Toby Wilkinson: preference

Transcript context

…If you think about current Egypt, and surely you’ve spent a lot of time there, knowing a great deal about the distant past, does it give you any insight or does it just feel quite unconnected to you? Both and, I would say. Particularly when you’re out of the cities, in the countryside, in a small Egyptian village, you will see patterns of subsistence, of farming, architecture of mud brick houses that has changed very little in 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 years. The rhythm of life, the patterns of life in a rural Egyptian community are still very recognizable from the days of the pharaohs. Contrast that with the cities of Cairo or Alexandria. These are big modern metropolises that don’t seem to have very much to do with or very many visible signs of the ancient world. It’s both and. For me, as an Egyptologist, I love getting into the rural parts of Egypt because there one can almost feel the past as still very much present. What’s the most interesting rural part for you to go to?…

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