The Fayyum and the Fail Pyramids

AUC Downtown Campus, 8:00am. Final field trip of the semester!

We're on our way to visit several sites in the Fayyum, an oasis that is fed by an offshoot of the Nile River which ends in a salty lake, Lake Moeris (Birket Qarun in Arabic).

The first is Karanis (Kom Aushim), where the crocodile god Sobek was worshiped. The ancient Egyptians mummified crocodiles and stuck them in these slots.







Next we saw Amenemhet III's Pyramid at Hawara.

The pyramids we'll see today all have one thing in common--they're ugly. Originally they looked quite nice, but unlike the more famous Giza Pyramids, they're not in such good condition. Lots of these pyramids were made in experimental styles during the Middle Kingdom, where the pharaohs decided to improve on the existing pyramid design and made a mudbrick core containing the burial chamber. They then surrounded this core with a shell of limestone. What they didn't expect was the lack of cohesion that the mudbrick would have, though, and over time, the outer parts of the pyramids collapsed, leaving only a sad-looking mudbrick center (occasional earthquakes and building too close to the river's unstable water table didn't help).







And a closeup of the blockwork:



After this guy we visited the pyramid of Amenemhet III at Lahun, east of the Fayyum, another epic fail.



Depressed by all these disappointing mounds? We saved the best for last!
As I might have said in a previous post, the bored, boat-riding Old Kingdom pharaoh Snefru had an astonishing four pyramids dedicated to him--at Saqqara, Seila and Meidum. He constructed his pyramids entirely from limestone, but unfortunately the Meidum pyramid suffered a similar fate to the Middle Kingdom pyramids around it. As you can see, the outer layers have collapsed quite spectacularly.



Inside




In my infinite stupidity, I brought along a wool scarf to protect myself from the sun (the only scarf I had). After berating me for several minutes, Dr. Ikram, in her infinite wisdom and South Asian skill, tied it Punjabi-style.





Don't mess, Diljit.

Finally, we moved to the immense Mastaba 17 to the south of the pyramid. Mastabas were large flat mounds that were used as burial chambers for early Pharoahs. The brilliant architect Imhotep, of "The Mummy" fame, realized that by stacking mastabas of decreasing size on top of each other, you could create a pyramid. And he did just that with Djoser's pyramid at Saqqara (see previous post).

Anyway, Mastaba 17 was awesome. Below, Dr. Ikram holds a council to warn us of the impending claustrophobia that may prove too much for some.




...and zombies?





Apologies if this film is slow in places. Keep watching though, it gets better.



All in all, a great finish!

Alexandria, EGYPT

Took the 3-hour train from Cairo to Alexandria, on the coast. Alexandria's a great place if you want to get away from the heat, smog and crowds that characterize Cairo.
It was the first time I'd seen rain in 3 months.




On the way to the Catacombs we stopped to get some real 1-LE Egyptian pancakes and 50-piaster croissants. Delicious!


These catacombs were built during the Late Period of ancient Egyptian history, when Roman influence had mixed with Egyptian influence and mutated its art forms into a very, very strange type of offspring. This is just my opinion, but it diluted a lot of what we classify as "real" Egyptian art, turning Horus into a Classical-style baby and messing around with traditional art forms to bring them more in line with Roman tastes.



If you ever go to an ancient Roman gravesite, know that it's ten times creepier if you go there on Halloween weekend.

I'm also doing research for Dr. Ikram, my Egyptology professor.





Picture of the day

Happy Halloween

About 13 years ago...

What happens when you don't pay your workers enough?

So much trash!







As Shahira explained, there are several discrepancies between the Arabic and English versions of the workers' contracts. Basically, their contracts say 600 pounds per month, but they only receive 400 after taking out "implicit expenses" the University has in place like health care. It's pretty hard to live on 400 pounds a month (=$80).

While they may have much better-paying jobs than the vast majority of Egyptians out there, AUC can clearly afford to pay these people just a little more. They work hard to keep the campus clean, which is a Herculean task in itself owing to the lack of...well, water and civilization, as well as the constant invasions of sand and dust.

Oh, and another thing. AUC students who litter.
As these students demonstrated solidarity with the workers, I couldn't help but notice a few other things. First, they pledged to skip classes to continue their protests. That's a nice sacrifice in theory, but in reality a lot of students' usual attendance records indicate otherwise...

Second, some of these students are the reason AUC's campus is currently such a mess. I see people littering every day. Trash goes in the trash cans, not on the ground. While the workers will pick up your trash for you if you leave it somewhere, that does NOT mean you can act irresponsible. (This is not a cultural-value issue--it's a cleanliness and social norms one.)

It makes me wonder whether the cycle of littering-cleaning-littering is really a causal loop, feeding on itself, which benefits both the students and the workers. Because the students litter, AUC needs to employ more workers to clean up the amount of trash, so each person's pay becomes smaller to reflect the budget considerations.

As of the following Monday, AUC and the student union have negotiated and come to a solution, basically giving the workers pay raises to 1200 LE in March and September 2011 as well as a 200 LE increase in meal compensation. Well, something clearly worked, and I'll give the students and workers credit for that. Still, this issue illustrates a certain hypocrisy that I'm seeing around here.

Giza, at last

On a lighter note...
This week, the 2nd Annual Arab University Games were held, hosted by AUC. 700 student athletes from all over the Middle East, from Morocco to Iraq, came to compete against each other at an intercollegiate event that seemed more like an Arab League Olympics. In the Algeria vs. UAE basketball game I watched, there were the Algeria supporters on one side (a small but vocal minority) and the Egyptians on the other side, who have had bad blood with the Algerians ever since Egypt's devastating failure to beat Algeria's football team and make it to the World Cup last year.








