Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 484

Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 484

This report is available at http://www.s-gabriel.org/484

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Greetings,

Here's the information we found on Ghawazis.

Unfortunately we can't provide much. We know that the Ghawazis are a group of Egyptian dancers who performed dances which are the ancestors of modern Middle Eastern dances. The earliest documentation about the Ghawazis dates only to the 1700's, and it's not very detailed in terms of naming conventions. There's no solid evidence for the existence of the Ghawazis before this time, although there are records of professional itinerant dancers from well before our period. For more information on the Ghawazis you may want to investigate sources on Middle Eastern dance. We've found that the name references at these sources are extremely poor, but they can provide more in the way of general historical information.

If you want to be a Ghawazi specifically, we recommend that you look at a later-period persona. There were dancers in early period, but the surviving information on the dances of this period is practically non-existent. We can help with names from either late or early-period Egypt.

Arval D'Espas Nord, Pedro de Alcazar, Zenobia Naphtali, and Talan Gwynek contributed to this letter.

We hope this has been helpful, and that we can continue to assist you.

In service,
Alan Fairfax
Academy of S. Gabriel