A Closer Look at Cairo

On the agenda for Saturday, the first official day of my OAT adventure, was a tour of Fustat (aka Old Cairo) as well as visit to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization. 

 

After another hearty breakfast from the buffet, where I indulged in freshly baked pita bread, I was ready for an introductory meeting with tour experience leader (and professional Egyptologist) Hussein Abulella and the other 21 members of my group.

The weather was perfect when we headed out of the hotel – clear, sunny, and a little cool but heading up to near 70 by afternoon. To reach the museum, we drove south down the Corniche du Nil (the road that runs alongside the river).

 

During the brief drive to the museum, Hussein told us that the Egyptian Cairo is home to 22 million people – no wonder it looked so congested! He added that the government is hoping to alleviate the over-crowding by building a new capital city fifty miles away. The new capital doesn’t have an official name yet but many government offices have already moved there. The plan is to clear the slums of Cairo and relocate several million people to the new city. It will be linked to Cairo with public transportation. 

 

The National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, which opened 2021, provides an excellent overview of the 5000-plus years of Egyptian history. Hussein guided us through some of the major exhibits before giving us free time to explore on our own. 

 

I’ll share some of the highlights of the museum’s collection, starting with the oldest artifact I saw, this stela from the Archaic period (King Qa’a, 1^st dynasty, 3100-2890 BCE). It was found in the city of Abydos in Middle Egypt (see map). 

 

 

The pharaoh Merenptah (New Kingdom, son of Ramses II) and the goddess Mut are shown in the statue below.

The following sandstone statue of Akhenaten was found in his temple in Karnak in Lower Egypt.  

 

Here is a gilded chariot that belonged to pharaoh Thutmose IV.

One of the most interesting pieces was a statue of the goddess Nut on a “birth chair.” She’s giving birth to Isis while being supervised by the goddess of childbirth (who has the head of a cow). This statue was found near the temple of Dendera in Middle Egypt.

Ordinary Egyptians were represented in the exhibits, too. Below you see the inner coffin of a craftsman named Sennedjem who lived during the 19^th dynasty (New Kingdom). The wooden coffin, which was decorated with magic spells from The Book of the Dead (instructions for reaching the afterlife), was found in Thebes. Also on display were the funerary masks of Sennedjem and his wife. These would have been placed on their faces after the bodies were mummified.

 

Everyday objects on display included the ancient Egyptian board game of senet. It symbolizes the soul’s journey through the afterlife.

 

There were also exhibits devoted to the history of Judaism, Coptic Christianity, and Islam in Egypt. A Jewish community has existed in Egypt for over 2000 years. These are 19^th century Torah cases.

 

Christianity came to Egypt with St. Mark the Evangelist who arrived in Alexandria in the middle of the 1^st century CE. Egyptians who converted to the new religion were initially persecuted by the Romans. This Coptic bible is written in the Coptic language and Arabic. The language of the Coptic Christian church is closely related to the ancient Egyptian language. The unique Coptic script is a combination of the Greek alphabet and seven additional characters derived from Demotic script for sounds that don’t exist in Greek. It developed in the 2^nd century CE. Demotic script was a cursive form of ancient Egyptian writing that could be used by ordinary people.  

 

A textile fragment dating back to the 6^th-7^th centuries CE shows the Coptic style of figural representation. Coptic art developed as folk art and typically shows figures with flat faces, round eyes, and thick dark brows. Decorative motifs are often foliate (leaf-like) or geometric.

 

This beautiful tent is the Mahmal of King Farouk, Egypt’s last king, who was in power from 1936 to 1952. It is a ceremonial tent carried by the lead camel in the Kiswa procession, a four-month long journey from Egypt to Saudi Arabia that takes place annually. The purpose of the journey is to deliver the Kiswa, the black silk cloth that covers the Ka’aba in Mecca.

 

Finally, there was an entire gallery devoted to royal mummies. Unfortunately, photography wasn’t allowed in this part of the museum. The mummies of 17 kings and 3 queens who lived during the New Kingdom (dynasties 18-20) were on display. Most of them came from tombs in the Valley of the Kings. They’re quite shrunken and covered in a resin that has turned very dark. Along with the actual mummies were a few elaborately decorated coffins and some beautiful canopic jars for holding organs. 

 

Around noon, we crossed the Nile for Lunch at Sky Rim restaurant. Its hillside location offers a panoramic view of the city below.

