This project aims to encourage people to create new memories from old objects and to meet the past through writing, drawing and photography.
We invite people to join in via our workshops or by sending us writing, drawings and photographs from your memorable encounters with the Romans in the Middle East and North Africa.
What a terrific project. About 30 years ago I sent an early email to one of the Roman scholars asking why they never covered the Western Desert of Egypt's many, many, Roman artifacts. He responded that he did not know that Egypt had such monuments. I had been exploring the Western Desert and its oases since the 70s. In the 1980s I went to Kharga Oasis and found an old Bedouin to take me to a number of them to the north of the oasis. I wrote about them in my book Islands of the Blest later to become The Western Desert of Egypt. I photographed everything, all the norther forts. I know I was the first to visit these sites in many, many, years. Not a single tire track anywhere. There is a big section on them in my book, complete with drawings based on my photos. More important I still have those early slides. I was very pleased when archaeologists began visiting and recording these sites. The Western Desert links the Roman Empire across North Africa and into Asia.
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