Egypt!

Tuesday, April 7, 2009 – ALEXANDRIA, Egypt
It is the desert! Chilly in the morning and hot during the day
Egypt is part of our cultural past, appearing prominently in both the classical and biblical traditions with influence from the Orient, the Islamic world and Africa.

We were up at 4:45 and out the door by 6:30AM!! Cool and sunny and the port of Alexandria is beautiful. New building (which is for looks only as you do not pass through it!!) and nice landscaping. Even the post office comes onboard.

(In case you wonder how mail is posted…in some ports, the post office comes onboard, along with the local bank, to do the necessities. If neither comes onboard, the ship handles the posting of mail at the next available port and the cost is added to our onboard account.)

There were 37 buses to take most of us to Cairo (3 hour drive) to see the pyramids in Giza and either the Egyptian Museum or the Step Pyramid at Djoser/Saqqara. We traveled in a convoy to Cairo and passed many oil refineries, fishing boats on a marsh which looked like they were right off a Vietnamese postcard, and fields of vegetables and fruits. They grow dates, aloe, oranges and olives in abundance and the entrance to the farms has a beautifully decorated archway. There were several food processing plants and new developments where you can live, study and shop in your neighborhood so you do not have to fight the traffic in to and out of Cairo. There were very large cone-shaped figures for homing pigeons also.

It was an interesting drive and we enjoyed the company on our bus. We were on the back-up bus along with the extra guides and management of the tour company so we had an opportunity to mingle with them. The back-up bus is exactly what it states. If a tour bus breaks down, they have this one available right away to keep the tour moving. Brilliant to be so forward thinking…but you have to be when you have passengers with only 15 hours in a port and the distances are so great. We were always the last bus in line.

Horses and carriages and donkeys blended in with the large trucks, buses, cars and tri-wheeled cars on the major roads. They do not use horns, they do not use turn signals, we saw very few stop lights in a city of over 15,000,000, there are police check points all over the place, they create their own driving lanes as very few are marked anyway and, yes, we did see one accident as a car sped along and flipped over and another Cunard bus was stuck in traffic for an hour due to another accident. A front seat on the tour bus is sometimes NOT the best seat in the house.

Our first stop was at the most famous site in Egypt: the pyramids at Giza, the sole survivors of the Seven Wonders of the World. Each pyramid complex has a number of features: pyramid temple, causeway and valley temple. The pyramid stood within a paved court and enclosure wall with the temple on the eastern side and a statue of the dead king in an adjacent shrine. The entrance to the pyramid was on the northern side. Satellite pyramids were thought to be burial places for queens. A causeway connected the pyramid temple with the valley temple which stood at the edge of the flood plane. Used to bring the casing stone from the river during construction, the causeway was afterwards enclosed to serve as the corridor between the two temples.

The Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) dates from 2589-2566 BC. The pyramid was believed to be the repository of Divine Wisdom but Egyptologists have no doubt that these were nothing more than royal tombs. The largest (Khufu) covers 13 acres at its base, had an original height of 481 feet, of which the top 31 feet are now missing. It was originally faced in fine white limestone. You can visit inside the pyramid but it is rather an anticlimax and claustrophobic. The corridor is150 feet long and the King’s Chamber is built of granite with an empty and unadorned black granite sarcophagus. The ceiling of the chamber has nine slabs and there are five relieving chambers above the burial chamber which cannot be seen. On another side of the pyramid, a cache was discovered which contained the coffin and burial furniture of Queen Hetepheres but her coffin was empty.

There was a Boat Museum housing a cedar wooden boat of 140 feet long which would have ridden very high in the water. It may actually have been used to take the kings’ mummified body to Abydos and bring it back to Giza for burial.

The second pyramid of Khafre (Chephren) is from 2558-2532 BC. It is built on slightly higher ground with a steeper inclined and appears to be larger than the other, but is not.
The Awsan red granite blocks and limestone blocks have been fitted into position rather than just being piled up. Inside was a floor of alabaster and there were 23 statues of the king – whose fragments are now in the Egyptian Museum.

The smallest of the three main pyramids is Menkaure built between 2532 and 2503 BC.
The funerary temple was completed in mud-brick and a series of splendid sculptures was found here depicting the king and his consort, with the goddess Hathor and the nome deities. In alabaster and schist, they are now in the Egyptian Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

There were many camels and horses around the pyramids and you could ride them all. We took the camel ride and have photos with the pyramids in the background. Today, the city is just outside the entrance gates of the pyramids but so are the sands of the desert! You can ride the camel out into the desert and get all three pyramids in a great photo. The pyramids used to be 6.8 miles from the city.

Just down the hill sits the Sphinx, from the Greek word “living image”. It was carved around 10,000 BC from quarrying stone leftover from the Great Pyramid and measures 66 feet high and 187 feet in length. The body is that of a lion and deterioration of the Sphinx is due to the poor quality of the stone, time, pollution and a rising water table. The place is surrounded by vendors!

Cairo, once dubbed “Mother of the World”, is the largest city in Africa and the Arab World. The conflict between Egypt and Rome provided the background to one of the greatest romances of literature, the love of Antony and Kleopatra. Egypt plays a prominent role in the biblical narratives, particularly in the Old Testament with the stories of Joseph and Pharaoh and of Moses and the Exodus.

