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And so to the pyramids. They have not yet built the walkway to the pyramids from GEM so you have to take a cab. We were conned, of course. The driver must have just dropped someone off from Cairo because he didn’t have a clue where he was going and just threw remarks in the air like ‘Six kilometres’ or Seventeen kilometres’ when in fact it is two. He eventually dropped us some distance from the scrum of people around the ticket office. As we joined the throng a uniformed official stepped up and informed us that only Egyptians were allowed in that line. We should be in the Western Tourist section which he led us to. Here he pushed to the front of the queue and bought our tickets, with our money, but refused a tip, saying he was a government employee. He had a laminate, but it could just as easily have been a dog licence for all I knew as it was naturally in Arabic. But of course, we couldn’t get rid of him, he stuck to us inside offering camel rides and horse and cart trips to get the best view of the pyramids from the desert. Theo paid him. Getting past the touts, traders and hustlers is difficult, and the government of Egypt should be ashamed that one of the world’s most important historical sites is so appallingly badly run as to make it the worst tourist experience I have ever had. But there are the pyramids, almost 5,000 years old, immune to all the clamouring crowd: of the Seven Wonders of the World, they are the only one still standing, robbed of their polished facing stones, robbed by thieves, picked over and even blown up by archaeologists they are so massive that they survive the centuries.
When we were there it was impossible to get really close to the Sphinx – the gate Rosemary and I used a decade before was closed, but even from a distance it is wonderful, weird, enigmatic. There is apparently a piece of its missing beard in the British Museum which I must find. We became classic tourists, snapping away with everyone else. And why not?
The traffic in Cairo was not as bad as I remembered it. The moth-eaten camels and wretched horses pulling carts are no longer on the streets, I didn’t see one. The cars are also in better shape. When Rosemary and I were there before our driver’s car had half the side surrounding the rear wheel ripped off and it was by no means the only one. It’s still a challenge to cross one of the busier streets. There are a few traffic lights, but no-one pays them any attention. You just have to stand close to a Cairene and when they launch themselves into the traffic you follow closely in their footsteps. It is a big city: 22.6 million people including its suburbs and appears to be on the point of collapse. Over 100,000 buildings are classified as ‘irreparable and so dangerous they must be demolished.’ Up to 70 percent of all buildings in Cairo were built ‘informally’ by unlicenced contractors. According to the Think Tank National Strategies for Sustainable Development in Egypt sixty percent of all buildings in Cairo will have to be demolished or upgraded to reach minimum standards. Building collapse is a frequent occurrence.
Except on busy main streets, no-one walks on the pavement because it so hazardous: missing manhole covers, jagged pieces of metal protruding from the ground, cut-off electricity cables that may or may not be live and, the most frequent, unfilled holes left by the laying of pipes and cables where the remains of the tiles or cobbles that once made up the pavement are thrown back into the hole with no attempt to make the surface walkable again. Where the pavement is wide and more useable, street traders lay out their wares, so you are reduced to single file to pass them. Then there is the noise: constant car honking, the shouts of traders and waves of music from radios and cafes; usually Umm Kulthum who remains a goddess even though she died back in 1975. Her 60-year career established her as a national institution, more famous with Arab audiences than the Beatles are in the West. Her picture is everywhere. We stopped off at a café named after her just behind out hotel and a few streets away there was a museum in her honour. I love her work, but Theo found it an acquired taste. Here she is, with her museum.
The next day Tom showed us round the Egyptian Museum, the wonderful pink edifice on Tahrir Square which, in February, still housed Tutankhamun’s famous gold mask. It is no longer in its old room but in a separate smaller gallery along with his funerary jewellery. He will be installed in a special set of galleries at GEM due to open in July 2025. I had searched GEM for the Narmer Palette, mistakenly thinking that the entire contents of The Egyptian Museum had been transferred there. This is not the case, and the two museums will co-exist, though the one in Tahrir Square has been robbed of its greatest treasures, as have various other museums including the one at Luxor. It was a lot easier to simply take things already on display elsewhere than to search the storage vaults because many things have gone missing, and no-one wants it to be their watch when the thefts are made public, and scandal erupts. Obviously, some things have been retrieved from storage but it has been a disaster for the other museums. However, in the Cairo museum you can still see remarkable things. I loved the mummified food, including mummified geese and a leg of goat, all ready to eat in the after life if you are caught short and your shabti figures having not got the kitchen up and running yet.
Tom took us straight to the Narmer Palette, which, though nominally a cosmetic palette, with a shallow area for mixing pigments, is far too large to have been used domestically. It was possibly used to grind cosmetics for use on the statues of the gods. It is made from greywacke, a hard siltstone, and is carved in low relief and dates from the 31st century BC. It has been described as the oldest Egyptian historical record and contains some of the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions ever found, yet it is sophisticated and uses many artistic conventions that have clearly been normalised for some time. It was made at about the time when Stonehenge consisted of nothing but an embankment with an earthen ditch – the first stone circle was not erected until 2500 BC.
Tom, being a professional Egyptologist, explained the pallet to us in great detail, section by section, calling Narmer ‘King Catfish’ in translation, and several people gathered to hear him. (All the details are on Wikipedia.)
Among the other great things in this museum are the statues of King Akhenaten, (1353-1536 BC) the first monotheist, who abolished all the old gods in favour of Aton, the sun’s disk. He also introduced a new artistic style involving elongated features and a huge fat stomach. Some scholars have suggested that he really did look like this, the result of pharaonic in-breeding, but as the style in repeated in portraits of groups, and a women’s head, it is more likely a design convention.
