[This is the second installment of the Egyptian portion of my chronicle of my travels in Israel and Egypt. The whole experience was quite different from the voyage around Israel. Israel is a bit more than 1/50 the size of Eqypt, yet we saw most of Egypt on day trips out of Cairo (until the cruise on the Nile, which was an add-on). In Israel, we did several day trips, but we stayed in three different cities.
[Almost everything we saw in Egypt was either ancient or medieval-to-Ottoman. The only truly modern thing we saw was the Aswan High Dam (and, I suppose, the reconstructed Abu Simbel Temples—all to come in the post). There was a considerable amount of ancient history to see in Israel, a lot of medieval and early-modern, but also a lot of 20th-century sights—which makes sense, since Israel is a 20th-century nation (and now, a 21st-century one as well).
[There’s nothing amiss in this contrast. It’s just a curious dichotomy in the two halves of one sightseeing journey.]
Cairo – Friday. 24 December
I had my continental breakfast overlooking the Nile from my balcony again. Then we made our excursion to the Egyptian Museum (formally, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities). This is where all the principal relics of ancient Egypt are preserved (aside from the ones held—often under protest by today’s Egyptian government—in places like London, Paris, and Berlin).
The Egyptian Museum is where the artifacts from King Tut’s tomb, including the famous gold funereal mask for his mummy, are usually on display. Except, that is, when they’re traveling. That’s the problem with places like the Egyptian Museum or the National Archaeological Museum of Athens: their holdings are of such interest around the world and in such demand that anytime you visit one of them, you’re bound to find some of their best exhibits absent!
Tut’s treasures, for example, were on tour for nine years (1972-1981)—which meant that they weren’t in Cairo for nine years. Relics from the “Boy King’s” tomb (he took the throne at about 9 years old and died at 18 or 19) are among the most travelled artifacts in the world.
Fortunately, there are far more items of interest in the Egyptian Museum than just Tut’s stuff—his are just the most famous. There’s so much of interest in this place that when we had a free day, I made a beeline for it on my own. (It was in walking distance from the Sheraton, as I noted earlier.)
I guess most visitors, especially foreigners, are drawn to the burial customs and artifacts—the mummies, sarcophagi, funereal masks, canopic jars, and so on. The Tutankhamun relics are surely the most famous collection in the museum, and many of the items are undeniably extraordinary. But I didn’t go back to revisit those well-known objects.
The large statues, many of them representations of the pharaohs whose tombs we’d seen the day before (see Part 7)—and many of them were transferred from the Giza Complex—are magnificent, We’re all familiar to some extent with Greek and Roman sculpture. One way or another, there’s a direct line from those civilizations to our culture.
But the equivalent Egyptian statuary is less familiar. That makes it exotic and novel—and, hence, an object of fascination. The large Egyptian statues of honored men are curiously dichotomous. While the Greek statues are almost entirely realistic and accurate in detail, the Egyptian examples have split artistic personalities.
On one hand, the poses and stances are stiff and artificial. The parts of the body often don’t look quite natural—and they’re not. (I know some of the reasons for this, but that’s not relevant to my point here.)
The faces, however, are as real as anything Michelangelo might have carved. The features like the eyes, noses, mouths, cheekbones are so distinct and varied that they almost have to have been reproduced from life with specificity and accuracy. They’re true sculpted portraits—I’d bet on it.
The large sculptures, though, aren’t the pieces that caught my eye the most. It was the little items—including the jewelry. There were some pieces of jewelry that were just stunning. (It’s no wonder that in the 1920s and ’30s, right after tomb of Tutankhamun [1332-1324 BCE] was opened in 1922, the West went mad for Egyptian motifs. This stuff is elegant by even modern standards.)
Other small items, however, like vases, bowls, small figurines, are also exquisite. When my mother and I used to go to art exhibits, we’d assess how well we liked the show and the works on display by deciding what pieces we’d come back for on a “midnight shopping trip.” From what I saw at the Egyptian Museum, I’d clean out the place. (No, I’d leave the mummies and sarcophagi. And the large statues—no place to put them.)
After our brief guided visit to the Egyptian Museum (my comments above combined those from my later visit on my own), we toured Old Cairo.
The city of Cairo, now Egypt’s capital and largest city (with a 1982 population of about 7.9 million inhabitants—grown to almost 10 million today), is one of the largest cities in the Arab world, Africa, and the world. [Today, Cairo is the ninth-largest city in the world by population.] It wasn’t founded until 969 CE, after the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641. There were, however, settlements in what is now Cairo beginning in the Roman era before the 6th century BCE.
