Coptic Cairo

One of the interesting things about Egypt is the Coptic Church, and though it is centered in Alexandria - the leader of the Coptic faith is the Pope of Alexandria and the Patriarch of All Africa on the Holy See of Saint Mark (it a mouthful of a title) Shenouda III - but there is an entire area of Cairo simply called Coptic Cairo, which I finally made it out to for a visit. The Coptic church has been separated from the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox varieties of the Christian world for over fifteen-hundred years. Essentially, they split over differing perceptions of the nature of Jesus, which was a very common bone of contention in the early days of Christianity anyway (the duality of Christ, both human and divine, has caused a lot of argument over the centuries). The Coptic church is usually seen as being monophysite, that is, only focusing on one nature of Jesus, but they claim that it's far more complex (or simple, depending upon which side of the argument you are on) than that and that, in fact, they are not monophysitic at all. Anyway, there are about fifteen million adherents of Coptic Christianity in the world today and a healthy majority of them live in Egypt. They are very important religiously and most of the early practictioners of monasticism were Egyptian - including my all-time favorite Christian saint, St. Simon Stylites - he's the one who went out into the desert and piled up pillars of stone and then he would stand on top of it - and, amazingly (or maybe not so) attracted followers, who sat on their own, albeit smaller, pillars. I know the church was cleaning house a few years ago and there was some talk of stripping St. Simon Stylites of his sainthood, but, I think, cooler heads prevailed and he hung around. Anyway, there is a very long history of Christianity in Egypt. One of the oldest parts of the city of Cairo is Coptic, and there is an amazing museum there. The part of it that really impressed me were artistic representations of Mary suckling the baby Jesus (there were several of them). Obviously, the representation of Mary and Jesus is a very common one in western art, but it is very rare to actually show Mary holding her naked breast to Jesus to suckle. What I found interesting about it is that it clearly is a distant reflection of a common Egyptian artistic motif of Isis holding her breasts for the young Horus to suckle. So much of early Christian thought and iconography is influenced by the Egyptians, most notably the ankh and its similarity to the cross. A lot of the art work dealt with the story of the passage of the holy family through Egypt, not surprisingly. There was a great later painting of the killing of the early church father St. Zachirias, but in the art work the soldier who killed him clearly is portrayed as being Turkish (the story is much older, but the painting was prepared during the 17th century when Egypt was under Ottoman Turkish control) - can't believe the Turks let that one slide by. Less than fifty yards down the road from the museum is the Hanging Church, which is really quite beautiful. One of the advantages of spending the extra time in Cairo is getting to visit more areas and I would definitely have to recommend Coptic Cairo (even if you're not a complete history dweeb).