Egypt has a great many superlatives: the longest river in the world, the tallest pyramids, the most ancient script, and a civilization that survived, seemingly without many changes, for over 3000 years. However, it is not often that Egypt is associated with the birth of Christianity. According to tradition, the new Christian faith is said to have been preached in Alexandria by the Evangelist Mark, sometime around 60 ad. By the 2nd century the new faith was embraced by Alexandrian Jews, Greeks and native Egyptians, gradually spreading south into the Nile Valley. It is here that monasticism was established, as a result of the persecution of Christians by Roman emperors. Some sought refuge in desert settlements, whereas others chose to live in solitude as hermits. By 391, the Byzantine emperor Theodosius outlawed paganism and Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire.

Recently, the Coptic community of Egypt has experienced an extraordinary spiritual and ethnic revival, and the ancient monasteries are growing in size and in importance, preserving the beliefs, and the art of the early Christians, as well as the Coptic language. To this day, the patriarch of the Coptic church is selected from among the monks of the monastery of St Anthony. This is our journey on this tour, to explore the places where Christianity was born.

But we will also travel through the Sinai peninsula, that ‘great and terrible wilderness’ of the Old Testament. It is at its heart that the events narrated in Exodus took place, and it is on top of Mount Sinai that Moses is said to have received the Ten Commandments. Another first, with the birth of Judaism, the most ancient form of monotheism. By the time the emperor Justinian founded the monastery of St Catherine in the sixth century, the monastery and Gebel Musa already had become places of pilgrimage.
Its fame, now, is also due to the extraordinary collection of icons housed in the new museum curated by the Byzantine scholars of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

With the arrival of Islam, this same area was on the route taken by Islamic conquerors into the Maghreb and, later, Muslim pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Mecca. The library of the monastery preserves a ‘firman’, a decree, signed by the prophet Mohammed, commanding his armies to respect the ancient sanctuary and its monks.

In fact, the Sinai peninsula has always been a place of passage. Jutting into the Red Sea, and wedged between the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba, it is a link between Asia and Africa, and it has always had great strategic value. Not only did its vast quantities of minerals attract empire builders, but it has been the natural route for countless armies marching to or from the ancient Levant. Along these same routes travelled caravans of traders transporting their goods to the markets of Egypt. In recent years Sinai has seen enormous and rapid changes – a new pipeline that brings fresh water from the Suez Canal to the various parts of northern Sinai, desalination plants in coastal towns, and of course, tourism on its eastern shore, where diving and snorkelling have created new resorts along its coral reef.

Our tour concentrates on the ‘real’ Sinai, with its vast landscapes and its vivid colours, its high granite mountains, its volcanic outcrops and golden sand dunes, its acacia groves and hidden oases, its emptiness and solitude. We trace the history of this land and explore the events that led to the creation of the three great monotheistic religions of our world.

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