Around 525 BCE, the Babylonians, having conquered Egypt, built Fort Babylon at the mouth of the canal that connected the Nile with the Red Sea. The canal, which marked the boundary between Upper (i.e., southern) and Lower (i.e., northern) Egypt, made this a particularly strategic location in the ancient world and many settlements grew up here—on the southern edge of the modern city.
(For a brief explanation of the apparent paradox of Upper Egypt being in the south and Lower Egypt being in the north, see Part 7.)
In 30 BCE, the Roman Empire annexed Egypt and built a bigger fortress near the site of Fort Babylon. According to the New Testament, soon after Jesus’ birth, Mary and Joseph fled Roman Palestine in fear of King Herod’s determination to find and kill the infant “King of the Jews” and took refuge for several years in Egypt. It wasn’t until Saint Mark went into Egypt, however, that Christianity took a hold there. He began converting the pagan Egyptians and in about 33 CE, the Coptic Christian Church was established in Alexandria, then the capital of Greco-Roman Egypt.
The Christians were persecuted by the Romans for hundreds of years, even though a substantial number of Egyptians were now followers. Nonetheless, numerous churches were built in what’s now called Coptic Cairo, a part of Old Cairo, in the late 4th and early 5th centuries of the Common Era.
In the early years following the Arab conquest, the Christians were permitted to build several churches near Fort Babylon in Old Cairo. One of these is Saint Sergius Coptic Church (full name: Saint Sergius and Saint Bacchus Coptic Orthodox Church).
Consecrated in the 4th century, Saint Sergius and Saint Bacchus is one of the oldest Coptic churches in Egypt. It’s situated over the place where Christians believe Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus took refuge when they came to Egypt. The church’s historical importance is that it’s where many patriarchs of the Coptic Church were elected.
The story of Sergius and Bacchus is based entirely on legend; there’s no historical evidence to support any of it. They are nonetheless considered saints in the Roman Catholic Church as well as many Eastern Orthodox branches of Christianity.
According to their legend, they were lifelong friends who were high-ranking young Roman soldiers in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq and part of Syria) in the 3rd and 4th centuries. They were unmasked as secret Christians in the early years of the 4th century and when they refused to renounce their beliefs, they were tortured.
Bacchus was beaten to death under torture and Sergius, still refusing to abandon his faith, was beheaded. Their martyrdom is dated at 303, but there’s no record of their ever having existed, much less when they died.
Because of their undying friendship for one another, Saints Sergius and Bacchus are forever linked as “paired saints,” venerated together due to a close relationship which transcends mere friendship. (Among other paired saints are the female Roman martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas, the Apostles Peter and Paul, and even Jesus and his disciple John.)
[Because of the assertions of one 20th-century historian, the closeness of Sergius and Bacchus is interpreted by some as romantic and the two saints have become the unofficial patrons of gay Christians. There is, of course, no more evidence that this is true than there is of anything else in the story of Saints Sergius and Bacchus.]
Nearby is the Ben Ezra Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in Cairo. Founded in the 9th century, it’s claimed to be on the site where the pharaoh’s daughter found baby Moses among the reeds along the Nile.
The date of the founding of the synagogue isn’t known, but historic documents suggest that it was before 882 CE and probably before the establishment of Islam (622). The original building, built in the 4th century, was a Christian church (purchased by a former Jerusalemite rabbi, Abraham Ben Ezra (b. 1089-92; d. 1164-67), for whom it’s named.
The present interior is interesting, mixing features of Islamic and Coptic architectural influences. The echoes of church design are obvious, but the synagogue layout is reminiscent of traditional houses of prayer of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, with the bimah in the middle of the sanctuary floor, rather than at one end, and no seats for worshipers like an Ashkenazi synagogue.
(I usually distinguish the two synagogue configurations by comparing the Ashkenazi shul to a proscenium theater, with the stage, or bimah, at one end and the audience [i.e., congregation] seated in fan-shaped array facing it.
(The Sephardi synagogue is like an arena theater, with the stage in the center and the audience arranged in a circle around it, except that Sephardi synagogues don’t have seats. The worshipers stand. [The word bimah, incidentally, is the same in a synagogue and in a theater; the name of the famous Habima, Israel’s national theater company, means ‘The Stage.’]
(I have noted that Ashkenazi Jews are those mainly from Eastern and Central Europe. Sephardim come from Spain and Portugal, having arrived in Europe with the Moors; they’re closely related culturally to the Mizrahim. Mizrahi Jews are those from Western Asia [i.e., Middle East] and North Africa.)
Though the Ben Ezra Synagogue has ancient roots, the current building only dates from 1892. Four years later, in a storage space for aged Hebrew texts awaiting burial (sacred Jewish texts and secular texts which mention the name of God must not be destroyed or discarded; they’re buried just like human remains), a huge cache of manuscripts was found and shipped to the University of Cambridge for identification and study.
