Saqqara!

You're looking at the first pyramid built in Egypt. Before this point, royalty and nobility were buried in mastabas which would look like the bottom level of this step pyramid. About the 27th c. BC, King Djoser's chief architect, a guy named Imhotep, came up with the idea to stack mastabas on top of each other to create a six-step pyramid. Djoser's pyramid sits amongst the ruins of a large funerary complex, surrounded by a wall which featured a frieze of cobras. In the foreground of the photo, can you see a remnant of these cobras?

Saqqara, just south of Cairo, served as a burying ground for Memphis, which was the capital city of Egypt during the Old Kingdom and nobility were still being buried there in the New Kingdom after the capitol had moved to Thebes. It is the largest archaeological site in Egypt and covers about 7 km of desert and is littered with pyramids and mastabas. We were able to enter several of the mastabas and although we weren't allowed to take photos, our guide let me take a few when we were away from the crowds and it was light enough where I wouldn't have to use flash. All of the walls of these tombs were completely covered in reliefs depicting both symbolic scenes as well as scenes from daily life. The details were fascinating. There are people in boats pulling up nets with many different kinds of fish, boys wrestling and playing, butchers slaughtering cattle, marshes with frogs, birds, crocodiles, hippos, and grasshoppers, dwarves depicted as goldsmiths, as well as lots and lots of servants bearing food and drink for the deceased's ka or spirit. Some examples.....unfortunately I wasn't able to capture any pics of hippos. Those were my favorites. :)

















































One of the many aspects of pyramids which we were completely unaware of before we came to Egypt was that virtually every pyramid is associated with a complex of buildings which are so standard that archaeologists know to look for them. There is always the mortuary temple which is built against the east side of the pyramid where priests present prayers and offerings to sustain the king's ka. There is usually a smaller pyramid in the complex and there is virtually always a wall which encloses the two pyramids. There is also a valley temple. The valley temple is always located on the bank of a river which is how the body of the king was transported and the temple was used for the mummification process. A long causeway connects the valley temple with the entrance of the mortuary temple. This is why pyramids are in the desert but often just on the edge of cultivated land. I hope that makes sense. I'm sure I could figure out how to draw a layout of a pyramid complex on Photoshop and link it here but I'm such a horrible artist, I don't think it would clear things up much. :)

Anybahoo, the only surviving somewhat intact causeway in Egypt is in Saqqara, connecting the pyramid of Unas, a king in the 5th dynasty, with the ruins of its valley temple about 1 km away.
The causeway was walled and roofed at one time but there are only remnants left. I think they reconstructed some of the floor. Here you see the causeway with the pyramid in the background behind two pillars which I think was the entrance to the mortuary temple.


The hieroglyphs on one of the pillars indicating that it indeed belonged to King Unas.


There were parts of the wall still intact along the causeway which had reliefs on them. Here's one which depicts ships:


Another feature found in several pyramid complexes are boat-shaped pits. The ones found in Giza near the Great Pyramid actually contained wooden boats, purportedly to transport the king and family to the Land of the West. Here are some boat pits outside the pyramid of Unas but apparently no boats were found so maybe they were just symbolic?


Finally, I took a photo of the stars in the last remaining section of the causeway ceiling. It blows me away that there is still some blue coloring left after 3000 years! You'll have to click on the photo to open it in another window in order to see the stars. We only saw a small portion of what Saqqara has to offer and we're looking forward to going back to see more!

Coptic Fayoum

Our bartender, Tony, invited all of us out to see some of the Coptic monasteries in the Fayoum area. He and his family are Coptic. I wish I would have thought to take a photo, but all Christians in Egypt choose to have a cross tattooed on their wrist.... no casual conversions here!! David and I've spent several nights at the bar talking with Tony about what it's like to be a Coptic Christian in Egypt. Copts make up about 10% of Egypt's population. He maintains that discrimination has gotten worse and that there are kidnappings and murders against Copts which are ignored by the police. Personally, he says his family hasn't been affected other than the occasional situation where someone has thrown something at his wife and chided her for not wearing a headscarf while they've been out walking

He took us first to a very old monastery next to the Lahun pyramid just a few miles from where we live. It's thought to date back to the 3rd century. It's neat to think there was a Christian community in the Fayoum area from such an early date. I may have mentioned this before, but there is a bishop from the Fayoum area mentioned as attending the Council of Nicaeain 325 AD.


