Cairo - Pharaonic Period - Part 2

Cheops Pyramid, Giza

With me in foreground, for scale

We left the restaurant and drove for another 30 or 40 mins to the Pyramids. Close up, these things are big! Oddly, though, not *that* big. I've stood under office buildings that are larger than the big pyramid (in appearance from one side). Of course, the pyramids are some 5000+ years old! And that's what eventually does it for me, I guess; especially on reflection. These imposing edifices were constructed by men not even as big as me all that time ago using the simplest tools and they are still here!

Pyramids represent the rays of the sun.
And here were the rays, to emphasis that

Horse-riding touts

One of the things that diminishes the majesty and grandeur of the site is the large number of hawkers and beggars prowling around. I am well aware that this 'job' provides a meager existence for these people, but they are distracting and annoying and patently trying to rip people off. It's disappointing. As is the manner in which the tourists are managed too. No carefully designed footpaths to provide good vantage but not damage the monuments, almost no explanatory signage, and no sense of crowd control. All of which takes away the dignity of the place, I think. This is a graveyard, after all.

The Queen's tombs

Solar boat pit

Anyway, we walk around from the North side, passed the boat pits and subsidiary pyramids to the East. Here there are children (10 – 15 years old, at a guess) riding small horses around, which I presume they rent for rides. At the moment, the handlers are just trotting around involved in their own interests, which seems to include treating the horses pretty shabbily, to my untrained eye. There's not much to see on this side, except for the camel shit, the horse shit, and at the bottom of each pit, the windborne, mostly plastic, rubbish. <sigh>

We enter the Solar Boat Museum, an optional extra. Thank God I took this extra as the display was astonishing. They found a complete cedar boat, dismantled and stored in 13 layers in a sealed boat pit when clearing years of detritus from around the main pyramid. It was perfectly preserved and they’ve reconstructed it. The whole story is quite astonishing! The boat is a fine craft and the fact that it still exists, complete, is just gob-smacking. I was lucky enough to have the place virtually to myself (and Adbul, of course). One cute extra over my normal experience of museums: you are asked to wear covers over your shoes, to prevent carrying in sand (or shit) from outside, presumably. That was a bit novel.

After the wonder of the solar boat, we head out to inspect the causeway of the second pyramid, part of “probably the most complete example of a funerary complex” (valley temple, causeway, mortuary temple, tomb/pyramid). This is less-majestic than it would have been in its hey-day, largely because the temples are quite ruined, but the scale of the whole thing is quite wonderful. The second pyramid is smaller than the first, but the builder used optical illusions to make the pyramid appear as big. It was set on a plateau that was slightly higher than the largest pyramid and has a slightly steeper slope making it appear to soar higher. Yet its dimensions are all smaller by a ‘respectful’ amount, as befits the pyramid of the son (Kafur) of the builder of the greatest pyramid (Cheops).

Kafur's Pyramid

So, we head over to the second pyramid and I have agreed to do the optional extra of going into the tomb. This involves scuttling down a 3ft x 3ft stone tunnel at about 45deg. There are timber handrails on each wall. After struggling for about 15m trying to work out how to do this efficiently, I finally settle on leaning well forward with a hand on each handrail and walking down bent double. Fortunately, the passage is probably only 50m long, so it’s not a long scuttle. The passage descends into the first flat corridor where it is just on 5ft 6in high (bloody munchkin pyramid builders!). The walls are all carefully carved flat but there are no inscriptions or paintings or anything (which is probably why tourists are allowed there). Off the flat corridor there is a short descent (same trick as first passage) to a small antechamber, probably not much bigger than a large bedroom; bare and stuffy. Back up to the flat corridor, which proves that my technique works really well uphill. I walk along the flat corridor to an ascent to the tomb proper. About halfway up this ascent (say, 25m) it opens out suddenly to a vaulted ramp as the original “proper” entrance joins it. Looking back up the main entrance shows it to be more majestic (higher, anyway) for a while, and the home of an air-conditioning unit!

