Pyramid Schemes

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.

So, crime. Several people worried about our trip: Was Egypt... dangerous?  

Well. It is a developing country.  Things are different there than any country I have been in before.  We never felt in any danger (except when our taxi driver decided to save time by going the wrong way up on a one-way street...  straight toward a car.  Yeesh.)

On the other hand, on several days we were accompanied on the bus by an armed man in plainclothes.  And every hotel and several museums had a metal detector..

The street sellers and beggars did make us feel harassed.  They were more aggressive than I am used to.  When my wife and I went for a walk in Luxor (against our guide's advice) we must have been met by half a dozen such folk, including a driver of a horse and wagon who followed us for blocks trying to convince us to take a ride.

And then there was our arrival at the Cairo Airport.  Our checked bag had not made it through the transfer at Frankfurt Airport (in spite of the plane being delayed for an hour there, sigh.) We were having trouble figuring out where to talk to someone about that.  I found an Information Desk and there was a woman standing in front of it.  We chatted for a couple of minutes and finally found our way to the right office.  While I was  waiting to fill out forms I said I needed to figure out where to get local money.

"Oh," said the woman, "I will take any currency."

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.

None of this is a crime, of course.  But the ten men I saw fist-fighting each other in the street were definitely breaking some law.  We were on a bus, so no danger.  

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.    

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.

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.

In the Valley we visited the tombs of Ramesses III and IV. Lucky for us the thieves couldn't swipe the wall decorations.   

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.

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.  

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.

Amarna Letters

Those clay  pieces you see are part of the Amarna Letters, an amazing find.  Pharoah Akhenaten, arguably the first monotheist (ca 1350 BCE) forbid the worship of any gods but the sun disk and built a new capital city, Amarna.  After his death the city was abandoned and so archaeologists were able to find its untouched archive with thousands of letters to and from the monarchs of his day.

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.

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.