Egypt: Day Four, Part Three

On the way back to Giza, we pass loads and loads of “tuk-tuks”, those three-wheeled auto rickshaws which are illegal in Egypt but can be imported anyway.  Go figure.  Kids drive them as of age 10 or 12, especially in the countryside... and obviously without a license.  We also see a lot of buildings that look like tall ovens with sticks and holes poked in them.  They’re dovecotes, pigeon being one of the favorite dishes in Egypt.  (We’ll see more of them along the highway from Cairo to Alexandria later on in the trip.)

Pyramid builders' tombs

As we drive past the Giza Pyramids and the Sphinx, which we’ll be visiting in two days.  Ahmed tells us that the Nile used to reach the Sphinx when the river flooded.  In 1942 the water came up to its neck!  That was also the year that the Temple of Khafre was uncovered and excavated.
  Waiting for us when we pull up at the Pyramid Builders’ Tombs is Dr. Hawass, who discovered them.  And there were plenty of builders.  Estimates today are 20,000 workers to build Khufu’s pyramid aka The Great Pyramid aka The Pyramid of Cheops (the Greek-isized name by which we know it in the United States).  As Hawass says, that’s the population of large cities in the Near East in the third millennium BCE.   And that population went on for nearly 70 years, year round, while construction continued.  The facilities would have included housing for the workers as well as storage for food and building materials... and even a cemetery for those killed on the job.  Men came to work from villages all over the kingdom.  It was certainly an eye-opener for country boys here in the Big City, much as it was for soldiers from France’s villages on the front lines in World War I.  Hawass explains to us that “The pyramid builders were not slaves but peasants conscripted on a rotating part-time basis, working under the supervision of skilled artisans and craftsmen who not only built the pyramid complexes for the kings and nobility, but also designed and constructed their own, more modest tombs.”
  As with many of the monuments hidden over the millennia by the sands (at least three we were told about), the cemetery was found when an American tourist was thrown from her horse who stumbled on a previously unknown mud-brick wall.  The mud-brick wall turned out to be a tomb.  And then the rest was excavated, giving us an idea of how “the other half” lived, this half being not the pharaohs but Ancient Egypt’s blue-collar workers.

Although it’s not far to Mena House, it takes us half an hour to go just the short distance.   Cars are parked on either sides of a narrow street and there’s only one lane, which is blocked.  There are also spare lots filled with camels waiting for something... perhaps tourists to ride them across the plateau.  It’s often like this, evidently, in this neighborhood of stables, where you can rent a horse to ride across the Plateau of Giza.  But all the horses are skinny and their coats aren’t brushed at all.  It’s something I’ll notice often during my time in Egypt.  Animals here seem to play a role - breadwinner or mouse-catcher or guard-dog - but not act as pets.  (Camels may be an exception to that rule, although I doubt if they’re pets, but I’m not well-versed enough in camel to tell if they’re well looked-after or not.)

I seem somehow to have lost Sally’s safari hat that she lent me for this trip.  I thought I’d left it in my room, but when I get back, it’s not there.  I ask at the desk if anyone found it, but no.  The only other possibility is that I left it on the bus, but also no.  (It turns out later that Suzanna found it and left it on the bus near the empty water bottle box, so either it got thrown out or the person who cleaned out the bus liked it and adopted it.)  Luckily for me, our early start this morning meant I was wearing both my sweater and my jacket with the hood.  That hood kept my head from burning up, but that’s how I’ll be immortalized in all those photos taken at the pyramid builder’s tombs.  Sigh.