 

The meal began with warm pita bread and tahini along with tasty vegetable sambusek (pastry turnovers with a vegetable filling). The sea bass I chose for my main course was served with a creamy dill sauce, a vegetable medley (carrots, zucchini, peas), and French fries. I also tried the kofta that one of my fellow travelers had ordered. All of the food was delicious.

After lunch, we drove into an area of Cairo called Fustat, or Old Cairo. When it was established in the 3^rd century CE, Fustat was a separate city. In fact, it served as the first capital of Egypt during the time of Muslim rule. It has now been absorbed into Cairo. We were here to see reminders of the city’s early Coptic and Jewish communities. 

 

Our first stop was a Coptic Church known as the Hanging Church, the oldest church in Egypt.  It’s called “hanging” because it is suspended, i.e. the foundation rests on two towers. The original building dated back to the 5^th century CE. The walls of the walkway leading up to the church are lined with contemporary mosaics. 

The interior of the church features both Arabic designs and crosses. Over a hundred icons adorn the walls. Iconography developed during Roman times when Christians were subject to persecution. The small size of the religious paintings allowed them to be moved quickly. Coptic Christianity inherited both the ancient Egyptian language and the traditional artistic style of ancient Egypt. However, Coptic artists made one major innovation. While nearly all paintings from ancient Egypt show faces and figures in profile, faces and figures are portrayed frontally in Coptic painting.

 

Another Coptic church in the same area is the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus. It is popularly known as the Cavern Church because it supposedly sits on top of a cavern where the Holy Family stopped during their journey in Egypt. There is debate among scholars as to when this church was built.

While we were in Old Cairo, I was very eager to visit the Ben Ezra synagogue, Egypt’s oldest Jewish place of worship. A Jewish community has existed in Egypt since biblical times. According to the Hebrew bible, when the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem in 586 BCE, a large number of Judeans found refuge in Egypt. By the 3^rd century BCE, there were Jewish communities throughout the country and during the Ptolemaic era, the city of Alexandria was a center of Hellenistic Judaism. Cairo’s Ben Ezra congregation was in existence well before Islam arrived in the 7^th century CE. Over the centuries, the community built and occupied several different buildings on this site, which is adjacent to a courtyard containing an enclosure where the Well of Moses is located. Local legend says that this is where the infant Moses was drawn from the water by an Egyptian princess.

 

About a hundred years ago, scholars discovered that the geniza (document storeroom) in the attic of the Ben Ezra synagogue contained thousands of documents that had been saved over a 1300-year period, between the 6^th and 19^thcenturies. In addition to rabbinical texts, the collection included religious and secular poems and historical narratives. There were even several documents written by the 12^th century Jewish philosopher and scientist Moses Maimonides. The collection provides unparalleled insight into the long history of Egypt’s Jewish community. 

 

In the 1920s, the Jewish population of Cairo was about 80,000. In the mid-20^th century, however, increasing antisemitism and official government policies forced the majority of the Jews to flee Egypt. Nowadays, only a few elderly Jews remain in Cairo and the Ben Ezra synagogue is no longer active. The government maintains the building as a tourist site and museum. Sorrow washed over me as I stood alone on the bimah, whispering Hebrew words that once reverberated within these walls.

 

After being on the go all day, I was happy to relax for an hour so before our welcome dinner in the hotel restaurant. I didn’t have much of an appetite but I couldn’t resist trying the basbousa, a delicious semolina cake soaked in a sweet syrup.

After seeing antiquities in Cairo museums for two days, I was looking forward to tomorrow’s activities, beginning with visits to the ancient cities of Memphis and Saqqara (see map below). That will be the subject of my next post. 

 

Introducing Cairo

Sabah el-khair! Good morning! This was one of the few Arabic phrases I learned during my time in Egypt. I already knew how to say thank you (shukran) and on the drive in from the airport, Amir, from the OAT office, had taught me that mesh is slang for okay. Here’s the view out over the Nile from the balcony of my hotel room. 

 

After breakfast chosen from the lavish buffet in the Intercontinental Semiramis, I was eager to explore Cairo. I’d be on my own since my OAT tour didn’t officially begin until the following morning. Amir told me it was fortunate that this “free” day fell on Friday, the first day of the weekend, when residents of the city would be sleep until quite late. Any other day of the week, the traffic would make crossing streets a nightmare. In fact, when he accompanied me on the short walk from the hotel to deserted Tahrir Square, where the old Egyptian Museum is located, there was barely a car in sight. 

