Egypt: Day Two, Part Two

Saqqara, Step Pyramid

By the time we reach the Step Pyramid in Saqqara, we’ve learned it was the first giant monument built, the prototype for all the other pyramids to come after.  Built in 2700 BCE by King Djoser, it’s a mind-boggling 4,600 years old!  The name comes from the fact that it’s actually six different mastabas (“eternal houses”) of different sizes, one on top of the other.  But Djoser didn’t dream up this project; it was his vizier Imhotep, a physician, who decided to build the tomb.  Its deep shaft cuts 92 feet through limestone, and the sarcophagus is of pink granite.  There are dozens of corridors on six different levels with blue tiles all along them.  As with all pyramids, the entrance faces true north.  Ahmed calls it “the biggest tombstone on Earth” because there’s nothing inside it; everything’s underneath it, below it.  It was just one of several buildings that, grouped together, created a mortuary complex, all surrounded by a one-mile-long wall.  Now the only thing around the pyramid is farmland, with no residences.

Mohammed

       While some go down inside, I choose to opt out.  My legs still ache from yesterday and this pyramid is apparently much the same inside except the corridors are only 4' high and very long.  That’s too far to crouch.  Instead some of us decide to walk all around it and we discover another smaller pyramid on the opposite side.  It’s believed that this was his wife’s.
       We split up to explore the several buildings within the necropolis.  Somehow I seem to have adopted a certain Mohammed, who started out wanting me to take his photo, “no money”.  (Everyone wants $1 in bakshish.)  Mohammed proceeds to “show me” (translation: walk around with me) several buildings and finally a statue.  But as I try to leave for the bus, he wants “dollar”.  I use my new word leh (no) - adding shoukran to be polite - but basically I just have to keep walking, with him in my wake until another “volunteer guide” shushes him away.
       Lunch at the Palm Club was a Mideastern smorgasbord (how do you say that in Arab?) with barbecued chicken and beef kefta.
       Followed by the Imhotep Museum, the work of Zahi Hawass which was opened jointly by the wives of Egyptian President Mubarak and of French President Chirac in 2006.  It includes scale models of the site as it once was, plus many of the treasures found during excavations, including our first mummy.  Along with a statue of a scribe that I particularly liked and a collection of jars made out of alabaster, on display are many of the blue-green tiles that lined all the corridors of the Step Pyramid, so at least I can see them without having to crouch along the low passages on my still-aching legs.

Cobra frieze at Saqqara

Back at the hotel after a long bus trip and heavy traffic, we just have time for a rest and change, then an audiovisual presentation by The Great Man himself, the impeccably-dressed Zahi Hawass.  He tells us of how the Cairo Museum was ransacked during the Egyptian Revolution that eventually brought down Mubarak.  Looters, he says, were looking for gold and the mercury placed in the mummies to protect them from evil spirits.  The looters also stole souvenirs from the museum’s gift shop, but not books.  In all, only 54 objects were stolen, compared with 45,000 in a similar incident in Baghdad.  All but 17 were found later on.  Hawass takes this incident as typical of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he feels is ignorant.
       In spite of his vast knowledge, Hawass tends to speak extensively in the first person singular.  For instance, we learn that it was he who discovered the Pyramid builders’ tombs.  Hawass has written a book on Ancient Egypt chock full of magnificent color photos of all the wonders we’re about to see, and he signs the copy I buy, but doesn’t enjoin a conversation with me or with any of us.  Same at dinner - he only talks to his assistant Tarik and others in his group.  Then disappears.
       As I do... to bed, to nurse my still sore muscles.