Serene Assir visits Rashid, home to much more than just the Rosetta Stone As a child, I would often accompany my parents on for brief breaks in London, which for my father constituted a mixture of work and pleasure. Meanwhile, for my mother and me, life was always intensely active during those trips. We would spend our days walking through the streets -- which more often than not would be drenched with rain -- going from one art gallery to the next museum. Her energy was extraordinary, and her ability to raise a real interest in me in art and history was perhaps more so. My nagging and early-morning arguments aside, the British Museum and, more specifically, the Rosetta Stone intrigued me perhaps more than any other aspect of the metropolis' cultural life. The fact that one single document written into rock in three languages provided the key to resolving endless mysteries in the Pharaonic era seemed to me like magic. So it became clear to me that, being in Egypt, a trip to Rashid -- the city beneath which the stone was found by French colonisers -- was becoming long overdue. So it was that early on a crisp, winter morning, photographer Sherif Sonbol and I arrived in Rashid, having bought fresh dates along the desert road. And to my surprise, although the town is small and lacks in many amenities, culturally it is fantastically rich. To start with, its Ottoman heritage remains vivid to the degree that its streets are quite literally dotted with old Turkish houses, open to the visitor daily. They happily co-exist with their more modern neighbours, raising no surprise to the town locals. After all, they have grown up surrounded by history. In all, 13 houses are open to visits all year round, and guides from the Office of Islamic Heritage will gladly accompany travellers in order to explain the intricacies of the homes. Originally inhabited by local pashas, the houses embody all the splendour of a time past, and yet humbly demonstrate how Ottoman local leaders used to live. Still capturing the stunning beauty of Turkish art in the engravings and paintings on the ceilings and walls, the structure of the houses is, on the whole, simple and homely rather than stately. Furthermore, the overwhelming feeling that one experiences on admiring the houses, which have somehow found themselves at once trapped and exposed in a vastly different modern era is one of the calm of knowing that all empires eventually fall, all times must pass. And on the outskirts of the town, beyond the work-site of the ship-makers, lies the Qait Bay Fortress. Not to be confused with the Qait Bay Fortress at Alexandria, it was beneath this Ottoman structure -- later to be used by the French -- that the Rosetta Stone was found. In other words, it is the meeting point, by virtue of one of those sheer coincidences that only seem possible in Egypt, of Pharaonic, Ottoman and French empires and civilisations. And, sitting at the top of its walls, looking over a sapphire-blue Nile and finding calm in having completed a thread begun long ago in London, I phoned my mother in Spain. She laughed with great joy when I told her where I was.