Here's Tony.


The second monastery was the one where Tony and family go quite a bit. These monasteries seem to act as community centers for the Copts. Tony says that his family will come and just hang out until 1 or 2 in the morning some nights!!
















And then Tony's wife, Phoebe, brought lunch for all of us. It was delicious!!


The third monastery is dedicated to the angel Gabriel and it was probably founded in the second half of the 5th century. The church inside is dated to the 10th or 11th century. These paintings were covered over with plaster and apparently their very existence had been forgotten until a team was doing restoration work in 1991 and uncovered them.
















When we turned the corner, Tony and his wife gasped and he said "You are lucky! The martyrs are usually not displayed and they are out today". Sure enough, there were two rows of glass coffins each containing a mummified body wrapped in velvet. Also uncovered by that same restoration team in 1991, nobody knows the details of these naturally mummified bodies other than some appear to be monks and they are certain these people were martyred because of the signs of torture, strangulation marks, limbs or heads missing, and blood-stained cloth.

In the back of the monastery are ruins which Tony thought to be the remains of the 5th c. settlement here. The hills in the background purportedly contain caves which were used by various monks....but no time to explore. I took a photo of all the shards of pottery we were walking on.















A photo of the monastery gates looking out over the Fayoum delta:

Which direction to Mecca??

The secretary for David's team was showing me her prayer rug in the office a few weeks ago and I asked her how she knew which direction Mecca was. (during their five prayer times a day, they are supposed to face the direction of Mecca in Saudi Arabia). She said that her sense of direction was about as bad as mine but she just asked the others in the office when she first started working there to find out. She said that virtually all hotel rooms in the Middle East will have a placard somewhere letting the occupants know which way to Mecca. Sure enough, in Alexandria, we found this on the desk:


If you click on the photo and open it in a new window, you can see that it says Mecca in English and Arabic with an arrow.

She said that her husband actually has a compass which will tell him which direction to point towards Mecca but couldn't explain how something like that would work.

The Bibliotheka IskandRAYa

An Egyptian corrected me yesterday on my pronounciation of Alexandria. :)

For those who read my previous post on Alexandria and thought maybe we'd forgotten to go visit the new Library, au contraire. I just decided that it deserved its own posting. :)

You probably already know about the great ancient library of Alexandria, which reputedly held the sum total of knowledge available at that time. I don't know if this is true, but I've read that every ship which entered Alexandria's port was required to hand over some manuscripts for copying. Ptolomy I was very interested in translating other cultures' works into Greek. I hadn't realized that one of the first projects was assigning the translation of the Jewish scriptures to seventy rabbis, hence its name Septuagint, which means "Seventy" in Latin.

They aren't certain who was responsible for the library's destruction but it was burnt to the ground in the 4th century. In 1987, Egypt in joint partnership with other Arab countries and UNESCO, undertook the creation of a new library for Alexandria. A Norwegian company won the contract with its design and, $355 million later, the doors opened in 2002.

It's a very cool design.

(photo from http://www.bibalex.gov.eg/English/gallery/images/a01.jpg)


The exterior of the building is engraved with letters, hieroglyphs, and pictograms from all the known languages.


The interior is well-designed, spacious, and uses natural light.
















Those pillars remind me of Roman columns. It was an impressive building, but, apart from the many tour groups passing through, the place was dead. There were virtually no patrons and the staff didn't look like they had much to do. I don't know if this was due to the fact that it was Ramadan or maybe the adjoining University wasn't in session or both. I spent some time looking through the stacks and was surprised to find that their collection used the Dewey Decimal system and that it rivalled what you would find in a midsized public library in the States.

