughlaq built his Bijay Mandal on the lines of a pyramid, probably influenced by the tales of the Moorish traveller Ibn Battuta. Amir Khusrau’s fabled 50-gate palace also had traces of Egyptian architecture.
Conjuring spirits
Ali confided that one night he had conjured up the spirits in Abouthis, resting in the underworld with Osiris, during a hypnotic Khanjeeri (gypsy drum) and scimitar dance by a semi-clad pubescent nomadic tribal virgin, in the mellow light of a half-moon while the shade of the Divine Priest of Isis hovered around the deserted Qutub Minar complex.
Mahomet Ali’s sojourn in Delhi lasted three months. Some of his inferences may be open to question but on that stormy evening he sounded very convincing and the next morning claimed that he heard the ghostly music of the Sistra of Isis over the hotel as though she was still lamenting the end of the Pharaonic cult in the land of Khem, with India clinging on to its old beliefs and Egypt, Greece and Rome losing them, so well described by Alama Iqbal : “Yunan, Misr, Ruma/Saab mit gaye jahan se/Kuch baat hai ke hasti/Mit-ti nahin hamari/Mit-ti nahin hamari”. Soon after Mahomet Ali departed to Jaipur to trace Egyptian influence in the architecture there, initiated in the time of Sawai Ram Singh I. And thence to Bombay where H. Rider Haggard was born and later wrote some of the best books inspired by Egyptian lore. And thereafter to meet the Bene Israel Jews whose ancestors laboured during the building of the Pyramids.
After 1947
1947- 2022
Alind Chauhan, June 25, 2023: The Indian Express
Delhi established a bilateral relationship with Cairo just three days after it got Independence on August 15, 1947. Their partnership, however, began to blossom when India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt’s second President Gamal Abdel Nasser became close. The friendship was first tested during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis when Nasser nationalised the canal leading Israel, and later France and Britain, to attack Egypt.
Nehru lost no time in condemning the aggression against Cairo and, as per academic Swapna Kona Nayudu’s article, Nehru’s India & the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956, published by the University of Pennsylvania, “took a number of measures to mediate” between the opposing parties, including asking the US to intervene in the matter, She wrote: “The US–sponsored Uniting for Peace resolution, passed on November 2, 1956, pushed fighting forces behind armistice lines, and opened the way for what came to be known as the Eisenhower-Nehru formula.” India went on to emphasise the urgent need to decolonise Asia and Africa in the United Nations, “contributing substantially to the closing of the crisis,” Nayudu added.
In the following years, the bond between Nehru and Nasser further solidified. The two charismatic leaders, ardent supporters of the liberal and decolonisation movements, played a pivotal role in founding the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) along with Yugoslavia’s President Josip Broz Tito, Indonesia’s President Sukarno and Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah. It was because of this special relationship that India also stood firmly next to Egypt and the Arab world when they came to blows with Israel over Palestine — Delhi didn’t establish full diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv until 1992.
Notably, Delhi and Cairo didn’t just focus on political strategies. The two nations seek to strengthen their defence and economic ties too. For instance, as per the Ministry of External Affairs, “there was close cooperation between the two nations’ Air Forces, with efforts at jointly developing a fighter aircraft in the 1960s.”
But what once used to be a cornerstone of its foreign policy, India put its partnership with Egypt on the back burner in later years, particularly during the 1970s. In a column for The Indian Express, C Raja Mohan, a senior fellow at the Asian Policy Institute in Delhi, wrote: “The Indian foreign policy discourse, with its deepening anti-Western rhetoric and empathy for radical Arab States in the 1970s, was not empathetic to the concerns and interests of Egypt as it made brave moves to rethink its regional policies.”
Those years saw India completely ignoring not just Egypt but also the whole West Asia region. By the end of the Cold War, the area had completely dropped off Delhi’s agenda — India had only maintained relations on “a mercantilist basis” with oil-producing nations and those countries where Indian labourers migrated for work, Raja Mohan told Centre for Strategic and International Studies in an interview.
Why have India and Egypt rekindled their ties with each other?
The Modi years, however, have witnessed a turnaround in the situation. Since 2014, India has sought to engage with West Asian countries. The reasons, as Raja Mohan explained in the interview, for doing so are quite clear: Delhi wants to draw huge amounts of capital from Gulf nations, curtail religious extremism by supporting moderate countries in the region while encouraging social reforms, and participate in the security politics of the area.
And in order to do all this, India has realised that Egypt is a key player. The country has remained fairly moderate over the years, shares strong ties with the UAE and Saudi Arabia (both nations have made heavy investments in Egypt), and is located at a crucial geo-strategic location — 12 per cent of global trade passes through the Suez Canal. Therefore, the bilateral relations between Delhi and Cairo have once again taken centre stage.
Meanwhile, Cairo wants India’s help to tackle its battered economy. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic coupled with the implications of the Russia and Ukraine war has worsened its financial woes. Inflation in the country is at a five-year high of over 30 per cent and it has approached the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the fourth time in six years for a bailout.
According to a report by The Indian Express, Egypt has “sought investments in infrastructure — Metro projects in Cairo and Alexandria, a Suez Canal economic zone, a second channel of the Suez Canal, and a new administrative capital in a Cairo suburb. More than 50 Indian companies have invested more than $3.15 billion in Egypt” from Delhi.
When el-Sisi arrived in India earlier this year, the two countries announced that they had decided to elevate their bilateral relationship to a “strategic partnership”. The strategic partnership is supposed to comprise four key elements, including scientific and academic collaboration; cultural and people-to-people contacts. As Modi lands in Cairo on Saturday, it’s expected the two leaders will work further towards deepening the ties between the two countries.