 

 

The Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square housed the major portion of the antiquities from ancient Egypt prior to the recent opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum in nearby Giza. Although the interior of the pink building is a bit dark and dusty compared to the new museum, the old Egyptian Museum still has an impressive collection. As soon as you enter the building, you find yourself peering up at a colossal statue of Ramses II (Ramses the Great, of the New Kingdom).

Among the other statues on the first floor is this statue of the Old Kingdom pharaoh Khafre on his throne, from his mortuary temple at Giza. (c. 2570 BCE) He was the builder of the second pyramid at Giza and Great Sphinx at Giza as well. The stone is dark green diorite, quarried near Abu Simbel. This indicates that his power stretched all the way from the north to the south of Egypt. He’s wearing a false beard, a symbol of kingship in ancient Egypt.

 

Also from the Old Kingdom is this triad statue of the pharaoh Menkaure (central figure), builder of the third pyramid at Giza. He’s wearing the crown of Upper Egypt and a short, pleated kilt. The female figure to his right is the goddess Hathor, identifiable by her crown of a sun disk between two cow horns. Carved from a single block of stone, the sculpture was originally painted in bright colors.

A painted limestone funerary stela of two 11^th dynasty pharaohs and their wives dates back to the Middle Kingdom (2125-1985 BCE). It was common in ancient Egyptian painting to show males with reddish brown skin and females with yellowish beige skin.

It was exciting to be standing mere inches from this fragment of a limestone pillar found at the temple complex of Karnak (Thebes) and to see the relief carving of hieroglyphs so clearly. The falcon, representing the god Horus, wears the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. The pillar dates back to the reign of 12^th dynasty pharaoh Senwosret I of the Middle Kingdom (c. 1964-1929 BCE).

 

Pharaoh Ramses II is shown as a child in this statue along with the god Horus.

 

A colossal statue in the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari (near Thebes) was the source of this painted limestone head. Hatshepsut, a member of the 18^th dynasty, ruled Egypt during the New Kingdom. The statue shows the female pharaoh merged with the god Osiris.

There were several sphinxes in the museum. This sphinx statue of Hatshepsut is made of red granite.

Ramses III is standing between the falcon-headed god Horus and the jackal-headed god Seth in this statue. He ruled as pharaoh during the New Kingdom, but he was not the son or successor of Ramses II (aka the Great).

Some of the most unusual artifacts come from the Amarna period (c. 1352-1336 BCE) of the New Kingdom. As you can see from this colossal statue from Karnak of pharaoh Amenhotep IV, also known as Akhenaten, the style is very distinctive. 

Unlike the pharaohs who preceded him, Amenhotep IV elevated the god Aten (shown as the disk of the sun) above all the other gods and goddesses. For this reason, he is sometimes considered the first monotheist. His radical religious views caused a great deal of consternation among the conservative Egyptian establishment, and he was seen as dangerous by the powerful high priest who served the primary state god, Amun-Re. 

 

During the fifth year of his reign, Amenhotep changed his name to Akhenaten, which means living spirit of Aten. He established a new religious capital at Amarna in Middle Egypt and eventually forbid the worship of Amun-Re. Along with the new religion, Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti ushered in a new artistic style that was immediately recognizable as a departure from the traditional Egyptian representational style.

 

After ruling for about 17 years, Akhenaten was succeeded by his young son, whose original name was Tutankhaten. King Tut ruled from 1336 to 1327 BCE. During his second year on the throne, Tutankhaten reopened the temples of Amun-Re, re-established Luxor (Thebes) as the religious capital, and changed his name to Tutankhamun. 

 

Some scholars believe that Tut brought the mummy of his father back to Luxor and had it buried in the Valley of the Kings, in the tomb archaeologists have designated KV55. The museum houses Akhenaten’s wooden coffin, whose lid is inlaid and gilded.

 

During the mummification process, the organs of the deceased were placed in canopic jars. These alabaster canopic jars contained the organs of Queen Kiya, the secondary wife of Akhenaten. They were also found in tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings. 

