by Pat Brown
After my whirlwind tour of a myriad of shops, I huffed and puffed to the high-ceilinged room of my hotel, carrying bags of long skirts, sleeved shirts, and a half dozen hijabs of assorted vibrant colors, and collapsed into my bed. I slept like a mummy, a dreamless sleep after the grueling flight in coach and the endless layover at Heathrow in London, content and unconscious under the heavy quilt that adorned the bed, unconcerned that it had not likely been washed in the last century.
If one can sleep late in Cairo, one has lived in the city for a long while or is luxuriating in a fine hotel along the Nile that serves alcoholic beverages to tourists, dead to the world from inebriation, sheltered from sound by the thick walls and airtight construction. At my fifteen-dollar-per-night hotel in the teaming streets of the city downtown, at far before the break of dawn, I woke to Adhan, the morning call to prayer that was emanating from a loudspeaker on a nearby mosque. It tends to raise the neck hair on the non-Muslim first-time visitor to Egypt, but is a comforting soliloquy for the start of day for those of the Islamic faith and for others who have become accustomed to the early-morning song of the city.
I threw open the massive window shutters and soaked in the lilting melodies floating above the courtyard, if one could call it that, a square trash dump with nondescript walls rising on its four sides. But, the magic held. I was in the land of Cleopatra, even if it had changed radically over the centuries from the days of the pharaohs to the Arab Spring, the about-to-begin 2011 revolution of Egypt. Each period of history contributed to the development of the region, the people, the religion, and the culture. The days of the Old Kingdom began in 2686 BCE, when the great pyramids of Giza were built. Three dynasties of indigenous rule held fast for almost seventeen centuries until the Libyan invasion in 945 BCE; followed by the Persian conquest of 525 BCE, under which the Egyptians were extremely unhappy; and the then most-welcomed liberation by the Macedonian general Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. His conquest set up the many years of pharaonic rule through the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE. Then Egypt became part of the Roman Empire and was regarded as a large estate that Rome could plunder for its crops, cash, and cultural amenities. The polytheistic religion was allowed to continue with relatively little interference, and the priests were actually aided by the Roman rulers in the construction of new temples and the completion of unfinished ones; life was hard but one could still pray to one’s own gods, those of human appearance and those in animal form.
Then came the spread of Christianity and the invasion of 324 CE, which resulted in almost three hundred years of rule under the thumb of Constantinople and the ravaging of the tombs, temples, and monuments. Today one can still see the breadth of their destruction at the temples where the noses of nearly every one of the ancient Egyptian deities has been lopped off in a mass cleansing of polytheistic worship. Christianity grew greatly during this period, in spite of disputes and offshoots fighting for power and survival like the early Coptic Church, which survives to this day. Presently, Christians make up 10 percent of the population; the many Christmas decorations I saw hanging in windows of businesses and in restaurants attest to this.
The next radical change came in 639 CE, when the Muslim general Amir ibn al-‘As invaded Egypt and ended the Byzantine rule and Islam began to take root. Weathering the Ottoman, French, and British occupations from the early 1500s until the 1952 revolution resulting in the 1953 establishment of Egypt as a republic, the country remained an Islamic nation and an Arab culture. The next three presidents—Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and the recently ousted Hosni Mubarak—brought a roller coaster of ups and downs to the struggling country, and now I was standing at my window listening to the call to worship in a land about to dramatically change yet again.
But, as I dressed that morning in my new Egyptian garb, I wanted to roll back through the centuries and see the vestiges of earlier times, work my way back to the world of the pharaohs and that fateful last day in which Cleopatra was to have died with her handmaidens within the cool recesses of her stone tomb.
Before I set off down the four flights of stairs to the hubbub of the streets below, I carefully concealed my hair in a bright turquoise scarf, wrapping it as properly as I could so that no wisp of hair escaped, no bit of my ears or neck might be observed. I positioned the scarf strategically so the embroidered flowers with their shiny mirror stigmas and tassels flowed down my left shoulder. I snuck a pair of earrings up into the holes in my covered lobes and studied my workmanship. I was pleasantly surprised to find that a tightly worn hijab offers a cheap and immediate facelift, even though my hearing was quite diminished from my ears being sealed off. I found, when I returned to the United States and no longer wore my hijab, that I was a bit sad because I had to style my hair again and there seemed a missing final touch to my outfit.