Your correspondent, emerging

On up into the tomb, as the roof declines and one enters through a door of about 3ft height. The tomb itself is quite impressive. It is about the size of the living area of my apartment with a high ceiling (equivalent to at least 2 floors of modern building and then a dressed pitched stone roof. The sarcophagus is open at one end, surrounded by large granite blocks. Otherwise, the room is empty (except for two small air-conditioning units and the fluorescent lights on the floor. There’s a piece of graffiti on the wall left there by the Italian-born British archaeologist that found the place. Allegedly written in lamp black on the date inscribed (3 Mar 1813); I’m a little dubious it’s the original graffiti given the time and the ‘ink’, but it’s the kind of senseless desecration that cavalier archaeologists of former times would make.

The tomb itself is unremarkable, but where it is makes being there quite remarkable, especially on reflection. To have been in the tomb made all that time ago, under that enormous pile of stones (and blessedly on my own!) is a once-in-a-lifetime experience and humbling in the face of the persistence and passion of the pyramid builders. It’s an extraordinary place on this earth to visit. Strangely, no phone reception there! ;)

The trip out was delayed while other tourists came down the first passage. It was only then that I realised that I’d had the whole pyramid to myself for the whole time I’d been in it. That was lucky and made the whole adventure even more profound. My scuttling technique soon had me out of the tunnel.

After the excitement of visiting the tomb, we drove around to the third pyramid; the smallest of the three. Abdul has told me that latest thinking about the pyramids suggests that the three structures mirror the three stars in Orion’s belt, hence their relative sizes. The builder of the smallest pyramid knew he was only going to have a small one, so he started encasing his pyramid in red granite rather than the customary limestone. Unfortunately, he died when the pyramid was only six courses high, so that’s as much granite as was installed and the rest was finished in limestone. By now, apart from the granite, one is already reaching the point of “seen one pyramid, pretty much seen them all”, so our stop here is brief for a few pictures.

The Sphinx

The viewing platform edgs

We return in the bus to the valley temple of the second pyramid. Here sits The Sphinx. This is a wholly impressive piece of carving but the ravages of time (and vandals) have degraded its beauty considerably. This feeling is particularly true having seen the near perfectly featured alabaster Sphinx at Memphis that morning. The valley temple is impressive as all such places are for the industry involved in creating the place given the tools available to the workmen. There’s a viewing platform where everyone is having themselves photographed with the Sphinx in the background. It’s a stone platform perhaps 4m above the base level under the Sphinx and everyone stands right at the edge, where the handrailing ought to be, but is not! This is another example of the different perspective that Egyptians have to crowd control, health and safety, and preservation of national monuments.

A future panorama of the Giza plateau

The other notable thing about this area is that it is 50m, maybe 100m, from a boundary wall on the other side of which is Cairo (Giza, to be precise). And a bit of a ghetto area, at that. The juxtaposition of the proud, glorious, ancient valley temple and Sphinx, with the Pyramids in the immediate background and the bustle, noise, filth and smell of this part of Giza is saddening to me. But, it’s the very real way that Cairo is developing and how people are managing to make a living for themselves as best they can.

Cairo, it's that close

The 'shopping district' outside the gate

We leave the Sphinx and the pyramid district through this gate and head for a Papyrus shop, ostensibly for me to learn about what papyrus is and how it is made. I am led into the shop and introduced to Dina. As soon as I met this young, beautiful, vivacious young woman I knew it was going to cost me money!

Perrsonalising my papyrus calendar

Dina. <sigh>

Dina went through the interesting presentation of how papyrus is made and what to look for in genuine papyrus (compared to banana leaf fakes). She also provided a careful explanation of the significance of the main pictures painted on the papyrus. After much flirting and convincing, I bought a large calendar, which was then personalised for my by a resident artist who added two kartouches (is that the plural of kartouch?) as two wishes that will now come true because of the power of the calendar (according to Dina, of course). She threw in a smaller papyrus of an Ankh as part of the deal. They are both quite beautiful. I’ll find somewhere for them, I’m sure. In spite of the ‘bargaining’ and the added extras, I still feel sure that I’ve been fleeced. Dina tried to convince me at one stage, “if you want to take something from this place that you may never visit again, make it something precious that you will cherish forever.” It’s a nice sentiment but doesn’t take away the whole sting.

(Regular readers will remember that I’m pretty tight-fisted with money, so all stories of me feeling ripped off must be read in that context.)