It happened first in Egypt

...or so my Egyptology professor says.

Here's an ancient Egyptian story about King Snefru, father of Khufu (who built the Great Pyramid).

One day King Snefru was bored. His country didn't suffer from hunger, war or strife. But today nothing could make him happy. He paced up and down the halls of his palace at Memphis. He was bored, bored, bored. So he called his magician. "Magician! I am bored. Do something that will lighten my heart."

"My lord, O Great Pharaoh, I will do as you command," said the magician. And he turned his staff into a living snake, which writhed and twisted on the floor in front of Snefru.

At first Snefru was surprised, but he quickly lapsed into depression again. "Magician, you have failed me! Have you nothing else that will amuse me?"
The magician said, "My lord, O Great Pharaoh, you should sail upon the Nile, and on the lake below the palace. This will surely cure you of your ills."

Snefru was reluctant to go to all this trouble for something that might not even be worth the effort, as he had a particularly severe case of boredom. He could literally feel his life-force and ideas in his heart (for he and his viziers believed brain matter to be useless) wasting away with every cubit the Sun fell in the sky.

"This voyage will be different, my lord, O Great Pharaoh," Snefru's magician assured him. "Instead of your normal rowers, you must use fair maidens from your Royal House. When you see them row your boat on the sacred lake, and watch the birds flying, and the fish swimming, and the grass growing, surely your heart will become lighter."

No doubt Snefru's wife and half-sister, Hetep-heres, took issue with this amusement of the King's. But in this endeavor her opinion did not matter, and Snefru was curious to try this idea. So he ordered his attendants to take out the Royal Boat with its twenty oars inlaid with precious metals, with twenty beautiful maidens to row it, each wearing nets of golden thread and ornaments of rare gems. This was done, and he sat on the boat as the women took him up and down the stream and across the sacred lake. Snefru's spirits started to lift as he experienced this new pastime.

Suddenly one of the oars brushed the maiden who was holding it, and it knocked her turquoise fish-earring off of the Royal Boat. She cried out in shock, and stopped rowing. All the other maidens on her side stopped their rowing as well.
"Why have you stopped rowing?!" Snefru exclaimed.

The girl sobbed, "The turquoise earring that you gave me has fallen into the sacred lake, my Lord, O Great Pharaoh. I cannot go on."

Snefru had been having such a good time. Annoyed, he said, "Do not worry. I shall give you another."

The girl continued crying. "But I want this one! There is none like it!"

Snefru was not about to jump into the sacred lake, for though he was God incarnate, he could not swim, much less dive to the bottom of the lake where the earring lay. He did not want to risk meeting the Gods sooner than expected just to recover a stupid ornament. So once again he sent for his magician. The magician was brought to him. "O magician, I have done as you advised and my spirits have lifted greatly. But this maiden has lost her turqoise earring at the bottom of the lake, and I want you to recover it for her."

"My lord, O Great Pharaoh, I shall do as you ask. It is not a difficult enchantment, but I hope it may lighten your heart even further when you see its magic." So the magician chanted a great spell, and, standing at the edge of the Royal Boat, he held out his rod over the waters of the sacred lake. And as if the lake had been sliced by a great sword, the waters parted, leaving a dry area at the very bottom where, to the maiden's delight, the amulet rested. She jumped from the boat and grabbed it from the lake bottom, resuming her place at the oar. And the magician lowered his rod, and the waters slowly came back together, leaving only smooth surface where there once had been a great chasm of water. The Pharaoh praised his great magician, and all were happy.

After this enlightening story had ended, we reached Dahshur, site of the Bent Pyramid and Red Pyramid of King Snefru. (These weren't the only ones. He went on a building spree and built a total of four pyramids during his reign, which is strange because each pyramid would have taken about 20 years to build and this was about how long he reigned for.) After the collapsed pyramid of Meidum, the Bent Pyramid is the second-biggest epic fail in Egyptian history. It seems the builders miscalculated the angles of the sides and realized they were too steep, so about halfway up they had to change the angles to keep the pyramid from falling in on itself. I guess it's a lot like when you try pouring a tower of sugar...there's a certain point where the sugar won't go any higher and just collects around the sides.






