Cairo and the Pyramids

While Clodagh stayed on board at our port of El Sokhna and our friends went off to look at monasteries, I had a 6.30 start for a long drive to Cairo.

On route our excellent guide, Rafda, gave us a run down of 7,500 years of the history of Egypt. The more interesting part starts from 3,100 BC with the start of the first of the 31 dynasties of kings, the last of which ended with the conquest of Egypt by Alexander in 332 BC.It was the Third Dynasty kings who started to build stepped pyramids to house their tombs and those of the Fourth Dynasty built the famous smooth sided pyramids at Giza, which includes the Great Pyramid and these we would see later. Later dynasties started to inscribe their pyramids with religious texts concerning the soul's journey to the afterlife. There are nearly two hundred pyramids in Egypt and the design of the interior tombs varied over the centuries, with great efforts being made to disguise where the actual king's tomb was to defeat tomb raiders. These efforts almost always failed.

Our morning excursion was to the Cairo Museum where there is a superb collection of antiquities from the tombs that escaped the raiders and especially the burial furnishings of the tomb of Tutankhamen. He became king at the age of 9 and died at 18, so he had no time to do anything notable during his reign. The only reason that he has come to our notice is that his tomb entrance probably got covered by rubble and escaped the notice of raiders up to its discovery in the 20th century. It does provide what one assumes is a typical example of what the other tombs would have contained but, as our guide commented, there is only once thing that is certain and that is that nothing is certain about the tombs of the kings.

This collection contains numerous outstanding items of furniture and objets d'art found including 110 walking sticks - it is believed Tutankhamen suffered some accident requiring the use of a stick. Most impressive are the 3 decorated body shaped coffins in which he was encased and which were in turn put inside a stone catafalque, which was put inside 3 ever larger decorated wooden cases. A truly memorable exhibition.

As we drove from the museum through the massive conurbation of Cairo (about a quarter of Egypt's population of 85m live here), we saw block after block of half completed apartments with no windows. We were told that Egyptians preferred to invest there money in these properties than put it in the untrustworthy banks. We saw 'ghost towns ' of hundreds of these with only occasional occupation as we drove through the suburbs to Giza and the Pyramids.

 

 

When these pyramids were built they would have been far away in the desert but, as can clearly be seen in this photograph, they are now right on the edge of the city. They have suffered much weathering over the years.

 

 

 

 

 

For me the most interesting part of this visit was the Boat Museum, which is situated by the Great Pyramid on the site where under large stones there was a long narrow cavity which had contained all the parts of boat, provided for the king's journeys in the afterlife. The massive stones had been carefully cut so that they slid together to prevent air getting to the wooden parts and ropes beneath them.

We saw this large beautifully elegant boat, which had been reconstructed, and thought it must probably be the first example of Ikea-like flat packing. We then took the long drive back to Minerva after a long but fascinating day


 

Robert Cole