David Tresilian's Articles

Late translator Humphrey Davies and Dutch scholar Marcel Kurpershoek have supplied new additions to NYU’s Library of Arabic Literature, underlining the scope of this important series, writes David Tresilian

This year marks the centenary of the discovery of the tomb of the ancient Egyptian boy king Tutankhamun in what is still the most famous achievement of modern Egyptology, writes David Tresilian in the first of a series of articles

David Tresilian reports from an exhibition of celebrity Pharaohs in the French port city of Marseilles.

The mediaeval Arabic animal fables of Kalilah wa Dimnah have appeared in a new English-language translation.

More and more European museums are returning heritage artefacts to countries in Africa and Asia, with the pressure mounting for the return of artefacts to Egypt, writes David Tresilian

One of the few European philosophers to have written at length on Egypt, the 17th-century German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz also drew up plans for its invasion, writes David Tresilian in an occasional series on books by visitors to Egypt

The emir Abdel-Qader, leader of the resistance to the 19th-century French conquest of Algeria, is the subject of a new exhibition in the French port city of Marseilles, writes David Tresilian

This year’s Arab History Days at the Arab World Institute in Paris explored women and gender in the Arab world, writes David Tresilian

A new book examines the 19th-century “Eastern Question” that wracked the brains of European statesmen when thinking about the Middle East, writes David Tresilian

The first English translation of the traditional Arab epic of Dhat Al-Himma has recently appeared in an abridged edition.

David Tresilian reports from this year’s Maghreb des Livres Book Fair in Paris, an annual rendez-vous for French-speaking readers on the Arab world

A new biography of Egyptian writer Taha Hussein emphasises his role in building the cultural institutions of modern Egypt, writes David Tresilian

A current show at the Arab World Institute in Paris is a rare opportunity to see a panorama of modern and contemporary Algerian art

A new exhibition at the Louvre in Paris focuses on ancient Egypt’s Kushite Dynasty that originated in today’s Sudan.

Egyptian critic Mohamed Shoair’s reconstruction of tussles surrounding Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Children of the Alley has appeared in English translation.

A new Paris exhibition is celebrating Jean-François Champollion, the French decipherer of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics at the beginning of the 19th century and one of the founding figures of modern Egyptology.

Marie Favereau, The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020, pp377

The winner of this year’s Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation was announced in London in January in another bumper year for Arabic literature abroad.

An intriguing new initiative is raising European awareness of Islamic art by organising exhibitions across provincial France, writes David Tresilian

David Tresilian attended Marseilles exhibition that reconstructs the background and afterlife of French novelist Gustave Flaubert’s North African novel Salammbô, and read the 12th-century Iraqi physician Abdel-Latif al-Baghdadi’s account of his visit to Egypt

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