Monthly Archives: December 2018

Back in August I wrote a post about the Cairo early 20th-century society weekly The Sphinx. I was excited because I had just discovered ten or so issues of it in the newspaper archives of the British Library. Well, I’m just back from Cairo where I have been working in the archives of the American University and what did I find there but almost a whole run of the paper in bound volumes from 1902 to 1947. The project I was working on (of which more at a future date) didn’t allow me to spend much time reading the Sphinxes but I did take plenty of photos of articles, graphics and pages. I’ll be posting some of this material in the coming weeks but to start off with here’s the complete issue from exactly one hundred years ago this week.

As you’ll see (click to enlarge the images), the pages contain many familiar names, including Miss Devonshire, who used to give tours of Islamic architecture to soldiers and whose book Rambles in Cairo was a bestseller for the Egyptian publishing house of Schindler. There is also an obituary for Lord Edward Cecil, whose entertaining The Leisure of an Egyptian Official was published posthumously in 1921, and, under Social and Personal, a brief mention of Governor-General Sir Lee Stack, who six years later would be assassinated while being driven through Cairo. Note also the ad for land and villas for sale in Maadi, marketed as ‘A country resort for summer and winter’.