Down at the entrance to the hotel, I grabbed a cab and instructed the driver to take me to the Citadel, the massive walled fortress begun by magnificent Saladin in 1176 to defend against the Crusaders. This structure with its impressive stone walls and the domed Ottoman-style Muhammad Ali mosque, towers over the city on the high promontory, dominating the skyline of Cairo and reminding all below of Egypt’s long history of invasions and military rule. As the taxi driver maneuvered his way through the traffic-snarled streets of Cairo, it was hard to believe, with all Arabic writing scrawled atop the entrances to businesses, women in black burqas and men in Muslim religious dress, that the people of Egypt once worshipped Anubis the jackal; Horus the hawk; or Hathor, the goddess of love, wearing the horns of a cow. Nor was it easy to imagine Queen Cleopatra swathed in a Grecian gown, entertaining an entourage of Romans in her resplendent palace by the sea.
The taxi pulled in front of the entrance gate to the Citadel. I paid the driver and made my way up the steps. I removed my shoes and entered the Mosque of Muhammad Ali, walking silently across the red-and-gold carpet, staring up at the rings of chandeliers that lit the Turkish-style interior. It was beautiful. But then I had to smile at the irony of how this place of worship was built at the location where, seventeen years before its construction began, Ali gave a celebration in his palace with very little spirit of brotherly love. That night he held a banquet for 470 Mamluks, the powerful military caste that controlled the army and much of the politics of Egypt. They were a constant threat to Ali’s governorship of Egypt. After an evening of festivities, the Mamluks poured out into the lane leading down the hill from the fortress, where they were ambushed and massacred. Ali achieved his goal of eliminating his opposition and gaining sole control of the country.1 Cleopatra clearly wasn’t to be the last of the ruthless rulers of Egypt.
I wandered back to the doorway, retrieved my shoes, and strolled over to the terrace, and, there spread before me was a spectacular view of Cairo, miles and miles of square and rectangular buildings, tin domes and minarets, smog submerging the mishmash of newly built high-rises, half-finished apartments, and older two-storied buildings in varying shades of grey and brown, a smattering of white mosques and occasional flashes of color as far as the eye can see, or at least distinguish under the film of dirty air created from the congestion below.
And then there, behind all the city tableau, was what I was longing to see. Two massive triangles, the greatest of the three Giza pyramids, so incredibly large that they seemed almost a mirage or a photographic trick that has been staged for the naïve tourist. But they are real. They are the essence of Egypt. They are the symbol of people of the desert and the Nile, the land before Europe encroached on the continent from across the Mediterranean Sea. It is the backdrop to the life into which Cleopatra VII, the last Cleopatra of the Ptolemaic line, was born.2 It is evidence that would help me profile the life and death of Cleopatra more thoroughly and concretely.
I arrived at Giza early the next morning, far before the site was open to the public and when there was hardly anyone but the locals moving about, getting ready for their day. Giza is a bit of an odd site up close, not at all what one expects from
the carefully shot photos of the three pyramids. There is a tendency to believe that one will need to travel miles from the city, and there in endless sands of the Western Desert, the pyramids will rise majestically on the horizon. In reality, one can jump on the metro and arrive at Giza in a matter of minutes. I took a taxi from downtown and passed by hotels and restaurants, and in less than fifteen minutes I was at my destination. Hardly far from the present-day world, the pyramids can be seen through a Pizza Hut window just a short walk down the street from the archeological site, the laser light show viewable from its roof, as a number of low-budget tourists (including myself) have discovered. The remainder of the 118 pyramids of Egypt spread west across forty-three miles of desert to Fayoum City, most of which are not visited by the majority of visitors to the country. It is easy to see why once one has viewed the Great Pyramid, the others pale in comparison, although they are still treasures to historians and archeologists.
