IFAO

Le temple d’Hathor à Dendara, admirablement conservé, est probablement la plus aboutie des réalisations architecturales de l’Égypte ptolémaïque et romaine et la richesse des compositions théologiques qui ornent ses murs est incomparable. Ses inscriptions hiéroglyphiques ont été éditées sous l’égide de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale, d’abord par É. Chassinat puis par Fr. Daumas, et enfin par S. Cauville. Ce volume présente les inscriptions hiéroglyphiques des plafonds, architraves et parois extérieures du pronaos. Par rapport à la première édition de 2008, les restaurations réalisées par le Conseil Suprême des Antiquités de l’Égypte ont offert une lisibilité nouvelle des architraves centrales [Dendara XV, 55-70], révélant leur beauté, ainsi que de la travée lunaire (ouest n° I), même si les émendations nécessaires ont été dans ce cas fort peu nombreuses. Les parois extérieures ne sont pas encore photographiées.

Le temple d’Hathor à Dendara, admirablement conservé, est probablement la plus aboutie des réalisations architecturales de l’Égypte ptolémaïque et romaine et la richesse des compositions théologiques qui ornent ses murs est incomparable. Ses inscriptions hiéroglyphiques ont été éditées sous l’égide de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale, d’abord par É. Chassinat puis par Fr. Daumas, et enfin par S. Cauville. Ce volume présente les inscriptions hiéroglyphiques des parois intérieures du pronaos. Par rapport à la première édition de 2007, une relecture des parois restaurées grâce aux photos remarquables de Gaël Pollin a permis d’améliorer la lecture de certains hiéroglyphes, précédemment fort encrassés. Outre la modification des signes concernés dans le corps même du texte de la nouvelle édition, certains hiéroglyphes exceptionnels ont été reproduits en photographie. La forme des hiéroglyphes propres à l’épigraphie romaine a également été unifiée.

Le temple d’Hathor à Dendara, admirablement conservé, est probablement la plus aboutie des réalisations architecturales de l’Égypte ptolémaïque et romaine et la richesse des compositions théologiques qui ornent ses murs est incomparable. Ses inscriptions hiéroglyphiques ont été éditées sous l’égide de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale, d’abord par É. Chassinat puis par Fr. Daumas, et enfin par S. Cauville. Ce volume présente les inscriptions hiéroglyphiques des colonnes du pronaos. Cette deuxième édition, après la première intervenue en 2007, intègre de très rares corrections, lesquelles n’ont du reste aucune incidence sur le sens général du texte.

The introduction of the record album in the field of the oral music tradition brings about a break that is as abrupt as it is complete. On the one hand, as an example of objectification, the act of recording undermines the ontological status of the oral musical form; the latter, being fixed on the technical support, acquires a specific material reality and can, therefore, be freed from the traditional environment in which it had remained enclosed. On the other hand, record albums, as commodities, carry ontological reversal to a universal dimension, as a result of which the musical form incorporates the effects of mass commercialization. Hence, such a subversion results in an aesthetic phenomenon of disenchantment. This article analyzes this phenomenon in the cultural context of the Arab world through three symptomatic aspects: 1. increased aesthetic rationality; 2. the intrusion of heterogeneity into musical form; 3. aesthetic reification. In this regard, I refer to the thought of Critical Theory, and more particularly to certain categories developed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.

The first commercial recordings of Yemeni music were produced in Aden in the late 1930s, at the time of British colonization. These 78 RPM records were first published by a foreign company, Odeon, followed by several local companies, including Aden Crown, Jafferphon and Tahaphon. All of the urban musical traditions of Yemen—ṣanʿānī, laḥǧī, ḥaḍramī, etc.—soon gained recognition and were broadcasted throughout the country in the years between 1935 and 1960, in spite of the ban on music in the north. These first recordings, which are estimated to comprise several thousand records, are still largely unknown. Establishing a chronology has proven difficult, since the various documents that are available are never dated, and many other documents, such as articles from the press, are not currently accessible.

This research must therefore resort to a kind of “industrial and musical archaeology” which attempts to define approximate ranges of dates, periods and temporal correlations. At the same time, the current “wild patrimonialization” on the Internet of these music styles as a cultural heritage allows easy access to many sound recordings on mainstream platforms, particularly YouTube. While this represents great progress in the inventory process, it also implies a very haphazard storage solution for which researchers must try to compensate through increased efforts in documentation, in particular by the development of a database. The reception of the records by the Yemeni society during these twenty-five prolific years shows us that they had an important influence on the musical practice, as well as on a more subtle aspect of Yemeni music: the definition of regional genres which was of great importance in building the cultural identity of the Yemeni people, even until more recent times.

This article proposes a politically and culturally situated preliminary reading of the biographical and artistic trajectory of Aziz El‑Shawan (1916–1993), a cosmopolitan and nationalist Egyptian composer. The article characterizes the two cosmopolitan cultural formations in Cairo in which he partook and their impact on his career and music: a «modernist capitalist» formation which developed within the framework of colonial rule and the Egyptian monarchy from the late nineteenth century up to the 1952 Egyptian revolution; and a «modernist ­socialist» formation, partly configured by Soviet political and cultural influence, from the late 1950s up to the early 1970s. The article describes how Aziz El‑Shawan became a composer, the phases of his artistic and professional career and his musical style.

Halim el-Dabh (1921-2017) is a collector of “traditional” music and a pioneer of electronic music. He is currently being rediscovered by a new generation of Egyptian musicians who see him as a national precursor. In 1944, El-Dabh composed one of the earliest electronic compositions in history, based on selected and transformed sounds from his own recordings, made in his hometown of Cairo. Such works, and the career of this eclectic musician, both a composer and an academic, shed new light on the production and restitution of anthropological knowledge, which is not so much developed from the act of “writing cultures” as from that of recording and restoring them in different forms, including artistic ones. This text focuses on Halim El-Dabh’s youth in order to retrace his path in a technological and cultural moment of Egypt’s history, while relating it to more global dynamics. Like other 20th century figures, Halim El-Dabh developed new ways of linking collection, research and creation. The practices and itineraries of these figures question the colonial and neo-colonial dynamics of collecting, preserving and restoring music and, more broadly, the production of knowledge.

While in the Arab world, the totality of Umm Kulṯūm’s repertoire is currently considered as being “classical” both in the sense of its highly regarded status in the artistic hierarchy as well as that of its propaedeutic value; to which extent does it actually qualify as “art music” and what traces of the Nahḍa school has it retained? Starting from the term waṣla, employed throughout her career to identify a song during a concert, the article presents an appraisal of our present knowledge of the singer’s performance policy, which has greatly increased since the internet diffusion of most of her concerts, in addition to the commercially distributed versions of her songs. It suggests that Umm Kulṯūm’s metric (muwaqqaʿ) and non-metric (mursal) improvisations are the forms in which a continuity between her art and the ­aesthetic principles of the former school of court musicians is best observed. Two renditions of Salū kuʾūs al-ṭilā illustrate the successive vicissitudes of the “traditional” learned form known as qaṣīda ʿalā al-waḥda.

Despite the importance of the financial administrators of Egypt (aṣḥāb al-ḫarāǧ) and their basic role in the administration system in the early Islamic period, historical sources don’t provide sufficient information about them. On the other hand, hundreds of papyri from ­al-Ušmūnayn province still exist. These papyri, especially tax receipts, contain many names and some information about the financial directors of Egypt during the 2nd-3rd/8th-9th centuries. Some of the financial directors are not mentioned in other historical sources, but al-Ušmūnayn Arabic papyri provide some new information about known directors and introduce new ones.