Egypt land of Light
Sitting in the plane leaving Cairo, I am musing about how I will write my blog. Just before we took off for Egypt I read a blog written by a lady, who took the same organized trip, done by a company called Archeological Paths, in which she does a day by day report. (For those of you who would like to read it, I will append a link to that blog at the end of mine).
(The Marriott entrance with behind it peeking above the pyramid of Giza)
I found it difficult to read after awhile and did not finish it. But that is most likely, because we did the same trip and saw the same things. And I must admit that a lot of her observations of today’s Egypt which she writes about are exactly what I found interesting. And there is nothing more boring than reading your own observations written by somebody else.
(Our daily habit is exiting the bus and prepare for another sight with guide)
(The oldest pyramid, the Djozer (the name of the Pharao buried there)
created by his architect and high priest Imhotep, symbolizing the celestial
power of the deceased)
(Fishing was the daily life line of the people)
(As always taxes or “gifts” is the duty of happy citizens)
I also realized while still in my airplane seat, that I have been exposed to 2 weeks of overload, learning more about pharaohs, hieroglyphs, dynasties, gods, (many many gods), funerals and rebirths during more than 3500 years of fascinating history tales.
(Not all pyramids survive)
So unless you want to do the trip yourself or read the lady’s blog, I decided then and there that I would not try to give you a play by play report and or a history lesson. But unfortunately you do need to have some history in order to put this trip in perspective, so here we go with a short summary of what Sandee, I, our friends Linda and Gary, who joined us and 30plus other people on our bus, did and saw and heard about every day.
(Statues of regular Egyptians of 4000 years ago)
And to “enjoy” all of that, we often got a wakeup call around 3 or 4 or 5 am so we could commence our day before other tour groups were allowed on the sites scheduled for that day.
(What you see from our bus going to or from archeological sites
is Agriculture and unfinished buildings)
(Cairo street sight)
Here is the short version about one of the oldest civilizations in this world:
Religion:
Ancient Egypt was fundamentally a theocracy, where the gods had created life and the universe, led by a divine king, who is a god in his own right and a direct descendant from God Horus. To complicate the story of many many gods that Egyptians worshipped, Horus was the son of Isis, (motherhood and fertility) married to Osiris (god of the underworld). The divine king ran and controlled the country’s organization.
(Statue of Amenhotep III or the Magnificent and his wife Queen Tiye -
he was 12 when he took the throne and married Tiye his life long love elevating
her to Great Royal wife, lead an opulent life, was a great sportsman, hunted many
many lions, while Tiye took care of the Affairs of State. He refused to marry
Egyptian princesses to foreign kings, “no daughter of Egypt should ever leave her land”.
Tiye bore him his successor son Akhenaten, but more about him later)
Egyptians worshipped the sun god Ra as the source of all life.
They believed that Ra had bestowed their rich land upon them for their enjoyment as a Land of Light.
(Statue of Prince Rahotep and his wife Nofret. He was a son of Pharaoh Sneferu
4th dynasty. Unimportant person he was, were it not that these statues have eyes that follow you
as you circle around them, their eyes are inlaid quartz and crystal
Also during this time frame women start using make up)
The gods were powerful but benevolent, and approachable in many ways. The divine king was the hub between the world of the gods and the human sphere.
The gods were responsible for creation and abundance, the kings and elites were primarily responsible for ensuring that the system ran according to a set order and all people were responsible for clean living and daily work throughout the country.
(Pharaoh and his first wife were the symbols of god Ra’s
Relationship with all Egyptians so offerings and praying was
A daily activity for all Egyptians)
The high priests knew, that people are only open to knowledge, truth, love, wisdom, and power when Ra’s light and life force is flowing constantly into their hearts, which is their innermost sanctuary.
(Is this a God? Or if not, what is the story)
For that to happen, mankind had to consciously open their heart to the sun god, by praying to him at the start of each day and by asking him to make his will clear, so that his work could bear fruit.
(God Anubis -Greek word, Egyptians said Inpw- was the god of mummification keeper of the cemeteries)
And as I earlier said, gods were powerful but benevolent, and could be prayed to in many ways, and the god king was the hub between the world of the gods and all humans, and he was therefore responsible for organizing the supply and welfare of his people, and for keeping order.
