Walk Like An Egyptian

During the Winter break, we had the opportunity to travel to Egypt during ten days. Our impressions of Egypt are quite conflicting. We loved Ancient Egypt, but could not believe what we saw in Modern Egypt. For that reason, this blog entry will be divided into 2 parts: Ancient and Modern Egypt.

We started our Ancient Egypt Adventure with a visit to the world renowned Egyptian Museum in Cairo. That extensive collection was breathtakingly amazing, spread over 4500 years of history and giving us a first look at some of the marvels of the ancient world. Unfortunately, photographs were not allowed within the museum, but our memories will never forgot the upclose encounters with the eleven Royal Mummies, such as Ramses II, Amenhotep IV and the controversial queen Hatshepsut. Those were key in our trip, as we later visited Ramses II Abu Simble Temple and the queen Hatshepsut temple on the West Bank in Luxor as well as some Royal Tombs in the Valley of the King.

The life-changing moment for all of us was seeing King Tutankhamun’s treasures found intact in his tomb in 1922. His collection is extensive and mostly outshines everything else. It occupies most of the upstairs of the museum building and even exhibits the four guilded shrines that fitted inside each other and held King Tut’s gold sarcophagus. At the center of this collection was the young Pharaoh’s Golden Mask displayed in a glass box that we were able to see it within inches. My whole life I had seen it in pictures and learned about it in history classes, but seeing it so close was an unforgettable moment, forever seared in my memory.

The children were equally amazed at seeing the Golden Mask and the entire collection. They kept asking questions about how, why and how come that we attempted to answer as best as we could. They also were asked to wait until we could visit some of the other Ancient Egyptian sites and receive more explanations. Alex kept circling around the glass box containing King Tut’s mask and, looking at it from below, he noticed that the hieroglyphics had been carved from the back. Although mesmerized by them, Emma took an instant dislike to the Canopic Jars and to the idea of cutting your left side to remove your viscera and storing them into jars.

Seeing the Egyptian museum on the first day of our trip in Egypt was a great way to introduce Ancient Egypt to the family, to make connections and refer back to it during the rest of our jump back in Ancient time.

On Christmas Eve, we went to Saqqara, the site of the most ancient necropolis, strewn with tombs, temples and pyramids. Walking through a narrow and low corridor, bent in two, we entered the Step Pyramid of Zoser, the oldest stone monument, only 4600 years old. The walls of the tomb were beautifully engraved with hieroglyphics and scenes from everyday life, unlike the Giza Pyramids that are much less decorated.

We then did what every tourist passing through Egypt is sure to visit: the Giza plateau and its three main pyramids. Thankfully, we chose to see them on Camel back and approached them from the back, instead of the heavily trafficked front entrances packed with tourists. Emma and I were on the front camel while the boys rode the second camel and we slowly approached the pyramids, discovering them peak at us behind a dune.

 The sights were breathtaking and the peacefulness of the site was unbelievable, just a few hundred meters from the hustle and bustle of the city, yet totally quiet and respectful to the dead who were buried on the Giza plateau thousands of years ago. Those three pyramids are gigantic and make humans look like ants. We stood on camel back up-close to one of them and even touched the limestone building block…and were barely at the top of the first rock. Imagine a whole bunch of them expertly assembled together and measuring over 140 meters high!

On our way back to the Camel Stables, we encountered the Sphinx, which, surprisingly to all of us, was not as imposing or round as we all expected. It stood toward the front of the site, keeping a watch on the pyramids and looking toward the city of Cairo. You’ve all seen photos of the Giza pyramids but did you realize that the city has grown all the way to their steps. Nowadays, they are standing at the very edge of the desert, although when they were built, they stood far from the royal city of Memphis, about 25 km away. We couldn’t help ask the questions about how they were built… and were told that only 3 months of the year were they able to work on the pyramids, when the Nile River was cresting and coming close to the site, to transport the limestone blocks from the quarries on the East Bank to the Plateau on the West bank.