Above: My professor points out an unfinished coffin for a young child; her guess was that he didn't die so they gave up the task.

We briskly strode around the Bent Pyramid to Snefru's valley temple, now a jumble of rocks far from any sacred lake or river. Technically this was off-limits, but when you're with an Egyptologist anything is possible. Just keep running.



Next on our list was the Red Pyramid.



We went inside single-file and started crawling down the 4-foot-by-4-foot tunnel that led to the burial chamber. About a minute in, all the lights shut off. I'm not joking, it was creepy as hell. But we continued and eventually reached the small room where the king would have been buried, at which point the lights went back on.



Another highlight of this trip was King Djoser's step pyramid at Saqqara, a 15-minute drive north. The coolest thing about Saqqara is that it was supposed to be a carbon (well, stone) copy of the living city of Memphis, which was very close by and was the King's capital. He would be buried at Saqqara and have everything with him in exact form, down to the last sexy curve (the only one in Egyptian architecture) of his temple wall.



We also traipsed across the dusty desert to visit about 7 other tomb complexes dotting the area.


Above: The two professors lead us to our doom in the shifting sands.





Another function of Djoser's (fun)erary complex is the vast square that lies to the south of the step pyramid. It was used for running the Heb-Sed, a race that took place every 30 years in which the Pharaoh proved his worth by racing a bull around the square. If he won the race, his reign would be renewed for another 30 years. If not, he would be stamped an incompetent leader and swiftly replaced. We have no records of kings ever losing the Heb-Sed, and of course, in all the Pharaoh's portraits he has amazing leg muscles. More about propaganda in a future post.
Here's a video of me and a few classmates taking part in this prestigious tradition.



According to my professor, as you can hear on the video, we all cheated. Guess we know who's failing the quiz this Monday!

Oct 8-9: The Forever Train

Remember from the last few posts that our hotel was supposed to get us tickets for our return from Luxor to Cairo?
Well, they didn't. So we got our money back after a lot of hassle and went to the train station ourselves. Of course, this was 30 minutes before our train was supposed to leave, so all the seats were sold out. Rather than wait three hours for another train that could also potentially be sold out and exhausted from the day's sightseeing, we opted to take the earlier train and buy our tickets "bidoon kursi," without seats. They were half price, too. Since this had worked on the train from Aswan to Luxor, we figured it'd be ok. But the difference is that that was a three-hour train ride, and this would be about twelve.

We sat in some unoccupied seats for the first few stops. But our group of six was eventually kicked out by the real occupants, and we were forced to walk through the train in a vain and increasingly desperate attempt to find actual seats. Finally we settled in the only unoccupied section of the train, the space between cars near the doors and luggage compartments.

For the next eleven hours, we were unable to sleep, either standing for most of the ride or crouched in a pitiful position resembling a fetus. The space was engulfed by cigarette smoke as scores and scores of people, young and old, came into the compartment to fill their lungs with that wonderful and nausea-inducing substance and tell each other jokes in 3ameya that got progressively more and more annoying as the night wore on (we couldn't understand them). The female members of our group were hit on by several Egyptian men, one particularly brash one carrying around a computer CPU. He'd start up a conversation with us and ask to use our phones, because his phone didn't work. I am convinced he was using this solely as an excuse to find our female phone contacts, because later he took out his phone and tried to snap clandestine pictures of the girls in our group. We used this perfect opportunity to tell him "Haraamu Aleik" (Meaning "shame or forbidden upon you," the reverse of the greeting Salaamu Aleikum, "peace be upon you"). He went away eventually.

Of course, all Egyptian males don't do this. (Almost none go to these lengths.) But still. Come on.
The only brief respite from our complete and utter despair came when I found a 5-minute-long seat next to an old man from Ma'adi, who bought me a juice drink after his friend came back from the bathroom and displaced me.

I've done my best, but I don't think words can really sum up our plight. Fortunately Seth got a short video.



I never thought I'd be so happy to find myself back in smoggy, crowded, chaotic Cairo at 6:30 AM. After taking a cab back to Zamalek, we ate the most wonderful meal of our lives at McDonald's, thankful to be alive and free from the Train of Death.

