My Exodus Pt. II

The last entry was only the first day of my Egyptian exodus. I needed to take a little break from writing so I decided to split the blogging of the trip into two (maybe three if I get bored again). But before I get back to the exodus I wanted to take a moment to voice my thanks to the late Charleston Heston for his epic role in the Ten Commandments, making Moses a bad ass and giving all Jews something besides matzah to look forward to during Passoever.
We decided the previous night that we would get up early and start the day off by going to Great Pyramids of Giza and the Step Pyramid, a 30 to 45 minute drive from Giza. After traveling the entire day and not getting to sleep until pretty late at night, waking up early turned into sleeping late. We slept until around 11 and ventured immediately to the Great Pyramids.
When you see pictures of the pyramids in books it appears as if they are in the middle of a desert surrounded by sand and nothing else. This is only half true, Cairo has spread out into such an enormous city that they sit at the border of a metropolitan city and a desert. From the pyramids you can gaze in one direction and all you can see is smog and the outline of buildings and in the opposite direction yellow sand. As we approached the pyramids they popped out of the city and seemed out of place. I felt cheated, I wanted to see the pyramids as they were for the thousands of years before modern Cairo, I wanted to see the Nile as a glimmering source of agriculture and power for the ancient Egyptian empire and ponder how they were able to construct such structures. This said, I was still very impressed with the Pyramids and how the Egyptians built them with little to no knowledge of geometry and how something so old can still be standing today. We walked up to the base of the largest pyramid (though it appears smaller then the one behind it due to the other one being located on a hill) and were amazed at the size of the base stones, each one taller than an average man and a few meters wide. As most know, the pyramids served as the burial places of the kings, whom were buried with stockpiles of food, large amounts of jewelry and items used in everyday life but all for the afterlife. However, most to all of the things of worth were stolen from the pyramids, not just inside the tombs but also the outside. Each pyramid used to be layered with a shinny marble making them glimmer in the sun, only on the top of the second largest pyramid can you see the remnants of this marble. The smallest of the three pyramids is distinguished by a large scar on one of its sides, a mark left by Saladin’s son. He wanted to destroy the pyramids and build himself a castle in its places, but after years of demolition in which little progress was made and a lack of funds he gave up on his effort to destroy the pyramid.
The Sphinx (half man half lion) is located right next to the Pyramids, however, it interested me little though it made me recall the story of Oedipus and how he saved Thebes from the terrorizing sphinx. The face is 90 percent destroyed from a combination of factors, wind erosion and a rock disease that is eating it from within, also it does not have the gravity that the Pyramids have due to their size. One point of interest about the Sphinx is that the story of Napoleon breaking the nose is a fabrication and that it was maimed some other way.
After leaving the area with the Pyramids and the Sphinx we caught a cab, which in Cairo is as easy as catching the clap in a shady Thai message parlor, and headed for the Egyptian Museum which houses everything taken from the tombs and pyramids (minus all that was seized by the French or British during their colonial rules). But before going to the museum we caught our usual lunch of koshery followed by a dessert of rice pudding (note Egyptian rice pudding does not come close to measuring up to Greek diner rice pudding).
The museum building, like most other buildings in Cairo, is old. It was built in the beginning of the twentieth century and has not undergone any major renovations since. Everything in the museum is old as well, not only the ancient artifacts that range from 4000 to 200o years old but the few descriptions located next to the artifacts (the English on the descriptions is laughable). The only new section was a part that was financed and displayed by a university in the Czech Republic in conjunction with the Egyptian Antiquities Council showing the recent recoveries of items from Aswan, located in southern Egypt almost at the border with Sudan. Looking back on the trip this had to be one of my favorite places that we visited. It is shocking how much preparation and how much resources and energy went into the burial processes for the royalty. There were full beds with jackals as bedposts, jewelry by the hundreds that were layered in gold and inlaid with precious stones, whole sarcophagi weighing a ton that housed the ornately decorated coffins, and the main showpiece of King Tutankhamen’s burial mask that looks calm, cool and awaiting the afterlife. I really enjoyed the Greco-Roman room that is relatively new in Egypt standards but shows the combination of two cultures. Additionally, it amazes me how these artifacts are still around thousands of years later and able to be observed by peoples with such little connection to the ancient Egyptians.