After that wonderful camel ride, on Christmas eve, we took the overnight train to Aswan, a 14 hour trek to the very South of Egypt. On Christmas day, we toured the Philae Temples on Aglikia island in the lake between the two Aswan dams.

In the 1960s, the entire complex had to be moved from a now flooded island to its current location and present a richness of temples, built by the Pharaohs, then added on by the Romans and even being used by the early Christians who turned one of its halls into a chapel.

 As everywhere in Egypt, several of its representations had been damaged by vandals and some walls even presented signs of graffiti by soldiers from foreign armies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since the temples are on an island, we had to ride a little boat between the island and the mainland, which made it all worth it to the two children.

The next morning our wake-up call came at 2:45 am and we were ready for a bus pick up at 3:15 am. We formed a convoy to travel together to the magnificent Great Temple of Abu Simbel built by Pharaoh Ramses II. In our convoy, en route to the site, a tragic accident involving another tourist bus killed 8 American passengers. We didn’t learn about the accident until later when we saw the wrecked bus on the way back to Aswan and when we started receiving concerned emails and Facebook messages asking if we were ok.

Just like the Philae temples, both Abu Simbel Temples were relocated on their current site in the 1960s to save them from the rising waters of Lake Nasser, formed with the completion of the Aswan High Dam. Amazingly, you cannot tell that they were not built on site…

The front of the temple is made of four gigantic statues of Ramses II, flanking an opening into the temple, carved out of the mountainside. We felt like minuscule ants next to the statues and also inside the temple, a feeling that was repeated several times during the trip, as we stood next to statues or pillars. The Ancient Egyptians truly knew how to built grandiose monuments that stood the test of time, as they are still standing and sporting some of the original wall paintings from 3000 to 4000 years ago.

We worked our way back North and stopped in Luxor, the site of ancient Thebes where the Upper Egypt dynasties set up their permanent residences. At the height of its power, the city had almost one million inhabitants, more than twice its current population. In Luxor, history is all around, with temples situated in the middle of the city and the famed alley of the Sphinx in the middle of a busy intersection. The West Bank is the site of the Valley of the Kings and Queens where many pharaohs, nobles and regular old folks were buried

We made it the Temple of Karnak, a spectacular complex of sanctuaries, pylons and obelisks dedicated to the gods and the glory of the pharaohs and also the second most visited tourist attraction in Egypt, after the Pyramids. We were most impressed by the Hypostyle Hall, a hall area of 50,000 sq ft (5,000 m2) with 134 massive columns arranged in 16 rows. 122 of these columns are 10 meters tall, and the other 12 are 21 meters tall with a diameter of over three meters.

The vastness of the site was overwhelming and we hardly had enough time to see it all, one of the caveats of going with a tour and having to stick to a program. The kids took their time to walk like an Egyptian and jump in front of a variety of monuments, which became a must do at various sites we went through!

We also took a few humbling steps in the Valley of the Kings and visited the tombs of Ramses iV, Merenpath and Ramses I, which again did not allow ANY photographs inside the Valley and not just inside the tombs! The tombs were all dug in the limestone rock mountain and were built in similar ways: the usual tomb plan consists of a long inclined rock-cut corridor, descending through one or more halls, mirroring the descending path of the sun-god into the underworld, leading to the burial chamber. The first tomb we went in was Ramses IV and presented us with beautiful, intact and vividly colored hieroglyphics and carvings..it truly was amazing. As a lot of ancient sites, this tomb also contained Coptic symbols and graffiti as it was used as a Monastery in the 2nd century AD.

The second tomb was that of Merenpath, the 15th son of Ramses II: it was newly opened, as we still could smell the freshly cut planks used to build the pathway and fences for visitors. The burial chamber contained a limestone coffin and had a huge ceiling. The walls were not as nicely decorated as Ramses IV nor did it compare with the grand Abu Simbel temple of his father Ramses II.

The last tomb we saw was Ramses I and was extremely steep! The guide had given us an advance warning before letting us go in. It was hot inside, due to the narrowness of the corridor, the number of visitors and the effort to climb up all these steps on the way out! The colors used inside those tombs were so vivid you could easily forget they had been painted over 3000 years ago, using natural dyes: charcoal for black, chalk for white, a mix of charcoal and chalk for grey, egg yolk for yellow, crushed quartz for blue and green and the dum fruit, still found at the souk was used to produce red, at least according to our guide!