It's an experience none of us will ever forget; frighteningly stupid, but enlightening at the same time, as we got to see a slice of Egyptian society that is completely against everything you could gather from the entitled AUC New Campus experience of Gucci Corner, inflated egos and cliques straight out of middle school.

Never again, though. When I explained what happened in Arabic to my Colloquial teacher, the best adjective he could come up with (after doubting me a few times) was a very naughty swear word.

I think you get the point.

Oct 8: Luxor

Aswan to Luxor





Up the Nile! On a three-hour train ride where we bought tickets on the train. It wasn't full, so we hopped on and bought "standing" tickets for the ride, which were half the price of normal tickets. Still, we got seats. (Remember this for later.)

Upon arriving in Luxor, we cabbed to our hotel. If you're ever in Luxor...STAY HERE.






It's called the Bob Marley Hotel...12 LE per night, a rooftop lounge, and Bob Marley everywhere. The guy at the desk got us a nice deal on a driver around Luxor for the next day, and also promised to get us tickets for the ride back to Cairo while we were out sightseeing. (Also remember this for later.)

The next day we were up early to do a blitz of as many Luxor temples as possible. After stocking up on fool and falafel at a street place, our driver took us to destination 1:

The Valley of the Kings



Many of ancient Egypt's pharaohs, mostly from the New Kingdom period, are buried here. They decided to move their burial sites to the valley after all the embarrassing robberies of bodies and treasure from the somewhat less-subtle Pyramids at Giza and Saqqara. Valleys are much easier to defend from tomb robbers, right?

Wrong. The tombs still ended up being robbed. In some cases robberies even happened soon after the king was buried there. This is because unlike the policies of other ancient civilizations in China or Mexico, the Egyptians didn't kill the architects and builders of their tombs after the tombs were finished. Basically a hopeful tomb robber would go up to one of these people (could also be a guard, or anyone who has some knowledge of the layout of the tomb and its potential entrances), and he'd offer to give the guy a cut of his "earnings" if he helps him out with getting in. This happened disturbingly often, and it's why we have so few incomplete tombs nowadays.
Anyway, the authorities can fine you an obscene amount of money if you get caught taking pictures inside the tombs, so be content with the above Google map. The humidity in the first tomb we entered, about 100 feet underground, was like DC but in the Jurassic Period. So much that when we emerged into the 105-degree sunlight it actually felt cool.

After Valley of the Kings, it was time for Hatshepsut's temple.





Onward to Medinet Habu, one of my personal favorites.







To verify their enemy casualties, the Egyptian soldiers would bring back wagonloads of heads or...well, you can figure it out from the picture, given the Egyptian obsession with humiliating the enemy in most painful way.




...yeah, it's a battle. Remember this for later.

We wanted lunch, so our driver tried to figure out where we should best go. He first stopped at a hilariously overpriced place in downtown Luxor where he was friends with the manager. We left rather quickly and tried the place across the street, which didn't look open since it was Friday. The broken English the guy spoke there seemed to mean that we could sit down and have lunch, but the fact that they literally had no other customers and would have to make us food special seemed somewhat sketchy. We exited, and the owner followed us, offering to take us to another place that was open. He stopped at a European-style restaurant with a minimum charge of 100 LE per person. Not another one! Luckily, our driver had been looking for us after he noticed we weren't in the second place anymore, and he drove up just as we were about to go inside and get ripped off yet again. This daring rescue earned him major points. We told him we'd just get koshary, but he seemed to really want us to spend some serious money since the next place he took us was to a buffet restaurant full of European tourists. Probably the same ones who were willing to buy a can of beer for 13 Euros at Abu Simbel. Knowing this was not good, I subtracted his points and told him to take us to koshary NOW.

Good old Egyptian food. Not great, but not pricey, either. Final stop: Karnak, the largest temple in Egypt. It's the big brown square north of downtown Luxor on the map below, so you can get some idea of its size.