Since it was still early, I decided that before I entered the Great Pyramid, I would take a visit farther down the road to nearby Dashur to examine a couple of smaller pyramids built earlier: the Red Pyramid and the Bent Pyramid. I grabbed another cab and traveled south along the canal until I came to the two pyramids, both built by King Sneferu (2613–2589 BCE), the pharaoh who ruled during the Fourth Dynasty; he preceded his son, Khufu (2589–2566 BCE), who built the Great Pyramid at Giza. It would be interesting to see the construction of these two pyramids and what kind of workmanship they displayed and what their burial chambers might have looked like. I was specifically interested in two things: (1) did burial chambers make good living spaces for a trio of women to spend time in, and (2) how tightly sealed were burial chambers back in those days? Were they too tightly sealed to let a snake slither out of them?
In my previous travels throughout Egypt, I had visited two other sites in which burial chambers were included in their structures. One location was in the Valley of the Kings, just east of the famous sites of Luxor and Karnak in Upper Egypt, an overnight trip by train straight south along the Nile River. The Valley of the Kings was on the West Bank of the Nile, a quick ferry ride from Luxor and twenty minutes into the desert by van. The site itself is rather unspectacular, just a drab entrance, a bunch of dirt hills with holes in them looming up behind it. It seems a rather odd setting for kings to be buried, but apparently at least sixty-three tombs were built to house the royals for eternity, so they had little issue with their finery being confined to burial chambers and elaborately decorated corridors hidden under the dirt rather than some large memorial seen from above the surface. The tombs were built in the Eighteenth Dynasty, and the pharaohs who would eventually be buried in them hoped to protect them from grave robbers, a centuries-old problem for royal Egyptian tombs built earlier. Considering the plundering of so many of these tombs not too long after the kings were ensconced in them, that wish did not exactly pan out over time; criminals always seem to find a way to break into wherever massive wealth is stored.3
I visited a half dozen of the tombs, including the small tomb of the boy-king Tutankhamen, the least interesting of them all in spite of the twenty-dollar charge. However, for the pleasure of saying one had been in King Tut’s burial chamber and of seeing his mummy, it was oddly worth the expense. It was also quite thrilling to have been there and then to later go to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and view King Tut’s beautiful coffin and spectacular golden funerary mask inlaid with jewels, along with a supposed seventeen hundred items that were removed from his tomb; having been in the tomb made the museum experience more meaningful. And, like Tut’s tomb, none of the other Valley of the Kings tombs retained any treasures, but their walls are covered with fabulous reliefs in many colors.
All these tombs were reached by descending a very long corridor into the earth until one came into a rectangular compartment (with the exception of King Tut’s chamber, which was quite close to ground level). I noted during my visit to each chamber that all the edges of floors, walls, and ceilings inside the tomb were aligned perfectly, with no cracks or separating seams or holes. The burial chamber itself was quite small, providing only for the deceased in its coffin and a space to move around the platform upon which it rested with its mummy inside. There are some tombs that are larger, but, in general, the tomb was meant for one body to be ensconced in the chamber along with a pile of expensive possessions to keep the pharaoh company on his journey into the next world. Once the body was interred in the tomb along with the requisite royal treasures, the door was sealed and no one entered again. There was hardly a need to have a massive room for a corpse that was not going to be getting up and strolling about. If one were alive and spending any amount of time in the tomb, the only thought going through one’s head would be to notice how stifling it was and to question how soon one could get out.
