Dimensions and Proportions in Egypt’s Byzantine Religious Architecture

In the study of Egypt’s Byzantine religious architecture, modern scholarship has been focusing essentially on es- tablishing the typology of plans and their relative chronology. Church building activity has also been studied by using the written sources complimented by the archaeological evidence. is abundant Christian archaeological material shows an amazing variety and complexity in church designs. ere is a need of a rationalized analysis of the proportion ratios of the church buildings, and a necessity to focus on the dominant factors dictating its size, the type of its structure, and the quantities of materials used in its construction. e study of geometric shapes and the evolution of their sacred perceptions is yet another interesting facet of this type of architecture. e purpose of this paper is to explore new approaches in studying the proportion ratios and its correlation with the measuring units used in Byzantine church architecture and the existence of any symbolic concepts.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Roman, Byzantine and Arab Influences on Coptic Traditional Liturgical Music and the Importance of Microtonal Inflections

Traditional Coptic music is composed of liturgical chants sung homophonically by men. Its first musical nota tions date only from the nineteenth century. Music cultures do not exist in isolation but tend to adapt to their surroundings. Hence often even some folkloristic elements can be found in them. Copts prefer to seek their identity in the pharaonic past. However, stylistically musicologists of the nineteenth/twentieth century were colored in their vision of this, for them unknown, mysterious music, by their own time in their efforts to bring it within the scope of their understanding. In this article I want to draw attention to the influences of the three most important music cultures that have surrounded Egypt for such a long time, both in the past and partly still today.

Shenoute’s Rhetorical Syntax: Tentative Sample of Selected Entries

An ongoing encyclopaedic work, listing, illustrating, and describing Shenoute’s main grammatical rhetorical tools and devices, is here briefly presented in a tentative sample of selected entries. The following headings and domains are illustrated, with token documentation: macrosyntax, hermeneutics, style and figures, genres, registers, and grammatical functions.

Petrification and Portability: Monks as Statues in Late Antique Egypt

This essay considers how ascetics in Late Antiquity were perceived to be statue-like and how they functioned as statues in the ritual lives of the communities that surrounded them. Saints’ lives from Egypt, Asia Minor, and Syria describe ascetics whose statue-like immobility played a role in the Christianization of the landscape, at a time when some monks committed violence against statues. I focus on examples from Late Antique Egypt, with comparisons drawn from Syriac and Greek hagiography.