Aswan to Abu Simbel to Luxor

Looks cool, right?
Ramesses II is one of the most well-known Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, known for going on a building spree of temples and gigantic monuments, and for possibly being the Pharaoh of the Exodus as the primary antagonist in the story of the Israelites' freedom from slavery.
As the pictures show, Abu Simbel was no exception. In fact, Ramesses built this massive statue of him (times 4) to give a clear message to the peoples of the South: "Don't you dare fight Egypt because I'm so great and powerful, I can build these massive monuments and destroy you just as massively." But in addition to the warning/intimidation aspect of Abu Simbel, it was also used as a temple.



Take a quick look at the map above. Lake Nasser takes up most of where the Nile should be in southern Egypt and northern Sudan.
That's not a natural lake. It was formed in the 1960s, as President Nasser's pride and joy, the Aswan High Dam, was being built. The dam would provide as much as 25% of all of Egypt's energy in the form of hydroelectricity as well as stop the Nile's disastrous seasonal floods that had plagued Egyptians for thousands of years.



As with anything, though, there are upsides and downsides. While the Nile had repeatedly flooded its banks every year, farmers depended on its deposits of fertile black soil (silt) that would wash over their lands and bring them a good crop yield.
With the construction of the Dam, the Nile no longer flooded, there was no more silt...and Egypt began to have a food crisis that it still suffers from today. Today, the only good place to fish is near the Mediterranean Sea.

(The pollution in the Nile has gotten so bad that, when asked whether it would be safer to have oil tankers dock by the Red Sea instead of in the Nile following an oil spill in Aswan, a marine biology professor at AUC replied to the effect that the Nile is the more polluted of the two bodies of water, and nothing lives in it anyway, so there's no problem.)

With the formation of the massive Lake Nasser, hundreds of archaeological sites south of the dam were in danger of becoming completely submerged underwater. Although the flooding process had already begun with a the construction of the smaller and less effective Aswan Dam in 1902, the new dam's lake now threatened to engulf these monuments completely.

So UNESCO stepped in and told Egypt that it needed to save these monuments. From what people have told me, the Egyptians weren't convinced, being more concerned with the welfare of their own people than a bunch of ancient temples. Which is, in a way, understandable. But then UNESCO told them that they could make loads of money off of tourism from these sites...and voila! Egypt approved their request to mount a massive rescue effort.




It took over ten years, but with a combination of ingenuity, artistic and engineering skills, UNESCO and many nations worked together to move what they could to higher ground. These efforts included cutting up thousands of hundred-ton pieces of stone from the temples and painstakingly lifting them to a reassembly site, where they were put back together and set in their new places.

Without their efforts, Abu Simbel would lie about 200 feet lower today, at the bottom of the lake and only accessible (perhaps) by scuba diving. Seen here in the model at the Nubia Museum showing the submerged temple's former area (bottom of photo) and where they moved it to up the cliff.





Same thing for the temples on the island of Philae (now underwater, visible in the satellite photo as a small shadow-like oval in the lower right corner to the right of the larger island). They were moved to nearby Agilika Island, where workers had to level the island using dynamite to recreate a near-perfect landscape mirroring the layout at Philae. All the temples you see in these pictures are in identical positions relative to each other and the Sun. This is important because every year on February 22 and October 22, the Sun shines through to the back of Abu Simbel and illuminates exactly three of the four seated statues...something the ancient Egyptians originally planned quite well.


View from Aswan High Dam






Major props to all these conservationists!

Tomorrow, I'll divest so you can learn about ancient Egypt's political and religious system. I promise it won't be boring, and it'll help you understand Luxor's temples and tombs.

Oct 6: Cairo to Aswan

Oct 5: Egyptian Museum
Today my Egyptology professor, Salima Ikram, took us around the Egyptian Museum for the first time. Highlights included a disturbing stone mask from the predynastic period and below-the-waist statue of Min, the fertility god, with pillar-sized legs and baseball-sized...yeah. Anything above that was removed awhile ago and is now elsewhere, but I've heard it was the length of a ruler and gilded.

Got on the train to Aswan at 10. Ihsaan and I sat with some Australians, one white guy who was married to an Asian-Australian, and her brother. A train worker came into our car asking if we wanted dinner, saw these foreigners, and said, "Ah, you from Japan!" (They were ethnically Chinese but of course it's the same thing here.)



