Egyptology (Trunk of the Tree) Part 3

Sometimes a lack of planning plays in your favor. We waited to see the Giza pyramids until the end of our trip. Looking back, and through no foresight of our own, visiting these sights along with Cairo’s impressive archeology museum after absorbing the ancient tombs and temples along the Upper Nile provided a dramatic finale to an already moving trip — with a New Year’s eve full moon nonetheless. “Save something for the wedding night” a former songwriting professor was prone to say.

Indeed, context is everything. Visiting the temples of Luxor, Karnak, Dendera, the Valley of Kings, Abu Simbel, the quarry of the Unfinished Obelisk and so many more while Mohamed showered us with insights into Egyptian mythology and hieroglyphics created a foundation of imagery and historical background for that moment when we were finally staring skyward at the great pyramids and scrambling down the underground shafts to the tombs.

The last day of 2017 was relatively cool in Cairo with occasional clouds. The wind whipped up small sandstorms. We hired camels from a local outfit to reach an interesting vantage. It was a fun touristic splurge and we were glad we hadn’t heard in advance that tourists sometimes get crabs from the dromedary rides. Our new guide told us things we weren’t sure we could believe, like you could wrap all the stones from the Great Cheops Pyramid around the entire border of France.

The stones, however, did look like they could definitely weigh between three and seven tons a piece. They were massive and looking up made you feel very small and wonder how in the fricking BeJesus they pulled this off so many thousands of years ago. And why did humans for millennia in different cultures and different parts of the world put their faith in a system of royal descendants empowered with distinct communication pathways to the gods? When someone finally came along who was proclaimed to be the Son of God, or even more blasphemous, who preached persuasively that God was within each of us and salvation could be ours if we chose to live a certain way … of course he had to die.

The Egyptian Museum and Royal Mummies Hall in Cairo were a highlight, not only for the vast collection and well executed displays and protruding bones and hair and tight shiny skin on the ancient embalmed bodies, but for the second floor, where most of the contents found in Tutankhamun’s tomb are housed. What heart racing back flipping hallelujahs must have gone through the minds of Howard Carter and his crew in the thrilling moment when they realized what a trove they had just unearthed in the Egyptian desert. Though I had seen the traveling Tutankhamun show and other exhibitions of Egyptology before, we now had the context. Suddenly it made sense, every time Mohamed had tried to (sometimes half-heartedly) convince us that Egypt was the trunk of the tree, that all great discoveries of modern civilization might somehow be traced back to this lost empire of the sun and cobras that was so obsessed with a legacy of immortality. I stood mesmerized by a throne plated with gold foil that had been hammered to an amazing thinness and sequences of hieroglyphics inlaid in precious stones. All of the grandeur of ancient Egypt was all on display in that one stunning chair.

Generally speaking, we found the Egyptian people to be kind and friendly and eager to help. You would not know this, however, by the way they drive. Their traffic patterns are pure anarchy, particularly in the cities. Just observing Cairo’s massive traffic jams from the air made our stomachs churn as we approached the airport. On the ground we found that no one followed the lane lines. They went out of their way to straddle them, in fact, creating four or even five lanes out of three. Drivers honked incessantly, used the wrong side of the road, threaded seemingly unthreadable needles in impossibly large vehicles. It took hours to cross the city. Life seemed like one continuous bottle neck. Crashes were common and insurance is not a construct. Resolution, it was explained to us, happens when one driver finally gives in to the other, or both parties eventually leave and assume responsibility for their own damages. In Alexandria we passed an entire neighborhood of body shops with stacks of just the front ends or back ends of cars. On our way to the airport we came across an accident, two cars badly mangled causing a bumper to bumper slowdown. The two men were waving their arms and yelling at one another for retribution, with no officer on the scene to adjudicate. They would obviously soon be on their way to the body shops.

“The Egyptian people need a system,” our guide told us. “We are very productive, very hard working, when there is a system. Now there is no system. After the Revolution we completely began ignoring all traffic rules. Every driver thinks he is perfect and that all the other drivers are stupid.”

In Alexandria we toured a most impressive modern library, part of an international effort to preserve the legacy of Alexander the Great, who first built a signifiant library of ancient manuscripts there, later destroyed by fire. One wonders what it means to a people to understand that the golden age of their civilization may now be thousands of years in the past, covered by the sands of time and savagely defaced by generations of vandals who gave no value to their history.

For glimmers of insight I read the engaging prose of Yasmine El Rashidi’s Chronicle of a Last Summer and Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mafouz’s Autumn Quail. I rewatched “Lawrence of Arabia,” which our son Gardner enjoyed so much back in the days of video rental shops. Achieving independence and establishing a functional democracy has been a continual struggle.

Egypt currently has over 90 million people living between its East and West banks, which are jammed up against rocky desert hills they call mountains. Cairo and Giza have 35 million people; Alexandria another 11 million. The tourist industry has collapsed we are told, and inflation is rampant. Everyday the Egyptian pound is worth less and less. Nearly everyone we met complained about the cost of living. Yet we heard precious little about the elephant in the room. The country’s burgeoning population, crammed in cities and in irrigated rural districts, dependent on the lifeblood of the Nile, which originates in other countries and is ripe for 21st Century political warfare, as regional rivals vie for both its water and electricity.

We heard reports that the Trump Administration has threatened to cut off funding to the United Nations over its failure to support the US backing of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. For the past three months, we have seen firsthand so many positive efforts that UNESCO has made over many decades to acknowledge and support world heritage sites. This includes contributing huge amounts of money to save and relocate entire temples built into mountainsides which would have been flooded and destroyed by the High Dam at Aswan in the 1970s. UNESCO has to be one of the great public agencies working on behalf of the preservation of human culture in our time.

Just before midnight on New Year’s eve, huge spotlights illuminated the Great pyramid. We made friends with two expatriate couples living in Egypt originally born in Peru, Italy, France and Spain. They were generously sharing their European wines with us and we conversed in English and Spanish and toasted and danced with a full moon above and the ancient monument seemingly there within arm’s grasp and so much to be thankful for and high hopes for a very different year ahead.