Hello all!
What a crazy busy (but amazing!) day. I basically haven’t slept in 48 hours now. But I wanted to show you all what I saw today before I slept.
Ildi picked me up from my hostel at about 9.30am in an Uber. As I mentioned yesterday, I met Ildi through a lady I spoke to online. Coincidentally, Ildi’s niece is married to someone my Dad and brother used to play cricket with. She was born in Hungary but has spent the last 30 years in Melbourne. However, since 2015 she has been living between Melbourne and Cairo. Last week, she moved here permanently to be with her fiancée.
Ever heard of the saying “strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet”? It couldn’t have rung more true today. From the moment I met Ildi she made me feel at ease, and we got on really well. She started off helping me cross the busy many road to the Egyptian Museum. Crossing roads here is like crossing roads in Vietnam x10. The cars have a green light while the pedestrians do too (what the?!) and you have to basically glare down drivers and silently hope in your head they will stop. So far, so good. Ildi has been training me well!
The Egyptian Museum opened in 1902 and at the moment is celebrating its 116th anniversary. The moment we walked in I felt like it was from the era of the egyptologists finding treasures inside ancient tombs. And this is the case, because it hasn’t been paid too much attention recently. A new, billion dollar Grand Egyptian Museum is being built near the pyramids of Giza to eventually house the King Tut collection and lots of artefacts that have never before been seen. The original 1902 museum is going to be considered small compared to the new one, but as more discoveries have been made over the years (eg Howard Carter discovering King Tut) more has been shoved in haphazardly. Fortunately, the new GEM will ease the pressure once it opens. To be fair though, some work was being carried out inside the museum today as we walked around.
At its peak, the museum has been said to have held 120,000 artefacts with many more in its basement in boxes that weren’t looked at until later on.
We spent the next 4.5 hours looking around the museum and I was absolutely in awe. I have never seen such amazing stuff in all my life. By myself I wouldn’t have even known where to start. But Ildi brought it all to life, taking me through virtually the whole museum and pointing out highlights along the way.
Interesting facts Ildi told me whilst we walked around (most of these have photos associated below):
- Many statues from the Pharaonic period have Horus cradling the head of whichever pharaoh it was, so as to ensure the neck/head part of the structure was thicker and did snap off.
- Even though Khufu was the pharaoh who had the Great Pyramid (the largest one - more on that on Saturday) built for him, only one teeny tiny statue of him has ever been found
- The Egyptians were super clever. Their wooden statues were made like puzzles that fit together piece by piece. Instead of using nails, they used small pieces of wood to fasten larger pieces together. These expanded and then locked the pieces in place.
- King Tutankhamun’s Dad Akhenaten was really unpopular. He changed the religion of the Egyptian people during the Amarna people to worship only one god - Atum. This destroyed many local traditions, festivals etc and upset people. For this reason, King Tut was encouraged to change his name from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamun, so that people wouldn’t be reminded of his Dad. Only a few pieces remain of his Dad because many were destroyed when he died. Those that are left, oddly, portrayed him with a very feminine shape (wide hips and a belly). Very unusual for the time.
- There are many boxes around in the museum at the moment. Some are sending pieces off to the new museum, and some are returning them from exhibitions around the world.
Highlights for me in the museum were:
- Akhenaten’s coffin lid
- The Mummy room (can’t take photos). WOW. Staring at 3500 year old mummies and being able to distinguish their features and easily see that they were all different people was incredible. The Egyptians were so clever at preserving their dead, removing organs from the body to prevent it decomposing as badly at the beginning. These - the lungs, liver, stomach, intestines as well as the brain (which was removed through the nose and whisked) - were placed in canopic jars. The heart was left in place as it was seen as the source of intelligence, not the brain. Then the body was covered in natron salt and left to dry for 40 days before being wrapped in bandages. Pharaohs then had their arms crossed across their body. We saw many mummies, but standouts were Hatshepsut (female pharaoh - woo!) and Ramses II (more on him on Monday). It was also interesting to note how the use of different minerals on different bodies had coloured their hair and skin in different ways.
- The room full of amazing finds from the Tanis expedition
- King Tut’s section. I stopped in front of his mask twice. Everything in his section was special. When Howard Carter found his tomb in 1922 it hadn’t been plundered at all and was absolutely jam packed full of stuff. Ildi said the golden boxes he was placed in were like babushka dolls - one inside the other. They were huuuuge! He was buried with 143 amulets wrapped under his bandages. These were buried with pharaohs after priests cast incantations on them to release their magical properties for the dead in their after life.
- The stray cat that had snuck into the museum. We had a good chuckle right near a guard and he didn’t seem to mind at all!!
- Sarcophagi and hieroglyphics right in front of me!
- The mummified animals/pets section
Overall the museum was amazing, with so much to see around every corner. It’ll be even more spectacular when the new one opens and many never before seen King Tut artefacts are on display.
After the museum, we sat and had a Turkish coffee and Ildi helped me set up my Egyptian sim. I now have internet access wherever I go should I need it for the next ten days.
We had a falafel sandwich for lunch (delicious - and thankfully my stomach decided it was hungry!), then had a quick stop at Ildi’s friend’s perfume shop, before checking into my hostel. For some reason they’ve given me a huge four bed room to myself, but I’m not complaining!
Ildi then caught another Uber with me to meet my tour this afternoon. Her fiancée came to meet us briefly too. He seems lovely!!
My walking tour started at 4.30pm and had three guests - myself and a couple from just north of Boston called Tom and Artha. We caught the metro much to Ildi and Mohammed’s horror (they never have!), but it was fine. For the next three hours our guide (also called Mohammed!) showed us the Nile and downtown areas. We saw the 190m Cairo Tower, the tallest building in Egypt. Then we saw the Saab Zaghloul statue. He fought in 1919 to help women here to be able to walk in the street. We crossed a bridge over the Nile by foot and then saw Tahrir Square where, earlier this decade, 2 million out of the 25 million Cairenes gathered to protest the current leadership. And then the first university in Cairo and the street art in front of it, which is the only remaining street art from that time. I didn’t know this, but there was also a revolution here in 1952 during which the Egyptian royal family were overthrown. To this day they live Switzerland.
Many of the buildings we saw on our tour looked a little French, due to the French arriving here in 1796.
We enjoyed an ice cream at a famous patisserie. At this point some beggars approached us as Mohammed was buying our ice creams. Ildi has trained me up in some basic Arabic - “la, shukraan” (“no, thank you”) I repeated until they went away. If they still don’t get the hint I’ve been told to say (and eventually yell) “imshi!” (“get away from me!”).
We ended our tour by looking at some more interesting buildings and then each having some koshari (pasta, beans, lentils, fried onions and tomato pasta sauce) - yummm! Again my stomach was kind to me. At this point though I hit the wall, and Mohammed luckily was ready to walk me past my hostel anyway. Now I’ve had a shower and settled in for the night. I’m very excited for some sleep before tomorrow.
Lonely Planet summed it up for me about Cairo while on the plane. “Your nerves will jangle, your snot will run black from the smog and touts will hound you at every turn”. Thanks to Ildi though, none of that phased me today.
Love to all
Claire
Xoxox
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