We endured a 14-hour freezing-cold train ride (see above) to Aswan, which is close to the Sudanese border. Upon arriving in Aswan around 12pm the next day, we left the station and were immediately solicited by at least ten felucca captains who wanted us to take a ride with them. Their prices were ridiculous. It's hard when you want to see if you can get a good price but at the same time don't want to seem too interested, because then they will NOT stop following you. One guy followed us almost to our hotel about a half mile away, telling us he was giving us a good price (not really) and that we had to go with him now.



After checking into our hotel we put our stuff down and went out to explore, taking a 2-minute felucca ride to Elephantine Island. There were some cool artifacts there including a 3-D model of the island's temples and some cool inscriptions.



Major props if you can tell me what this script is. It looks almost like a cross between Hebrew script, Hindi, Phoenician and Greek. My guess is Hieratic?





We went over to the Temple of Isis after walking through a nice garden on the other side of the museum...it's a huge complex which has artifacts from the Greek and Roman periods, as well as earlier times where Elephantine housed a community of Jewish mercenaries hired by the Egyptians to fight the Nubians in the south.









Once we had had our fill of monuments, we trudged south to go to Sehel Island, home of the famous Famine Stela carved by King Djoser to commemorate his prayers to the god Khnum to stop a terrible famine. We didn't make it to Sehel because the felucca guy wanted to charge 120 LE for everyone, so we opted for the Nubian Museum instead.

We had to present our IDs at the ticket counter. When the man saw my last name, he asked if I was Jewish. Tired of lying, I said yes, but not Israeli. He asked me aren't they the same thing. I told him no, of course not. Not wanting to get into an intense discussion (all this was in Egyptian Arabic), I promised I'd talk to him later when we left the museum.
The Nubian Museum itself was unlike any museum I'd seen so far in Egypt--well-lit, clearly labeled artifacts, nice displays...




Who were the Nubians? You actually probably know at least one: the late Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat.
In ancient times before today's borders were drawn, the Nubians were Egypt's perennial friends and enemies in the South, historically occupying what is now northern Sudan and extreme southern Egypt, past Aswan. For ancient Egypt, Aswan was the last defense outpost before reaching Nubia. Depending on the period of time, Egypt either had complete control over the Nubians and ruthlessly extracted their raw materials for use in their empire, or the two groups were somewhat friendly.





In a dramatic reversal of fortune in 760 BCE, the Nubians took over parts of southern Egypt when a dispute between dynasties in the Delta led Egypt to become rocked by instability. The Nubians eventually took over all of Egypt for a period of about 100 years, fighting off repeated Assyrian invasions from the Near East until they were finally defeated and pushed back to Nubia. Ironically, during this period they tried to "restore" ancient Egyptian traditions and artistic/architectural styles, probably so they could claim legitimacy as the inheritors of the Pharaohs' dynasties. There was a lot of cultural exchange between the two powers; you can see the influence the Egyptians had on Nubia by these pyramid-like tombs, located in northern Sudan at Meroe.



On the way out I had that 30-minute Arabic discussion with the ticket guy about Jews and Israel. I'd like to say I enlightened him, but after all we'd said, he just suggested I read the Qur'an so I could become enlightened. Sigh.

Abu Simbel bright and early tomorrow. Leaving at 2:45 AM!

Standing up for yourself (or not)

On any trip, fatigue will invariably set in, no matter how excited you are to be away from home. In this case, it was on a 12-hour train ride from Luxor to Cairo sitting in between cars, without seats, in the small doorway areas Egyptians frequently enter to smoke a pack of cigarettes. Cigarette smoke is bad enough outside, but in a train car where there's no way to escape, it's impossible to breathe.

Couple that with extremely cold compartments, Egyptians who will not stop jabbering away in 3ameya until 5 AM, and a man carrying a computer CPU who's trying to get secret photos of your friends (girls) with his phone camera...and you've got yourself one hell of a ride.

That said, what could at best be called a "cultural experience" was at an all-time high, as we learned what it truly means to get a "standing ticket."

Not to worry, Luxor and Aswan made up for all this. Pictures soon.