Islamic Cairo: Mosques are the place where the Muslim community gathers for the ritual prayers on Fridays; they are the only prayers that are recited in public or in communion. It has always had a political as well as a religious importance. Before reciting prayers, the faithful engage in political discourses. This encourages social integration since each locality has only one main mosque. It may be compared to that of the Christian cathedral in history. The main difference is that the mosque is not considered by the Muslims as a house of God but rather as a house of believers, a haven where people gather in observance of the rites of prayer. In its most traditional form, it is composed of an open interior court off which are located various rooms and chambers, adorned with elegant porticoes. We hear the call to prayer during our tours, as they are heard five times a day.

Coptic Cairo: The Copts have lived peacefully alongside the Muslim majority; they were never persecuted by the Muslims in Egypt. The most ancient and interesting of the remaining Coptic churches are situated in the heart of Old Cairo. The early churches were usually constructed according to a Roman Basilica plan with a central nave with two side aisles separated by a colonnade and an apse at one end. The north aisle is reserved for women. The sanctuary almost always consists of three chapels, each with its own altar. A throne for the bishop and seats of the officiating clergy are behind the altar. The churches are extremely simple and rather plain with a narrow doorway in order to conceal the presence of a religious building in a sea of houses.

The Egyptian Museum is the largest museum in the country for Egyptian artifacts. It has outgrown its space and is somewhat congested. The ground floor has statuary and statuary and statuary! You just cannot imagine how cluttered and dusty they are; makes you wonder how many more are in storage. And you think your garage is cluttered???? The upper floor has the Tutankhamun galleries, royal coffins and jewelry.

We also toured the Step Pyramids, the Third Dynasty Step Pyramid of Djoser. This is the earliest large-scale stone building in the world. The complex comprises courts and halls surrounding the pyramid itself. Many of the buildings are in fact dummies: rubble structures faced in polished stone, but without internal chambers. You enter via a columned hall with carved great doors standing permanently open. There is a huge courtyard and as they are still excavating, you are able to see steps descending into the earth to get an idea of the depth of the original pyramid. You can barely see the bottom so it is quite deep! You cannot access the steps but they say there are stelae (inscriptions on columns) showing the king performing the rituals of the sed-festival and the faience tiles imitate reed matting (now restored and in the Egyptian Museum).

We also visited the pyramid of Unas, from 2375-2345 BC, the last king of the Fifth Dynasty. The burial chamber was interesting. You descend a steep stairway into a low corridor which ends in a suite of rooms. The burial chamber is covered with inscriptions in sunken relief filled with blue pigment, which are the Pyramid Texts, prayers and utterances to effect the resurrection of the king. His basalt sarcophagus is faced in alabaster and delicately carved and painted. One room was used for the vessels (urns) to hold what he might need in the next world – jewelry, food, clothing…

To get to this area, you pass a canal and a continuous stream of shops and schools (even the international school) and small plots of ground where they are farming. It is fascinating to watch the activities from the bus window – horses pulling carriages alongside the small trucks and cars and large tour buses. No lane markings and no speed limit and very few lights to control the traffic. At one point, on the main road out of the city, we were detained in traffic for about an hour. The turning lane from the opposite side of the highway did not have a turning signal or stop sign but had been able to inch their way forward to cross over our lane and we were stopped. I’ll see if I can explain this better so you can understand it…They were following each other so closely there was no way for our lane to proceed and in order to continue their turning, they were making a U-turn into our lane and then another U-turn so they were facing us head on and THEN turning to the LEFT to get out of our lane of traffic. It was unbelievable. They were facing us in our lanes and on our right hand shoulder of the road facing us! The bus driver and guide were hollering and shaking their fists and I can only imagine what they were saying. Finally the two of them exited our bus and went over to one public bus and attempted to physically pull the driver out of his seat!!! I turned away at that point. Police finally arrived on the scene and stopped their flow of traffic and we were allowed to proceed. Never attempt to drive in Cairo.

We reached the ship fifteen minutes before sail-away. The sunset over the Desert Road was beautiful, as was the full moon shining over the towns now lit with a few lights.

The entertainer was Nick Lewin, a comedian. I am so far behind in writing this that I honestly can’t remember if he was funny or not!!

My lesson for the day:
Sand + dust = straw hair
The city of Alexandria itself is very interesting but we did not have time to explore on this trip, and I remember very little from being there 26 years ago. With a population of 4.1M, it is the 2nd largest city in Egypt and the city’s largest seaport. It extends 20 miles along the Mediterranean Sea and is an important industrial center because of its natural gas and oil pipelines from Suez. It was founded in 334BC by Alexander the Great and remained Egypt’s capital for nearly a thousand years. It was known for the Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (a gigantic mirror reflected the sun during the day and firelight at night to guide ships to port); the Library of Alexandria, the largest library in the ancient world; and the catacombs of Kom el Shuqafa, one of the Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages (an ornate complex arranged in three levels with a tomb, statues and pillars and a large banquet hall). Ongoing maritime archeology (yes, maritime archeology) began in 1994 and is revealing details of a city named Rhakotis.

“Civilization is not by any means any easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other is by being corrupt.” Oscar Wilde, Lord Henry, in “The Picture of Dorian Gray”