Now, I stood in front of the Bent Pyramid at Dashur, theorized to be second of King Sneferu’s attempts at pyramid building. His first is believed to be the “Collapsed Pyramid,” on the outskirts of Fayoum at the village of Maidum. That pyramid was built like the earliest ones, a step pyramid with simple layers of massive stone like the one built at Saqqara in the Third Dynasty. Each pyramid had four or six huge stone terraces, each of which was smaller than the one below it. But the Collapsed Pyramid was modified. It was encased with an outer shell of white limestone blocks to beautify the exterior and make it a true pyramid (with flat sides). Unfortunately, it was badly designed and fell down from the stresses of the poorly planned structural addition. Sneferu then tried again. His Bent Pyramid was a far better attempt, but the sides of the thing go up at a steep angle and then taper off toward the top, making it look rather like a schoolchild’s poor attempt a drawing a triangle and failing to make a proper shape. It is supposed that the sides did not continue in the proper line because of unstable ground that caused cracks to appear in the walls of the burial chamber, and when they started leaning inward, the design was modified to prevent further damage. In all the burial chambers I have examined, I have never noted any problems with the walls, so it would appear that better design methodology was applied in future massive structures. The Bent Pyramid was abandoned and never used for its intended purpose. Sneferu gave it another shot and built the Red Pyramid (also at Dashur), and this time he got it right, a true pyramid that had its perfect geometric shape. Here the burial chambers were put to use.
The Bent Pyramid was not open to visitors when I was there, but I had the opportunity to observe the base areas, which no longer had limestone covering the stone blocks. It is amazing to see the craftsmanship that went into putting these blocks so closely together. Stonemasons did not fill large areas between the stones as one often sees today with traditional brick and stone walls; instead, the sand, gypsum, and lime mortar was scraped on in a very thin layer with one’s hand and used as a lubricant to slide the next forty- or fifty-ton block into position right up against the neighboring one. It is dead weight or friction that keeps the stones together. Hence, unlike today, where you often see chunks of mortar having fallen out of some building or chimney that needs to be repointed to secure the structure, stones of these ancient Egyptian edifices stay solidly in place for centuries, barring manmade assault or catastrophic movement of the earth. While the limestone surfaces were often stolen from these monuments (which is why they aren’t as attractive as they once were), those massive blocks of stone stayed put. As a matter of fact, the blocks are so tight that one couldn’t even pour mortar between them, so it is doubtful a reptile of even the tiniest size could find a way through those walls.
The Red Pyramid was Sneferu’s great achievement and, thereafter, pyramids were built in this manner, with the sheer sides we tend to associate with pyramids today, at least the most perfect ones in history, the trio of pyramids at Giza. In all of these structures, burial chambers were aboveground but located within the depths of the pyramid. The Red Pyramid required me to climb the outside stairs, which continued approximately halfway up the side of the py
ramid; and then I descended via a tight inside passageway for what seemed an eternity until I made it into the burial-chamber area. Here the chambers, three of them, were larger than at the Valleys of the Kings, so one could imagine it more likely that it would be possible to spend a bit of extended time inside one, if it weren’t for the darkness and the claustrophobia one feels while in the guts of the massive pile of stones. Keeping the light on, or shall I say the torch, for any length of time would prove problematic, as it would use up the available oxygen in the room and smoke up the place. The seams between walls, ceilings, and floors were just as tight as I had seen previously in tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
Then, I returned to Giza to visit the Great Pyramid, built by King Sneferu’s son Khufu, also known as Cheops. The son outdid his father, building an even larger and more spectacular pyramid. I paid my admission price and entered the site, now being trampled by a number of tourists, though not as many as I would have expected to see.
The Great Pyramid is, well, great. What can one say about a structure that took twenty-two years to build and used around 2,300,000 limestone blocks that each weighed an average of 2.5 tons, with some weighing sixteen tons? Sadly, the beautiful, smooth, white limestone no longer covers the pyramid, as it was stolen to be used in constructing the modern-day Cairo. The massive stones are exposed, and one can see just how huge each one is. I entered the door to the sloping pathway to the burial chamber, this time climbing up inside the pyramid. Again, after a very long time, I reached the center. The room was simple and empty, with the exception of a massive stone box that had no top (into which the coffin would be placed). But the feeling of being in such an isolated and secret place built so long ago, with its smooth interior, its perfect dimensions, was amazing. Those guidebooks that advised me not to bother with the uncomfortable ascent into the tomb because it wasn’t worth the trouble were dead wrong.
