Rock Stars Scorpions Come to Egypt's New Capital for 60th Anniversary
Jul 10, 2025
When Scorpions hit the stage in Egypt this October, they'll be doing so in a city fast emerging as a destination for global live music. Set for October 15th in the New Capital, the show marks the Cairo stop on the band's 'Coming Home – 60 Years of Scorpions' tour.
Formed in 1965, the German rock icons have spent six decades touring the world with a catalogue of hits that includes 'Rock You Like a Hurricane', 'Still Loving You' and 'Wind of Change'. Known for their high-energy performances and cross-generational appeal, the band's anniversary tour celebrates a legacy defined by longevity, melody, and global connection.
The concert is being staged through a joint collaboration between ACUD, Live Nation Middle East, and TicketsMarche. The partnership reflects an ongoing effort to bring international talent to Egypt with world-class production standards. Backed by ACUD's urban development strategy, the New Capital is positioning itself as a new regional hub for major cultural programming.
Tickets are now available via TicketsMarche's official website.
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Al-Ahram Weekly
4 days ago
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SCMR bans Maha El-Sagheer from media for 6 months, refers case to prosecution
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CairoScene
18-07-2025
- CairoScene
The Real Pyramid Scheme: The Colonial Issue at Egyptology's Core
In 2016, two artists walked into Berlin's Neues Museum with a hacked Xbox Kinect sensor concealed in a scarf. They weren't tourists. They weren't researchers. They were there to perform a unique heist. In front of them stood the bust of Queen Nefertiti: serene, ancient, impossibly elegant. She had been excavated from Amarna, her home in Egypt, in 1912 by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt and exported to Germany through deliberate deception. In official documents, Borchardt described her as a painted plaster head of no significant value. Privately, he called her 'the most beautiful object ever found.' Germany has refused every request for her return ever since - they've never even allowed a brief loan. Al-Badri and Nelles lingered in front of the queen, pretending to gawk at her while the Kinect sensor - originally designed for video games - captured thousands of data points from every angle. 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And it provoked precisely the kind of questions that Egyptology, for over two centuries, has avoided: Who owns the past? Who controls its images, its language, its circulation? What is more original, an object in glass behind museum walls, or a copy that breathes back into the culture from which it was extracted? To speak of decolonisation, then, is not simply to demand the return of artefacts. It is to reclaim the right to interpret, to narrate, to critique. It is to dismantle the systems, academic, bureaucratic, financial, that continue to privilege foreign voices and frameworks. It is to insist that heritage is not a spectacle, nor a commodity, nor a weapon. It is a relationship. "Not through national branding or a single triumphant repatriation, but through democratising knowledge, restoring agency, and building political coalitions,' Monica Hanna tells CairoScene. 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Ancient Egypt is treated as a glorious but dead civilisation, valuable only when extracted, classified and displayed. Contemporary Egyptians, in this framework, are not the inheritors of pharaonic legacy but its accidental neighbours. And when Egyptian archaeologists do enter the field, they are too often expected to mimic the tools, citations and tones of Western academia to gain legitimacy. Access is conditional. Voice is conditional. In recent years, the call to decolonise Egyptology has gained momentum. Conferences now feature panels on inclusivity. Grants are allocated for Egyptian scholars. Partnerships are struck between foreign and local institutions. But how much of this is performance? Austrian archaeologist Uroš Matić, in his 2023 paper 'Postcolonialism as a Reverse Discourse in Egyptology', warns that much of this activity reproduces, rather than dismantles, colonial logic. The discipline, he argues, has adopted postcolonial theory like a costume, borrowing terms like 'hybridity,' 'entanglement' and 'third space' without understanding their origins or implications. In postcolonial theory, hybridity is a powerful concept. It's not just about cultural mixing or visual combinations. As theorist Homi Bhabha explains, hybridity is about what happens when the colonised mimic the coloniser, not to become them, but to subtly expose and undermine their authority. It's a kind of resistance that happens in the cracks - an 'in-between' space where power is echoed, exaggerated and sometimes turned against itself. A true example of postcolonial hybridity in Egyptology might look very different. 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But in practice, it often becomes a euphemism for occupation. Matić calls this dynamic 'reverse discourse', another Foucauldian term for when the language of liberation is used within the very framework of domination. Postcolonial concepts are deployed not to critique power, but to camouflage it. Reclaiming Egyptology requires more than symbolic gestures, it demands structural transformation across every layer of the field. It begins with reforming excavation labour practices aligned with today's cost of living, offering transparent briefings about the significance of the work, and crediting local labourers in publications. Beyond the site, it means building democratic infrastructure, funding regional libraries and cultural centres in Upper Egypt and the Delta, translating core Egyptological texts into Arabic, and establishing community heritage councils with decision-making power. 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Egypt Independent
14-07-2025
- Egypt Independent
Calls to cancel Rock band Scorpions' concert in Egypt over supporting Israel
The German rock band Scorpions will perform in Egypt as part of a tour on October 15th, marking the band's 60th anniversary. As soon as the upcoming concert was announced, a large number of social media users called for its cancellation due to the band's support for Israel and the raising of the Israeli flag at its concerts. Social media users called on the head of the Musicians Syndicate, Mostafa Kamel, to intervene and cancel the concert. They launched a hashtag called #cancelscorpions, sharing photos of the band waving the Israeli flag at concerts. The Scorpions are a German rock band founded in 1965 by guitarist Rudolf Schenker. The band's longest-running and most successful lineup included vocalists Schenker and Klaus Meine, guitarists Matthias Jabs and Francis Buchholz, and bassist Hermann Rarebel. This is the band's second visit to the country, following their first to Egypt in 2005, when they held two concerts at the foot of the Pyramids, organized by the German Embassy in Cairo and Culture Ministry, and in Sharm el-Sheikh on November 17th and 19th.