From what I've read, the library has mostly relied on donations from around the world. I found a Croatian cookbook as a gift from the government of Croatia, a Harlequin romance from some American women's group in Cairo, an old Sunset magazine book on Bathrooms (like one you'd find at Home Depot), some old Frommer's travel books from the 1990s....it's almost as if Americans just cleaned out their garages and sent their books here to help out the cause. :) I looked at their collection development policy on the website (www.bibalex.gov.eg) and it indicated that due to budget constraints, the library is focusing on building up its sections on Egypt and the Middle East while temporarily collecting at a very basic level in other areas. The library boasts electronic access to 35,000 periodicals and has several digital initiatives. I hope the Bibliotheka Alexandria becomes the beacon of knowledge and dialogue it is striving to become in the Middle East.

A weekend in Alex......

Alexandria, that is. The city on the Mediterranean which didn't even exist during Pharoanic times but was founded by Alexander the Great in 3rd c. BC in order to create a port on the Mediterranean. Cleopatra was there. The Great Alexandrian Library was there. It even had one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the great Pharos lighthouse which they think may have stood 40-50 stories tall. In the 19th-mid 20th century, Alexandria was a cosmopolitan city with many European communities; there were French patisseries, Greek cafes, British hotels, wide European boulevards, and lots of gardens.

Much of it's gone now. They're almost certain Alexander is buried here but can't find his tomb. Other than textual evidence and a few coins bearing her image, there is nothing left of Cleopatra's palace which was engulfed in a tsunami in 4th c. AD. The lighthouse toppled over into the sea from an earthquake in the 1300s. The great Library with all of its books and scrolls burnt to the ground. In the aftermath of the 1952 revolution, industries were nationalized and much of the expat communities left. Today, Alexandria is as Egyptian of a city as Cairo: the mosques, calls to prayer, coffee shops patronized only by men, Koshary shops, the piles upon piles of trash in the streets, traffic even more dangerous than Cairo, and major pollution, a big problem as the population has grown to 5 million.

But if one looks a little closer, there are hints of the past. Some of the old French street signs are still up. Some of the grand old cafes are still there with wooden interiors, ornate ceilings, and wide picture windows, though they don't serve french or greek pastries anymore. We had dinner at the Cecil Hotel whose guestbook includes writers like Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward and has a lovely antique elevator. The Cecil was where the British Intelligence purportedly hatched their deception plan at El-Alamein. As you walk along the streets and look up, there are still some elegant balconies with ornate iron scrollwork. Plus, from what our guide said, whenever they try to dig up any ground for building or renovation, work has to be stopped because they inevitably find some piece of antiquity.

OK, now for the photos. :) These are from Ramses train station in Cairo (we took the train to Alex). I tried to surreptitiously take a photo of the men praying on a tarp which had been laid out for that purpose. We were in the station for about 45 minutes and people were continually coming up and praying for about 5 minutes and then going on their way.
















The view from our hotel room. The Mediterranean and Montazah Gardens. The Montazah Gardens were created by a Sultan in the 1800s who wanted to make his Austrian mistress feel more at home!! You can see the tower of the Haramlik Palace in the background which we then visited the next morning. President Mubarak uses it to host foreign dignitaries.

















This was the site of a Greek temple, the Serapeum, dedicated to the city's god Serapis...a god concocted to blend elements of the Egyptian god Osiris with the Greek god Dionysus in order that both peoples in Alexandria could worship it. Apparently, it worked. There are remains from the temple scattered throughout this site, but the two objects in the photo on the left are not from them. The piece with the hieroglyphics had been brought up from ancient Heliopolis and the pillar was erected to the Roman emperor Diocletian.
















A side street decorated for Ramadan.


A Roman theater. According to the Arab general who conquered in 641 AD, Alexandria had about 400 at the time.


One photo from the Alexandria National Museum, just because it looks neat: a bust of Akhenaten. Many of the pharoahs blur together for me, but he's one that stands out.