(God Set, with a dog’s head and flat ears with a tail of evil killed
His brother Osiris to capture the throne only to be killed by Son
Horus. Why did they still prey to him one asks himself)
The ancient Egyptian beliefs were polytheistic, acknowledging the existence of thousands of gods and endless deceased humans all transferred to the other world, be it the Netherworld, which was their name for heaven or they were left to decompose in the outer darkness, in the deepest recesses of the underworld, without flesh, walking upside down, exposed to knives, swords and the fire of hell produced by fire spitting snakes, drinking urine, placed in cauldrons, scorched and cooked and reduced to ashes. You get the picture?
History:
The foundation of the Egyptian state in the Early Dynastic period (c. 3100 BC) marks the beginning of more than 500 kings, belonging to around thirty dynasties, and ending with the Ptolemaic kings and Roman emperors.
(Is this the right picture to go with a history lesson?)
These dynasties are grouped into periods called the Early Dynastic period (c. 31st–27th centuries BC), the Old Kingdom (c. 27th–22nd centuries BC), the Middle Kingdom (c. 21st–17th centuries BC), and the New Kingdom (c. 16th–11th centuries BC), as well as three Intermediate periods, and the late Greco-Roman period (4th century BC–4th century AC).
Does all of this not sound very stilted?
Well, that is what we learned during those 2 weeks and much much more, which I will endeavor to forget in the weeks to come.
The rest of this blog will be about pictures as always and Egypt today as we saw it, and many more very unhistoric observations, adorned with pictures of those ancient times and tidbits of history as it reappears in my cluttered mind.
(Taxi stand in dirty Cairo)
We arrived late late afternoon in Cairo airport and were shuttled to a mini bus that took us to the other side of town crossing the Nile and ending up in the town of Giza, where we were lodging for the first week in a sprawling hotel compound, that on the very day of our arrival had become a Marriott property. I could not even register my Marriott member account, because it was supposedly to be downloaded to their computers that very night.
(Store display as only developing countries can get away with)
Walking the hotel grounds and gazing westwards we saw looming over us the pyramid of Giza, our next door neighbor. In the mid sixties I had wandered around that very pyramid as a poor student on my way to Tanzania, where I was supposed to start fieldwork for my thesis.
(Going home after a shopping expedition)
In those days I was not “protected” from the hustle and bustle of modern day Egypt. Today we return each night to our “oasis” called Mena House by Marriott, because to enter the grounds cars and pedestrians alike have to pass the guards who inspect cars with sniffing dogs and one has to have a reason to be admitted by those guards.
(Are they going or coming back from shopping?)
During each venture outside the compound, our bus was accompanied by a police car. Whenever we exited the bus to visit an ancient site or a restaurant for lunch at least one unobtrusive agent followed us.
Tourism in Egypt has dwindled to levels that alarm the Egyptian government to no end, reason why they field the tourist police to protect those that dare to come to a world, where radical Islamic splinter groups are trying to get on TV, cutting of heads of preferably American citizens. Although Egypt has less beheadings than in many other Islamic neighbor countries.
(Common sight: fruit stand)
Egypt’s main sources of income are the Suez Canal, tourism and natural gas and cotton products. Unemployment is high; joining the army is a career opportunity. (The US still finances a major portion of the military might) the average income is about $11,000 a year.
The tourist sites feature large parking lots for buses that don’t show up anymore and the dwindling number of tourists have to walk at the end of each site visit via the tourist gadget and souvenir shops with more men then tourists, waving stuff in your face for “only a dollar” or otherwise rapidly lowering their asking price as you try to exit this gauntlet as fast as made possible by all that product waving human obstruction.
(The Great Mosque of Mohammed Ali - founder of modern Cairo between 1830 and 1848, part of a defense system on a hill overlooking Cairo)
Our trip had two parts to our edification: first week: “landbased and pyramids” with at midday a luncheon that was boringly consistent: grilled meat or “kofta” and baba ghanoush (eggplant), Aish (pita bread), beans and lentils, hummus, and falafel. In itself it is not a bad spread. But unfortunately after several days one craves something different, not that we did get something different during that first part of the trip. The food was one of the pleasant surprises we got when after a several hours flight south, we arrived at our second: “waterbased week” in Luxor.