We did not make it inside King Tut’s tomb, for one because we did not buy a separate ticket for it nor did we want to fight the crowds to get in it. After having seen the treasures at the Egyptian museum, it would almost have been a letdown to see his minuscule tomb, built in a haste over 70 days, in sharp contrast with the 20-25 years average spent on the other pharaohs tombs! We preferred to keep our impression of his treasure intact!

Our next site was the Temple built by Queen Hatshepsut, who was a full fledge female pharaoh for 22 years. How she got there is quite controversial as she married her own brother then poisoned him to rule alone. She later was killed by her own nephew who took over power from her. Our guide that day explained that part of history using Emma as the queen, Alex as her brother and Worth as their father, turning history into an exciting soap opera!

This Pharaoh Hatshepsut's reign was long and prosperous. She was successful in warfare early in her reign and inaugurated a long peaceful era. She re-established trading relationships and brought great wealth to Egypt, which enabled large scale building projects. Most of this was erased from records after her death, and by defacing her temples and any cartouche that led to her recognition. Only her appearance as a very feminine pharaoh wearing fake beard and use of feminine when talking about her in texts led historians back on her trace. Her temple was built on three levels, presenting perfect symmetry and used another temple’s stones for its construction, making recycling and being green not such a modern concept after all! The kids loved climbing the steps and discovering the niches on each side, running around and barely letting us keep with them. We almost lost Alex a couple of time in that temple!

Our last cultural stop in Luxor was the Mummification museum, which explained the HOW and WHY of the mummies, as well as presented several examples of human and animal mummies (a ram, a goose, an alligator, a baboon, a cat, a baby alligator and a fish). The kids favorite part was the instruments used to cut and scrape the skulls and abdomens, again flashing back to the Royal Mummies we had seen in the Egyptian Museum.

So far, we had followed the tourist trails…on our return to Cairo, we purposefully attempted to find the less traveled trails and were lucky enough in finding Memo (Mahmoud), a cab driver/guide/history buff/ex-soccer player/ex-engineer/ex-boxer who took us to the Cairo not discussed in travel books. Call him at this number 010 149 3559 next time you’re in Cairo, we highly recommend him! So, Memo took us to the tombs of Muhammad Ali Pasha’s family, in the heart of the city of the dead. For a little history on Muhammad Ali’s story, follow this link Muhammad Ali Pasha .

We even got to climb on top of the tombs and see the city from up there, again, something that tourists never get to do…all it took was a banknote slipped in the hand of the gatekeeper and he let us go up on the roof!

From there, we went through busy market streets inside the city of the dead to the Sayeda Zinab Mosque, dedicated to and named after the granddaughter of the Prophet Mohammed. Sayeda Zeinab sought refuge in Egypt after the Ummayads slew her brother, Hussein.  Her body is entombed inside the mosque. Many Egyptians—especially women—consider Sayeda Zeinab a saint, and visit the mosque seeking her baraka (blessing) in matters of fortune and health. This large mosque was renovated many times over the centuries and is distinguished by its tin dome. Its interior is intricately decorated and very colorful. We took several pictures that do not completely render it justice.

For once in Egypt, we were the only tourists there and it even felt like we were the first tourists there, as everyone was staring. Emma and Alex’s hair and faces were also touched by women who kept on smiling at us. But stepping off the beaten path was worth it as we saw hidden Cairo and got close to its people.

Overall, the History of Ancient Egypt is fascinating and having been able to see all its traces was a once-in-a lifetime opportunity. Taking the children with us to Ancient Egypt was also rewarding as they got to experience it first hand and will be able to draw on their travels later on when studying about Egypt! How many Middle School students can actually say they’ve seen the Golden Mask of King Tut, the mummy of Ramses II, the Pyramids, the Temples of Karnak and Abu Simbel or the inside of tombs in the Valley of the Kings.