Trip date: February 16-18, 2020
I stood in awe as I walked in the land of the Pharaohs. To think the stone blocks were put in place to build the pyramids and the hieroglyphics on the walls were painted as early as the 27th Century....B.C.? That is sooooo long ago! I remember in 6th grade carving a scarab out of a bar of Ivory soap (thanks Mrs. Leschen) and learning about the daily life of the Egyptians along the Nile. I was in awe back then of all the mysteries of how they wrapped the mummies and how many tombs were yet to be discovered. My own children each had their own personal Egyptian period of interest where we couldn't keep enough books in the house or keep up with them as they learned how to read the symbols on the tomb walls or come up with their own theories of how the pyramids were built. So after my incredible introduction to current Egyptian culture by the MUN students at Hayah International Academy I spent two days touring the area around Cairo before heading back to the States.
The Citadel
The Citadel of Cairo is a medieval Islamic-era fortification in Cairo, Egypt, built by Salah ad-Din and further developed by subsequent Egyptian rulers. It was the seat of government in Egypt and the residence of its rulers for nearly 700 years from the 13th to the 19th centuries.
The Mosque of Muhammad Ali was commissioned by Muhammad Ali Pasha between 1830 and 1848, built to rival the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul. It is also known as the Alabaster Mosque as the lower story and the forecourt are tiled with alabaster up to 11,3 meters (the rest is limestone).
Coptic Cairo
The Copts are an early Christian denomination that began in Alexandria and survived the rise of Islam in Egypt starting in the 7th century. Coptic Cairo was a stronghold for Christianity in Egypt until the Islamic era. It is a part of Old Cairo which encompasses the Babylon Fortress, the Coptic Museum, the Hanging Church, the Greek Church of St. George and many other Coptic churches and historical sites. It is believed in Christian tradition that the Holy Family visited this area and stayed at the site of Saints Sergius and Bacchus Church.
Today the Copts are a minority in Egypt but still constitute the largest single Christian community in the Middle East.
The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities
Among the 120,000 items in the pharaonic antiquities museum one can find canopic jars, mummy masks, royal mummies wrapped and in the flesh and bones, and the treasures of Tutankhamun. It was so exciting to see the genuine artifacts up close and personal.
Pyramid of Djoser
The earliest known Egyptian pyramids are found at Saqqara, northwest of Memphis. The earliest among these is the step Pyramid of Djoser, which was built c. 2630–2610 BC during the Third Dynasty.
It started off as a mastaba tomb — a flat-roofed structure with sloping sides and, through a series of expansions, evolved into a 197-foot-high (60 meters) pyramid, with six layers, one built on top of the other. The pyramid was constructed using 11.6 million cubic feet (330,400 cubic meters) of stone and clay. The tunnels beneath the pyramid form a labyrinth about 3.5 miles (5.5 kilometers) long containing numerous chapels and burial chambers, false doorways and passages that lead to nowhere. What intrigued me most was the incredibly narrow entrances and depth to these chambers as well as the well preserved carvings, reliefs and paintings on the walls throughout the complex that were created for the king in the afterlife. What I didn't expect were the narrow, barely room for two lanes, hardly enough oxygen pumped in chambers that you just can't resist to visit. Even the most claustrophobic tourist with bad knees and back can hardly resist the temptation to bury themselves into the depths of the tombs and the inside the center of a pyramid, but that is exactly what goes in and comes out at an excruciatingly slow rate.
Below is the entrance to one of the chambers. It's hard to prepare yourself for the descent into a hidden world and its treasures, literally trying to read the writing on the walls that tell the story.
Red Pyramid & Bent Pyramid
Named for the rusty reddish hue of its red limestone stones, the Red Pyramid is the third largest Egyptian pyramid, after those of Khufu and Khafra at Giza. It is also believed to be Egypt's first successful attempt at constructing a "true" smooth-sided pyramid. Pharaoh Sneferu was buried in the single burial chamber with two smaller chambers leading to it. The Bent Pyramid in Dahshur represents a transitional form between step-sided and smooth-sided pyramids. It has been suggested that due to the steepness of the original angle of inclination the structure may have begun to show signs of instability during construction, forcing the builders to adopt a shallower angle to avert the structure's collapse.
The Pyramids of Giza
The Giza Pyramid complex, also called the Giza Necropolis, includes the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Pyramid of Khafre (son of Khufu), and the Pyramid of Menkaure, along with their associated pyramid complexes and the Great Sphinx of Giza. To stand at the base of the Great Pyramid and take in the age, composition, texture, color and so much more is a remarkable experience. It gave me a great appreciation of why it is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. To oversimplify, you can't stand before it and not wonder who were the people who built it and how did they build it?
Historical analysis tells us that the Egyptians built the Giza Pyramids in a span of 85 years between 2589 and 2504 BC. The purpose of the Great Pyramid, the most widely accepted understanding, is that it was constructed as a tomb for King Khufu. Written receipts, letters, diary entries, official reports to and from the palace all make clear that a great building project was accomplished at Giza under Khufu's reign but not one of these pieces of evidence suggest exactly how the pyramid was created. The technological skill evident in the creation of the Great Pyramid still mystifies scholars, and others, in the present day. Constructing the Great Pyramid required more than two million blocks, rising up in a perfect pyramidal shape 480 feet into the sky. Once the interior was completed, the whole of the pyramid was covered in white limestone. You can still see a bit of the white limestone on the top of the pyramid of Khafre.
The idea is that the pyramids were built by moving huge stones from a quarry and dragging and lifting them into place. The disagreements center on the method by which the stones were conveyed and placed and how possible the method was. Were the giant limestone blocks carried up ramps by slave workers? Many people imagine scaffolding made of wood to help hoist the stones, but wood was very scarce in the region at the time. Just another mystery of the time that will keep us wondering.
The Khufu ship is an intact full-size vessel that was sealed into a pit at the foot of the Great Pyramid around 2500 BC. The ship is now preserved in the Giza Solar boat museum. The ship was almost certainly built for King Khufu. Like other buried ancient Egyptian ships, it was apparently part of the extensive grave goods intended for use in the afterlife.
A room with a wondrous view: The Mena House is pretty much the closest you can get to the pyramids in an overnight accommodation. It was converted from an old royal hunting lodge.
Well, if you made it this far in the post, I am going to show one more side of Cairo that is a bit less attractive, but hard to miss with eyes like mine that are hypersensitive to plastic waste. What my camera fails to show in all the beautiful tourist sites is the amount of plastic that is blowing, floating, and lying around. For my two full days of touring I really did want to take in all the beauty that is Cairo, and there is plenty of it, but it sure is hard to miss in the outskirts of Cairo, especially near Memphis and Dahshur, all the trash lying around. Even the Nile and the canals are clogged with debris. What I did see that made me very curious was along roadside construction sites there were piles of plastic mixed-up with construction debris. Many countries are experimenting with making roads out of plastic. After a year of research, many have developed a method for transforming a mix of industrial and consumer plastic waste into pellets of a new material that are starting to replace the oil-based sealing material that holds asphalt together in roads. There are some arguments that heating up the new plastic material to lay in roads releases toxins into the air. This process explained the enormous "landfill" outside an apartment complex; a mountain of debris inside city limits. All of this is quite concerning to me. I hope my MUN students do their research when they start to argue for plastic road construction.
To end on a more positive note, I have every desire to return to Egypt, to visit more tombs in Luxor and Aswan and to SCUBA dive in the Red Sea.......and of course take my JBS students to HIAMUN!
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