Cairene:
- Of or pertaining to Cairo, the capital of Egypt.
- The shop, in typical Cairene fashion, was small. [Wiktionary]
Noted in “Egypt’s Eternal City,” Andrew Curry, Archaeology (March/April 2019):
That’s not to say that the team is ignoring the spectacular statuary left behind by generations of pharaohs. When Cairenes looted [Heliopolis] for building materials in the Middle Ages, they took the limestone but left the remains of toppled sculptures of red granite, quartzite, and basalt in place. Among these are intact reliefs 15 feet square and granite falcons that once graced a temple gate dedicated to the pharaoh Nectanebo I (r. 380–362 B.C.). Other finds point to even more impressive monuments—a recently uncovered foot-and-a-half-long stone claw suggests the existence of a sphinx statue 50 feet long. “Whatever sculpture we get is extremely high quality,” Raue says. “Heliopolis was such an important site that we just get the best.”
