Walk Like an Egyptian . . .

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By Dan

. . . which means do an absolutely amazing, death-defying sort of limbo between passing cars, buses, taxis, and donkey carts. I knew I should have spent more time playing dodge ball in third grade! I especially like that at night, many cars drive without their lights on, as a way to save on the battery or something. (That adds to the degree of difficulty a little!) As Christina mentioned in her last entry, it’s really quite an amazing process. You just take a deep breath and wade in – and if you freeze up or lose your confidence, you’re dead. We’re starting to feel pretty proficient at it, and the kids know that they let go of our hands or fail to respond immediately to every tug at their peril.

While Cairo has been, well, an experience, it has also given us the chance to see some absolutely spectacular stuff. To get ourselves properly oriented, we started out at the Egyptian Museum, which was a short walk from our hotel. It is just awesome. They have so much great stuff, and much of it is just sort of piled into cases or stuffed into corners, with no explanation whatsoever. It’s a total embarrassment of riches. I kept thinking that every other museum in the world would love to get its hands on any one of the Egyptian Museum’s items, and the Egyptian Museum can’t handle all of its collection. But, if everything in the Egyptian Museum got a full description, we’d all feel duty-bound to spend 3 weeks working our way through it.

We started with a basically chronological survey, opening with a beautiful sort of bas-relief stone carving representing the first pharaoh to unite Upper and Lower Egypt, dating from 3100 BC. For those of you doing the math at home, that’s more than 5000 years ago! And, it is in nearly perfect shape, with all of the detail of the man and his outfit perfectly clear. It continued from there. I guess one of the great things about being in a very dry climate, is that stuff doesn’t rot or fall apart as fast, and for whatever reason, later generations didn’t take as many pot shots at or otherwise deface a lot of the stuff that was out there. We couldn’t stop marveling at the condition of much of what we saw: colors still vibrant, lines and shapes still distinct, and everything very accurate at capturing the emotions of the subjects being represented. And it was 3, 4, and 5,000 years old!

And, that’s not all, folks. They’ve got all of the King Tut stuff. Actually, there’s a big exhibit of items from the tomb of Tutankhamun that just opened in London, but we didn’t even notice the absence of a few pieces. The sarcophagi, the jewelry, the famous death mask, the furniture – it just went on and on. And it was 3500 years old!

Oh, yeah, we do have two fairly ghoulish kids, and Halloween was only a few weeks ago, so we did pay the big (extra) bucks for entrance into the Mummy Room. To stare into the eyes of a man who lived and breathed, and imagine him walking the earth with all of the pomp and ceremony that would have gone along with being a pharaoh, 3 or 4,000 years ago, was really amazing. Most of them still had plenty of hair on their heads, you could tell how good (or not) their teeth were, and you could see clear family resemblances between a father, son, and grandson who were all there. Wow! Fortunately, no nightmares to report that night. Chalk it up as a very successful visit.

Cairo is pretty well known for some big, pointy things on its outskirts, so we spent a day doing the Pyramids A to Z tour. Because things are spread out, we splurged for a guide (Hamdy, who Christina mentioned in her entry), and got to see it all. Starting off chronologically, we visited Saqqara, which I remember learning about in seventh grade. Saqqara is the site of the “step pyramid”, which is the oldest monumental stone structure on earth, or so they say. A pharaoh named Zoser had a very creative architect named Imhotep, who decided that it would be more fun to build stuff on top of the simple stone platform that had previously marked tombs. So, he built about 4 tiers in a sort of stepped shape, creating job security for centuries for the guys who like to drag multi-thousand pound stones around under the hot desert sun. Perhaps as impressive as the pyramid itself was the design of the temple adjoining the pyramid. Imhotep came up with all sorts of clever designs in stone intended to replicate the things that people would have had in their homes but made out of less permanent items. Thus, he came up with the first stone columns, styled to look like bundles of reeds; stone outcroppings that looked like doors; etc.

Following Imhotep’s step pyramid, we went to Dashur, which is something new and very cool. The site has been part of a military base, and thus until recently was not accessible by the public. The pharaoh Sneferu saw Imhotep’s pyramid, and thought that he could do better; thus, he had the first true pyramid (with slanting sides) built. His first try went up at too sharp of an angle, though, and in the middle of construction it started to collapse. So, they changed the angle to a less sharp one, resulting in a rather odd-looking thing that does look kind of amateurish. Sneferu didn’t want that to be how he was remembered, so he had another one built, which became known as the “red pyramid”. Its base is almost as big as that of the Great Pyramid, but it goes up at a softer angle, so isn’t nearly as tall. Still, it was really impressive.

Last stop was Giza, where we saw the Great Pyramid of Cheops, and the two others there, plus the Sphinx. What a scene! After a very mellow experience at Dashur and Saqqara, it felt like pandemonium (hmmm, a pretty good description of Cairo generally?) at Giza. The tourists, the guides, the donkeys, the camels, the constant shouts of “Hey Mister!”, “You want postcards?”, “Camel ride?”, “How about ancient carving?” were all a little mind-boggling. You really need to become a little detached from the whole thing – otherwise, you’ll be a bundle of frayed nerves. It had been a long day, but we did recognize that we were in one of those really special places on this earth that everyone knows and everyone would like to see, and the story behind it all is really fascinating.

Of course, we are tourists, and we have kids, and so we did bite on the camel ride offer (albeit, the short one). Goofy and hokey as it may be, it really was very fun to see Christina and the kids each perched high on top of one of those funny looking beasts, and ambling out into the desert. Not surprisingly, everybody involved in the whole camel rental business had a separate angle, and a hand outstretched, but I suppose that’s part of the charm. The head camel-wrangler, who looked exactly like what a camel-wrangler should look like, must have some pretty sweet cash flow. I had visions of him ducking behind a sand dune, changing into his Armani and Gucci, and driving off in his BMW, laughing all the way to the golf club.

But, hey, that’s Egypt. You pay a certain price to see some mind-blowing stuff. And, along the way, you are reminded of a few things. For one, how weird fate is, and thus how impossible it is to explain why some kids are born to the easy life, and others are forced to hustle postcards before they’ve lost all of their baby teeth. For another, how strange it is that different cultures and communities have evolved as they have. And, most importantly, that at the end of the day, just about everybody is doing what he or she can to take care of his or her family. So, I’m really glad that we are in Egypt. What Grayson and Abby are learning from walking and driving around, seeing what’s out there, talking to the people we meet, watching their parents interact with folks, and discussing why things are happening as they are, is actually a lot more important in the long run than remembering whether it was Thutmosis II or Thutmosis III who built the black or the yellow pyramid during the 27^th or 93^rd dynasty. And, it’s something they can only really learn by being here.