Egypt: Day Four, Part One

An early start today - up at 6 am, bus by 7:30.  And off along the same irrigation canals as yesterday, lined with garbage, some smoldering or being eaten by spare dogs and egrets.  Today I even see a “soup wagon” (for pumping out septic tanks) emptying its contents into one of the canals.  Image-wise, it’s all a bit overpowering.

     On the way to Memphis and the Bent Pyramid of Dahshur, Ahmed gives us a lesson on the unification of Egypt in 3100 BCE, with that city chosen as its capital because it was on the border of the two Egypts.  The name Memphis means “beautiful monuments” and it governed 40 provinces, each with its own chief god.  Memphis had Ptah, the god of darkness and workers, his wife Sekmet and son Neferteem.  It was the richest and biggest city of ancient times, with two million people, but all of it is gone because it was built of mud bricks.

Ramses

Queen - Memphis

Ahmed goes over the gods and goddesses, and a chapter on how to read the statue of a king.  For instance, if his ceremonial beard is straight, he was alive when it was carved; if curved, he was already dead.  A cobra is a sign of the king.  So is a dagger at his waist.  His crown, as of this era, has a base/part for Lower Egypt (the north) and a crown for Upper Egypt (the south).  Even if only the legs of a statue are left, you know it’s a man if the left foot is forward.  Little clues to help identify.
       Ahmed dwells quite a bit on Pharaoh Ramses II, who ruled all the lands from the Euphrates to the third cataract of the Nile (at Khartoum).  He also loved his wife Nefertari, meaning “the beautiful one”, so much that she is portrayed in the statues at Abu Simbel as the same size as his own, a fact that never happened with any other queen.  Ramses also had two strange hobbies, again according to Ahmed:  he liked to usurp other rulers’ monuments, replacing their names with his, and he liked marriages, from which came 92 sons and 106 daughters.  So I guess Nefertari was perhaps the most beautiful wife but not the only one.
       Ramses is portrayed with the white crown of Upper Egypt atop the red crown of Lower Egypt, showing him to rule both.  Blue in his portrayals symbolizes war.  He always is shown with a cobra on his crown (for protection), the typical false beard (straight if the portrayal was made during his lifetime, or curled after his death), and with a dagger at his waist.  All these symbols add up to indicate a ruler.  (Children aged 1 to 12 are portrayed sucking their thumb and with a side-lock of hair.) 
       One fascinating detail Ahmed tells us concerns the ankh, the symbol of life.  If you turn it on its side, you have a line ending in a triangle.  (Well, a rounded one.)  The line represents the river and the triangle the delta.  So the ankh, representing life, also represents the Nile, without which there would be no Egypt.