Brenda Hyde: Day 4 - The Great Pyramid Adventure

SIDE NOTE: This morning Hubby D forwarded me an article on Egypt that was extremely interesting. I only wish I could have read it prior to our trip. Here is a link if you are interested in knowing more about Egypt and their pivotal role in that region of the world.

Egypt Today

99% of the population of Egypt live along the Nile.

While Egypt may be emerging as a more solid Middle East middle power, it still faces significant political and economic headwinds. As with the time of the pharaohs, its willingness to involve itself in regional affairs, waxes and wanes according to how stable it is at home.

DAY 4
After another wonderful breakfast we drove to Sakkara, site of hundreds of tombs and 14 pyramids, including the Step Pyramid of Djoser. Constructed at Sakkara about 4,700 years ago, the Step Pyramid of Djoser was the first pyramid the Egyptians built.

Hubby D and SW survey a wall at the Step Pyramid.

These workers are rebuilding portions of the pyramid and do not have visible safety measures. It was very unsettling to watch them walk along the edge.

The pyramid is northwest of the ancient city of Memphis. It was built in the 27th century BC during the Third dynasty for the burial of Pharaoh Djoser by Imhotep, his vizier. Imhotep was the first to build stone tombs in honor of the king's majesty.
  

Just a side note, this website has a most interesting logo incorporating the Key of Life. While I was researching for this blog, I discovered the site and it has a great deal of beautiful images and information about Egypt.

On our way back from the Pyramid of Djoser going to the Giza Plateau we stopped at the El Sultan Carpet School and watched the weavers at work. The link to the school is a video made in 2009 but it is very accurate showing them weave a rug.

Looking for a specific size round carpet in Egypt was on my “to do” list and I was very excited when we arrived at the Carpet School. After the tour, we all shopped. I found the perfect carpet, however it was too large.

Hubby D made arrangements to custom order one the correct size. I am so excited! I have a handmade custom carpet coming from Egypt for our breakfast room! It will be the perfect reminder of a fabulous adventure. However, it probably won’t arrive for several months.

This is the sample of the carpet (rug) Hubby D custom ordered.

Our lunch was in a local restaurant, Abu Shakra located at the base of the Sphinx. We had a wonderful view of the pyramids from our table.

The restaurant window was still flocked with a picture of Santa. LOL

We moved on from lunch to tour the Giza Plateau, site of the Great Pyramid. Built in the Fourth Dynasty (approximately 2690 BC), it is the only survivor of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Our first stop was the workman’s village and their cemetery.

When you think of all the labor that was needed to construct the pyramids, you assume they used slaves. There were slaves in Egypt but the pyramids were monuments of the Kings, monuments to their connection with the gods, to their ascent into the afterlife with the gods. The pyramids and their temples were part of the royal cult, and required the dedication and devotion of craftsmen and laborers who believed in their King and their gods.

The pyramids were built by Egyptians, by stonemasons, artisans, artists and craftsmen. From hieroglyphics, inscriptions and graffiti, it is being learned that these skilled builders and craftsmen probably worked year round at the site. Entire cities were created to support the work of building the pyramid.

The workers built their own tombs near the pyramids, and placed statues and other objects inside in preparation for the afterlife. The mud-brick tombs had a variety of shapes: mini-pyramids, step pyramids, mastabas and beehives.

We visited one important tomb, the tomb of Petety and his wife Nesy-Sokar. He was the supervisor of the junior workers on the Pyramids and she was a priestess of the goddess Hathor. The tomb has a unique form with three open courts.

Although we did not realize it at the time, but this was our first visit of many visits to a tomb.

On either side of the entrance to the tomb, Petety wrote a hieroglyphic warning text to protect himself and his tomb from tomb-raiders. Petety’s curse threatens anyone approaching his tomb that “the priest of Hathor will beat twice anyone who enters this tomb or does harm to it.”

“Anyone who does anything bad to this tomb, then the crocodile, hippopotamus and the lion will eat him,” the curse says.

As we were walking back from the workman's village, we had a safety moment. Always watch where you walk. This is a rebar marking the location of a buried building that has not yet been escalated. Someone placed a plastic bottle over the metal bar so you would not trip over it. LOL

The Pyramids of Giza consist of the Great Pyramid of Giza (also known as the Pyramid of Cheops or Khufu), the somewhat smaller Pyramid of Khafre a few hundred meters to the south-west, and the relatively modest-sized Pyramid of Menkaure a few hundred meters farther south-west. There are also a half dozen or more small subsidiary Pyramids, plus The Sphinx and numerous tombs and temples.

There are actually 9 pyramids visible from the plateau looking back at the Great Pyramid. Six are seen quite easily, and the other 3 are smaller mounds.

There has been some discussion among astronomers that the three pyramids were a terrestrial map of the three stars of Orion's belt. The position of the three largest pyramids of the Giza complex do match that configuration. The stars of Orion were associated by the ancient Egyptians with Osiris, the god of rebirth and afterlife.