Egyptians take football very, very seriously, and I guess this extends to other sports as well. But I'm sure their rivalry with Algeria is limited to the world of sports.
(Here's a clip of the game.)

I couldn't stay to see who won, but UAE was crushing Algeria when I left.

Grocery shopping in Egypt is always fun, from the imported $10 boxes of Rice Krispies to the stacks of knockoff Nutella jars. After the game my friends and I made Indian food, and the selection of spices was mediocre at best. This makes sense, because here the priority is to decimate your hunger with a veritable Mt. Sinai of carbs rather than to begin the clandestine hijacking of your taste buds by capsaicin. Still, the chicken curry and rice was delicious.

The next day, October 22, Ramesses II's birthday, my class went back to the Egyptian Museum to pick out our objects for our papers. Mine was the Colossus of Senwosret I, a statue of epic proportions and clearly overstated leg muscles.
Professor Ikram, to class: You are young and I am old, so I expect you all to keep up with me.
Us: Ok, sure. (piece of cake.)
And then she took off at top speed to the first object we were studying, weaving through crowds of tourists and Egyptian guides without looking behind to see if we were following. We went up stairs and across balconies and a few times I had to jog to catch up with her line of ducklings. None of us had expected her superhuman speed.

Saturday: Giza!
Everyone knows about the Pyramids. You learn about them in elementary school, see pictures on postcards, or encounter them in the news when a brave young man climbs one in broad daylight and has to be removed by Egyptian military helicopter.
Going there today was a bit anticlimactic. I definitely imagined they'd be bigger.






Still, it was great having Dr. Ikram with us to get into all the sites for free--several temples, the Sphinx, the Solar Boat museum, and two pyramids. Climbing out of a pyramid's claustrophobic and harrowing passages and breathing fresh air once again is an experience that can probably be compared to emerging from the womb, which maybe some of you can identify with.


Masamune smites Alia with his camel-bone mace (yes, he found it fresh on the ground)


Khafre's valley temple: stone masonry like the walls at Machu Picchu


Breast Cancer Walk




This is why our class field trips are awesome.


The Grand Gallery, Khufu's Pyramid






Here we have a hole in Khafre's pyramid. We can most likely blame tomb robbers who tried to make a grand entrance by blasting their way in, but I prefer to blame the Decepticons.

Life in Transit

Wednesdays are pretty much the longest days of my life. I wake up at 6am, catch the bus at 7, and have class straight from 8:30 to 12:45, and after an hour break, another hour and a half of class. Then I get the 3:30 bus downtown and take Metro to Heliopolis, where I tutor English at 6pm. I tutor until 7:30, then wait for my friends to finish their tutoring at 9:30 so we can go back together.

I couldn't do all of this without relying on transportation. You'll hear a lot about traffic and crowds in Cairo. Cairo's renowned for having some of the worst traffic in any world city, largely due to its population explosion and lack of infrastructure that can deal with it. As I write this I'm on a bus to downtown that left AUC's New Campus at 5:15, and we're only getting close to Tahrir now at 6:45. (This trip normally takes 45 minutes.) Metro was so crowded I couldn't even push through the 5 feet that separated me from the exit in time, so I had to go to the next stop and come back.

Think for a moment about driving to school. You wake up, eat breakfast, get your stuff together and get in the car. You start the engine and enter the packed road, already full of commuters, as you prepare for what will be another busy day.
What we don't realize, though, is how much can go wrong on the road so quickly.
Last Tuesday, an AUC journalism student named Ammar Tareq was driving his Volkswagen on Road 90, the suburban highway leading to AUC, when he saw a huge pothole in the road. He swerved to avoid it, but instead his car flipped over. He had not been wearing a seatbelt, and was killed instantly. AUC's student union held a prayer service for him last week, and some 200 people attended.







This is not an isolated incident. Every year, at least 8,000 people are killed and 32,000 injured while driving on Egyptian roads. In early October, 12 people were killed and 8 severely injured when a car driven by a university student swerved to avoid being hit by a lorry truck and instead hit a crowd of pedestrians. The day that AUC students mourned Ammar's death, another student had an accident just a few kilometers from campus. He was fine, but his car had been crumpled like an empty candy wrapper.

I sometimes wonder if locating the campus so far away from the center of town makes commuting there less, not more, safe. Ask any Egyptian, and they will tell you that most accidents happen outside downtown Cairo, where traffic moves much faster, the roads can accommodate more cars, and people usually don't use their headlights.

Clearly, more people need to wear seatbelts. Who knows if Ammar would still be alive if he was wearing one? I think part of this has to do with students' feelings of entitlement and invincibility, but it's also part of living here. Plenty of people don't bother with these things that just delay them getting to their destination by a few seconds. You'd think in Egypt, where time is so much different from German or American conceptions of time, they could spare the extra second.

If you wonder why infrastructure development and safe practices are so difficult in Egypt, just go to downtown Cairo. The first time I visited there, my Egyptian friend Amr and I were crossing the chaotic Midan Tahrir, a huge square where about ten major streets intersect near one of the bridges over the Nile with eight lanes of traffic in each direction. One of the cops standing in the traffic circle was checking cars randomly to see if people had their seatbelts. Anyone caught without one just paid him 10 pounds ($3) and he let them go. This is partly the cop's fault for being corrupt, yes, but the small bribe and miniscule possibility of getting caught only reinforce these dangerous practices.

Corruption isn't always bad--as a tourist, a little baksheesh can get you out of unexpected sticky situations--but when you're playing with lives on the road, the tolerance for unsafe practices is outright reckless. The excuse that road safety and other infrastructures take time to build up is not acceptable. How many more university students' deaths will it take until this culture changes?