 

On the second floor of the museum I met Yuya and Thuya, two high-ranking Egyptian nobles who lived during the New Kingdom. In fact, they were the great-grandparents of King Tutankhamun. Numerous items from their nearly intact tomb (KV46) in the Valley of the Kings are displayed alongside their sarcophagi. This is the outer anthropoid coffin of Yuya, father of Queen Tiye, wife of Pharaoh Amenhotep III. 

These funerary masks covered the heads of the mummies of Yuya and his wife Thuya.  

Among the objects found in the tomb of Yuya and Thuya are a gilded wooden chair and Yuya’s gilded chariot with red leather tires. 

From the Greco-Roman period here is a stela carved during the reign Ptolemy V (c. 204-180 BCE). It portrays the sacred Buchis Bull.

 

One of the highlights of the museum’s collection is the treasure from the royal tomb complex in Tanis, a city in the delta region of Lower Egypt that served as the capital during the Third Intermediate Period (1070 to 664 BCE). One of the most spectacular artifacts is the solid silver sarcophagus of pharaoh Psusennes I, whose intact tomb was discovered in 1939. Because of its relative scarcity, silver was considered more valuable than gold by the ancient Egyptians. The lid of the mummy-shaped coffin features gold and inlay decorations. The pharaoh is portrayed as a mummy, with his arms crossed over his chest and the royal flail and scepter in his hands.

Several pieces from the royal tomb show Egyptian expertise in goldsmithing.

 

Small statues called shabtis, made of faience, were also found in the tomb. Their role was to perform tasks for the deceased pharaoh in the afterlife.

 

In another section of the museum, items used by ordinary ancient Egyptians in their everyday lives were displayed. These included lamps, grindstones, rope, agricultural implements, baskets, musical instruments, combs, dolls, board games, boomerang type throwing sticks, and architectural tools.

 

I could easily have spent a few more hours wandering through the museum but exhaustion from the previous day’s long flights was catching up with me. I walked back to the hotel and stopped for a quick bite to eat in the hotel’s café with two of my fellow travelers (actually, my son-in-law’s parents, who were also on the trip). I ordered fatayer, mini triangular turnovers with a savory beef filling.

 

Later in the afternoon, I experienced a completely different side of Egypt. Amir took a small group of those who, like me, had arrived early in Cairo for a visit to an area of the city where ordinary Egyptians come to do their shopping. We drove about 10 minutes from the hotel to a bustling area near the Museum of Islamic Art, we started making our way on foot through streets thronged with people, motorcycles, tuk-tuks, small cars, and carts pulled by horses and donkeys. 

 

Outside a corner shop selling fruit juice, Amir pointed out hanging bags of doum, a fruit that grows on palm trees in this part of North Africa. It’s quite popular in Egypt. Doum supposedly tastes like gingerbread and I’m sorry we didn’t have time to try it. 

 

We scampered to keep up with Amir as the call to prayer from nearby loudspeakers cut through the constant honking of horns. Here are a few of the scenes we passed in a single block. 

Amir led us into an alleyway to see a barrel maker at work.

 

There were several small shops selling colorful lanterns (used for decorating during Ramadan) and boldly patterned textiles. 

We finally reached the Bab Zuweila, the western city gate which dates back to 1092, when Cairo was a walled city.

Across from the gate was the entrance to the Al-Khayamiya Souk. In this covered market, we found beautiful appliqué’d and embroidered textiles that were originally used to decorate the interior of tents. Today they’re used for special occasions such as holiday celebrations, wedding feasts, and funerals. The market has been in continuous use since the Mamluk era, which began in 1250 CE.

The workshop of one of Cairo’s few remaining tent makers is located in the souk.

To return to the hotel, we first piled into tuk-tuks for a nerve-shattering ride back to where we met up with our bus. It was a relief to get away from the traffic, the noise, the jostling of the crowd, the exhaust fumes, and the cigarette smoke. (Although it seemed that there was no way to avoid the cigarette smoke, even in the lobby of the hotel.)

 

As my first day in Egypt came to an end, I looked out at the sun setting over the Nile and reflected on my introduction to the country. I’d experienced such striking contrasts, from the morning when I viewed an awe-inspiring collection of antiquities from thousands of years ago to the afternoon when I was immersed in the color and chaos of today’s Cairo. Judging from the past twenty-four hours, I was certain that the next two weeks were going to be an exciting adventure and a mind-opening learning experience.