The Orion correlation theory was put forward by Robert Bauval in 1983. One night, while working in Saudi Arabia, he took his family and a friend's family up into the sand dunes of the Arabian desert for a camping expedition. His friend pointed out Orion, and mentioned that Mintaka, the dimmest and most westerly of the stars making up Orion's belt, was offset slightly from the others. Bauval then made a connection between the layout of the three main stars in Orion's belt and the layout of the three main pyramids in the Giza pyramid complex.

Graham Hancock, a British writer specializing in theories involving ancient civilizations says that the Great Pyramids may have been an architectural evolution of sites whose origin and cultural significance dated back some eight thousand years before the current monuments were built.

Hubby D and I had many conversations prior to our trip to Egypt discussing how the Egyptians might have achieved the construction of the pyramids. I found a book about this (Ancient Egyptian Construction and Architecture by Somers Clarke) and he read it with great interest. We were still not sure how they were able to build these mammoth structures.

Based on markings in the pyramids, it took between 10 and 20 years to build the Great Pyramid. It is estimated that they had to place a stone every 4 minutes around the clock to build the pyramid in 20 years. That is an amazing feat, considering they quarried the stone 12 miles from the site. Just think of the planning, logistics, management of people and the animals to accomplish this -- 4000 YEARS AGO. Simply amazing.

Before we traveled to Egypt, I had read about theories saying aliens helped build the Great Pyramids. I thought that was silly but after being there and experiencing them, perhaps there were aliens. How could the Egyptians have built the pyramids so exact and in such a short period of time?

On our way to the pyramids, our group stopped on a high plateau and took a short camel ride.

Trick photo - all the guides played around with the tourist and took these cheesy shots.

**Photo note – I decided to pass riding the camels and take photos instead. I have ridden camels other times and it is not really my cup of tea.

After the ride our group first visited the smaller pyramid Pyramid of Khafre and climbed inside to see the burial chamber.

Raafat told us this was a test to see if we wanted to climb inside the Great Pyramid and see the King’s Chamber. The climb into the Great Pyramid was supposedly more difficult than the smaller Khafre Pyramid.

This was inside the burial chamber of the Pyramid of Khafre.

This shows how the stones in the ceiling were offset.

Later Hubby D and I agreed it was not that difficult to climb inside the Khafre Pyramid and we would definitely climb into the Great Pyramid. However, only 5 members of our group decided to attempt the Great Pyramid, DW, SW, Hubby D, myself and one other traveler.

It was well worth the effort.

This is a drawing of the interior of the Great Pyramid. We climbed up the Grand Gallery to the King's Chamber.

There were quite a few people waiting to make the climb inside the pyramid.

Just climbing up to the opening was ... fun?

Climbing inside the Great Pyramid was hot and at times very narrow. Notice how the stones are offset as they go up, narrowing the passage to the top.

Most of the way we had to crouch down to get through the passages.

After the pyramids, our next visit was to the Solar Boat Museum and Cheops’ funerary boat.

In 1954, the parts of a cedar-wood barge were found in five pits near the Great Pyramid of Khufu. The barge was restored and assembled out of 1200 pieces of wood. All the pieces were found marked, piece by piece so they could be re-assembled easily, once you knew the code. It is believed that the ancient Egyptians buried the boat near the tomb of their pharaoh because they believed he needed transportation in the afterlife.

Outside the Great Pyramid SW took this picture of DW so she could send it home to her local newspaper, the Fayette County Record.

After we came out of the Boat Museum we posed next to the stones of the Great Pyramid. The wind was blowing really hard but it was worth it to get a perspective on the size of the stones.

Finally we traveled to the base of the pyramids and stopped at a terrace that gave us an incredible view of the Great Sphinx. The Great Sphinx lies on the east side of the complex. Current consensus among Egyptologists is that the head of the Great Sphinx is that of Khafre.

A debate continues about what caused the erosion of the sphinx. Was it wind and sand or was it water? If an ancient river existed here, it could be water. The erosion does remind you of the Grand Canyon. Who knows?

As we traveled in Cairo, inside our cool comfortable bus, we passed some very unusual sites. There was a closed golf course.   

We could not tell why this course was closed.

Sheep herders in the street.

A camel rider going down the city street.

Juice bars with hanging fruit.

Some of the buildings in the outskirts of Cairo are at stages of being torn down. Cairo has an ongoing housing shortage and since the 2011 army-backed uprising which toppled Hosni Mubarak, they have been struggling.

According to Raafat, these multi-story houses were constructed without seeking the required permits and adhering to safety standards that raise the cost of construction. During my research for this blog, I found one article that stated there are 450,000 buildings constructed without permits.

Here you can see where they have collapsed the floors to keep people out of the building.

It was a very odd site to see where the floors had been collapsed so that people would not try to live in the unsafe housing. Why did they not go ahead and completely demolish the building rather than keep it as an eyesore? It seams many things never get finished in the Middle East.

This evening, after a wonderful dinner with our new friends, we spent some time enjoying the view from our terrace at Mena House. Being this close to ancient history does change your perspective.