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| A Cairo pub |
Last month my wife and I took a tour of Egypt organized by the Biblical Archaeology Society. It was amazing. I'm trying to figure out what to tell you about it, since this is supposed to be about crime and writing.
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And that's when the penny (or Egyptian pound) dropped. She hadn't been behind the Information Desk. She wasn't any kind of official helper. She was another person looking to get money from tourists. After that I didn't believe her advice, good or bad as it may have been.But enough griping. Let's start with the greatest highlight: I can't imagine anyone looking at the pyramids and the Sphinx and being disappointed. They are stunning.
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And here is our first connection to writing. Between the front paws of the sphinx you find what is called the Dream Stele. (A stele is a stone notice board, usually with a curved top.) It explains that Thutmose IV dreamed that the Sphinx told him that it was being smothered by sand and if he got it all cleared away the Sphinx would make him pharoah. So he did that and voila, he got the crown.
Modern scholars interpret this to mean that Thutmose IV did not have a very strong claim to the throne so he made up this story as political propaganda.
But it gets more complicated because the writing on the stele is later than that pharoah. One guess is that the priests of the sphinx copied the text because it showed how important their statue was - a genuine kingmaker!
Most of what I knew about ancient Egypt before the trip came from Barbara Mertz. She wrote a brilliant book called Red Land, Black Land, which shows no interest in pharoahs, mummies, or animal-headed gods. What it does tell you about is the life of average people, the farmers, fishers, and so on.
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| Valley of the Kings |
But Mertz did more than that, of course. Under the name Elizabeth Peters she wrote a wonderful set of mystery novels about Victorian Egyptologist Amelia Peabody. Amelia loved pyramids but most years she and her husband dug in the Valley of Kings. That's the desolate landscape where the pharoahs hid their tombs once they realized that building a pyramid was like hanging a neon sign that reads Hey thieves! Treasure in here! Alas, all the royal tombs in the Valley were robbed - except one - but at least they tried.
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In the Valley we visited the tombs of Ramesses III and IV. Lucky for us the thieves couldn't swipe the wall decorations.
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| K.T. |
A minor character in Peters' novels is Howard Carter, a real-life Egyptologist. She presents him as a nice guy and a good archaeologist, but incredibly unlucky. Amelia often tries to cheer him up by promising that something will turn up. The inside joke here is that in 1924 Carter found that only unrobbed pharoah's tomb - that of King Tutankhamun.
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| Ushabti |
The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), which is magnificent and opened just a few months ago, contains among its 100,000 plus artifacts 5,000 items from King Tut's tomb. The tomb itself was tiny but packed like a moving van. Seems quite a lot turned up for poor Howard. (By the way, ushabti are small figurines intended to serve the deceased in the afterlife.)
Amelia's favorite form of transport was a dahabiya, a barge-like boat for sailing up and down the Nile. I would have considered myself lucky to have seen one but as it happened the owner of the tour company which planned our trip in Luxor arranged for the 40-plus members of our tour group to have a sunset cruise and dinner on his personal dahabiya. Picture three decks including rooms to sleep 24. Also one of the best meals we had in Egypt.
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| Merneptah Stele |
We also visited the Egyptian Museum, now known as the (Old) Egyptian Museum since GEM opened. It still has plenty worth seeing, including some written artifacts of note. For example there is the 10-foot-tall Merneptah Stele, containing the only mention of Israel found in ancient Egypt. Pharoah Merneptah brags of destroying Israel, which appears to have been an exaggeration.
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| Amarna Letters |
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| Photo by Schlanger |
One more piece of writing-related history. We visited the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. The fascinating thing about this beautiful building is a small window in the women's balcony (up on the left), which led to a geniza.
The rules of Judaism state that when a text that contains God's name (such as a Torah or prayerbook) is no longer usable it must be buried in a graveyard. Until that is convenient the papers are kept in a storeroom called a geniza. As it turns out, nobody emptied the Cairo geniza for a long time. Researchers emptied it and found over 400,000 pieces of paper, some a thousand years old. More excitingly, they weren't just religious texts: they found personal letters, merchants account books, legal documents, etc. The result is, scholars know more about the lives of eleventh-century Cairo Jews than they do about, say, Christians in Paris during the same period.
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| An old friend |
The written word -- or hieroglyphs -- have power.
Oh, and in that same old section of Cairo I met an old friend in an underground bookshop.
It was quite a trip.