(The big fountain on the courtyard leading to the mosque)
The pyramids are history now and mastabas take their place: “Graves”, underground, as in the Valley of the Kings or the temple of queen Hatshepsut and Ramses II’s Abu Simbel rock temples. The cooks on board of our river cruise boat had good and varied options every day for us to sample. And the hectic pace of the first week changed to a pleasant slower adventure tour.
(Inside the great Mosque the immense size is dwarfing)
(The carpet pattern shows praying position for the believers to kneel in the right direction. I gave up counting the number of praying spots)
But back to week one. Driving through greater Cairo is an adventure in itself as 6 to sometimes 8 rows of cars honk their way through the town, snaking from one lane to the next in the hope they will reach their destination faster that way.
Mind you the road they travel on was laid out for 4 rows but only the rule of the claxon or horn and a “don’t you dare” attitude reigns supreme in this country, resulting in the inevitable “slow as molasses” traffic patterns that can be observed as far as the eye reaches.
Cairo is a dirty overpopulated city, where 20 million people live, among them 1 million plus people that live in the sprawling several miles long graveyard (without water, sewer or power) that flanks our road on both sides during an outing to the mosque of Muhammad Ali or Alabaster Mosque, on the grounds of the Citadel of Cairo. An almost 200 year old grand walled building complex, sitting high above the city also known as the city of the thousand minarets. This sounds more romantic than it is.
Yes by night the lights at the base of the complex highlights it well and creates an eerie beauty, but by day the city is and remains what it is, a ramshackled dirty city with thousands of unfinished building complexes and trash all over.
(Camels in Egypt are tourist animals. These days their only reason
for their existence. And there are not enough tourists)
As our guide Ahmed explained, “decades ago every day young men with carts roamed the narrow alleys that lead to the main broader streets to pickup the bags of trash that were placed in front of the homes. The carts were then unloaded on the sidewalks of the wider streets awaiting trash trucks. However the city government in their wisdom “innovated” the system with modern imported trash trucks and “fired” the thousands of trash collectors”.
(Typical entrance to an uncovered temple)
(Gary returning after an attempt to go down all the way to an empty burial room).
The expectation was that people from the alleys would bring their trash to the main streets as the trucks were to big to drive there. It seems to me that the new system has even trashed the main wider fareways, or the trucks are not coming anymore. Even the canals in the city or stopped up like non-flushing toilet bowls. (Pardon the expression, but I want you to visualize it)
As to the unfinished housing, large and small, be it apartment complexes or single homes: as in many lesser developed countries, real estate is a “retirement plan”. Everybody hopes to own one day for their own use or to receive rental income. However the completion of any construction is depending on money being available. And in many of these countries money can become scarce or not available, resulting in unfinished buildings awaiting future completion, when and if Allah so wills, money will be received again.
But for us the visitor, it is a strange sight, all those unoccupied, unfinished buildings.
(Dr Zahi Hawass straight from his PBS show to see just us)
One of the reasons this trip rose to the top of our ever growing list of destinations we prioritize, was the fact that Dr. Zahi Hawass would take part in this tour as frequent site host or evening lecturer. The well known minister, or as they call it in Egypt, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities under President Anwar al-Sadat lost his position under successor Hosni Mubarak, but continued his work as self proclaimed savior of Egypt’s antiquities with numerous well funded tv shows and speaking tours, where he features his well known hat. Dr Hawass was very informative, but a bit of a pompous ass, and inclined to speak in the “I” form as if he uncovered everything we saw by himself.
(Lecture at the famous Sphinx between its legs. No other tourists
Get that close unless you take this tour)
(Very very early in the morning a lecture about the pyramid workers)
Also as an extra bonus we had “High Tea” at the home of Mrs. Jehan Sadat. She and one of her daughters entertained us with stories about her assasinated husband and his efforts in making peace with Israel. All of us had our picture taken with her in her living room under the portrait of her husband. She was truly a gracious hostess who took her time to talk to each of us.
(Family picture I found while wandering through several rooms)
I Let me end here and attach the earlier promised blog and proceed to my second part of this story
Http://sandyschopbachbucketlist.blogspot.com/
(A wedding took place here at the Marriott)
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