These last two photos are from walks we took the last few nights of Ramadan. We had been warned about the crowds shopping but it was really crazy as people were shopping before Eid. We actually saw clothes flying through the air, vendors had clothes spread out on blankets on the street and were shouting at the top of their lungs. At one point, all the vendors picked up their blankets and ran off, in 30 seconds the street was empty of vendors. We were wondering what was going on until we saw the police car slowly pass through. After the police had passed, the vendors were back, shouting and the crowds gathered round again. We enjoyed the show. :)

Eid Mubarak!!

or Happy Eid. Eid is the 3 day celebration which ends Ramadan. There are a lot of cultural parallels to Christmas. The streets are crazy with shoppers; everyone gets gussied up in new clothes and visits family, and there's lots and lots of eating. Plus, there are Eid cookies!! 2 Egyptian ladies who work here brought some cookies in for me to try. The cookie which you see everywhere and from what I understand is only baked at Eid is the powdered sugar one which looks like a Russian Teacake. They are filled with dates, or candy, or sugar and nuts. I can't wait until Christmas to repay the favor and make them some of Mom's sugar cookies!!

The Citadel

Hello again. This week's adventure was a trip to the Citadel, a fortress built by Salah al-Din (often referred to as Saladin) during the Crusades in the 12th century. The people of Cairo asked for protection against the Crusaders, so the Sultan of Syria sent his Kurdish commander, General Shirkuh. After his death, he was succeeded by his nephew Salah al-Din. Shortly after Salah al-Din became Sultan, he began work on the Citadel, and became yet another builder to strip limestone off the pyramids at Giza.

We don't have a photo of this unfortunately, but the Citadel sits up on a bluff and is a prominent feature on the Cairene horizon. It was the first landmark I saw in Cairo...the fortification itself as well as the domes of the Mohammad Ali mosque in the center of the complex. A picture of a small section of the walls and towers:


And then a view of Cairo from one of the ramparts:



Salah al-Din's original Citadel was reinforced and fortified by just about every ruler and invader who took over after him. I know that some destroyed most of what was there and rebuilt so I don't know if any of the original Citadel still exists! At any rate, although Salah al-Din didn't live there, his nephew al-Kamil who succeeded him moved in and the Citadel served as the royal residence for the next 700 years. One of its last residents was Muhammad Ali who ruled from 1806-1849 and , according to my guidebook, was responsible for much of what the Citadel is today including the mosque he built in 1839.

The Muhammad Ali mosque:


Before entering the mosque, they asked everyone to take off their shoes and then the women who were wearing short-sleeved shirts or shorts were draped in a green smock. Interestingly, they didn't concern themselves with women covering their heads. Some women did and others didn't. Some images of the mosque inside. The man talking with David had offered to be our tour guide and he was actually really informative. We were glad to have taken him up on his offer.















Now I can't find the photo but our tour guide told us a story about the clock tower in the mosque courtyard. It was a gift from King Louis-Philippe from France in exchange for the obelisk from Luxor Muhammad Ali relinquished (the Obelisk which now stands in the Place de la Concorde in Paris). The clock was the first electric clock introduced to the Middle East but it was damaged in transport and dead on arrival. There's been a few attempts to repair it to little avail but recently, some bigwig (I couldn't understand who it was from what our guide said) came through and was dismayed at it not working and said his country would send a repairman to come fix it (maybe he was from France?). The repairman came over and said he would start working on it once it was cleaned so the government put him up in a condo in Cairo and has a team at work on it. That was 12 years ago and they still haven't finished....not even close. Our tour guide said they work less than an hour a day. When we were there, there was a man sitting on the scaffolding but he wasn't working! According to our tour guide, the repairman is still living in the condo. :)

Muhammad Ali is infamous for the banquet he gave in 1811 for 470 prominent Mamluk citizens. The Mamluks were out of power but still influential foes of the new ruler. After the feast, he trapped them in the narrow passageway of one of the large Citadel gates and his guards shot and killed all of them. We didn't actually find this gate. It was 104 degrees out so we hit some highlights and will come back when it's cooler!

Muhammad Ali tore down a great many earlier buildings to make room for his own monuments and palaces but one mosque which escaped his demolition was the Al-Nasir Muhammad Mosque which was built in 1335. Apparently, he used it for his stables which is amazing because the columns you see in these photos are from the pharoanic and Roman eras. I guess when you have a wealth of historic treasures you can afford to be casual with the past.