The collection is currently archived in several university libraries in England and one in New York City. What the Dead Sea Scrolls are to the origins of the Old Testament, the Ben Ezra cache is to the history of medieval Jewry.
In 1168, Moses Maimonides (Rambam, see Part 2) settled in Fustat, the city, now part of Old Cairo, that was the capital of early Muslim Egypt and the site of the Ben Ezra Synagogue. He lived there for the rest of his life and, although he apparently wasn’t a member of the congregation, some of the ancient documents found tell of his life and work. These papers, some in Maimonides’ own hand, are a primary source of the philosopher’s biography.
Like many nations in the Muslim Middle East and North Africa, the Jewish population of Egypt has dwindled in the 20th century, especially after the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. With a shrinking congregation, the Ben Ezra Synagogue no longer functions as a house of worship. It serves as a museum and tourist attraction.
In the afternoon, we went to a different part of Old Cairo, away from the river, to the Citadel of Mohamed Ali (apparently more commonly known as the Citadel of Cairo or the Citadel of Saladin), a medieval fortification in the city built by Saladin (1137-93), the first sultan of Egypt and Syria (1174-93) and leader of the Muslim military campaigns against the Crusaders (1182-92), and then rebuilt and redesigned by subsequent Egyptian rulers.
The citadel served as the seat of the Egyptian government from Saladin’s reign to the Ottomans in the 19th century, down to Mohamed Ali, (1769-1849), the Albanian Ottoman governor and the de facto ruler of Egypt from 1805 to 1848 who’s considered the founder of modern Egypt. It’s more like an Egyptian Kremlin, with mosques in place of the churches in the Moscow fortress, than a White House or Élysée Palace.
The citadel was closed to the public and used as a military garrison and base by the British occupation army (1882-1956), and then, after 1946, by the Egyptian military. [The Egyptian government opened a large part of the Citadel to the public in 1983, and initiated the conversion some of its old buildings into museums.]
From the citadel, we paid a visit to Cairo’s bazaars, specifically the Khan El-Khalili market, the famous bazaar or souk in the center of the city. (Bazaar is a Persian word that’s been adopted by many cultures, while souk, an Arabic word, is the common term in the Middle East and North Africa.)
In the Muslim world, bazaars are not only common, but essential commercial and social centers. All manner of goods are sold there and it’s where local residents and visitors exchange information, news, and gossip.
While in the West, bazaars are often temporary or ad hoc marketplaces, often set up for charity fundraising, in the nations where bazaars and souks are a way of life, they are permanent locations, usually along a covered street (or network of streets in a neighborhood) or in a covered structure.
Stalls or shops are individually operated like a farmers’ market or flea market in the West, and the goods range from crafts, to spices and incense, to street foods and sweets, to jewelry, to clothes, to toys. Today’s bazaars also sell tapes, CD’s, souvenirs, picture postcards, slides, and so on, and usually feature cafés, one of the oldest of which is El-Fishawi, established in 1773.
In addition to the local people who shop in the bazaars, they are big tourist draws because they’re invariably colorful and bustling with activity. Big cities that were crossroads for commerce and trade, like Istanbul, Bagdad, Damascus, and Cairo, developed large bazaars and they still operate today as vital parts of the cities’ cultures.
Khan el-Khalili is such a place. Established in the 1380s by Jaharkas al-Khalili, the Master of the Stables of Sultan Barquq (1336-99; reigned: 1382-89; 1390-99), it soon became an important commercial center. (A khan is a multi-level building which served merchants as a place to store their goods on the ground level, with living quarters above. In the front of the street-level courtyard where the merchandise was stored was a space for a shop to sell the wares.)
Because it’s a gathering place for thousands of people, both Cairenes and visitors—tourists today, traders and pilgrims in the past—the bazaar also attracts entertainers and holiday celebrants. It’s always full of noise and music, odors and aromas (from the spices in open sacks, the burning incense, smoke from shishas and hookahs, and the food and Arabic coffee from the cafés), and crowds and animation.
[The 1988 Nobel Laureate for Literature, Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), the only Arab writer to have won the prize, set his 1947 novel Midaq Alley (released in English in 1966) in the Khan el-Khalili.]
[Part 9 of “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982,” the next installment, is scheduled for Wednesday, 11 August. It was Christmas Day in Cairo and I’ll be covering our attendance at the sound and light show at the Great Pyramids that night.
[Over the years (and I’ve seen a lot of them by now), I’ve spent Christmas in some far-off places. On this continent I’ve marked the holiday in Chicago; New Orleans; Williamsburg, Virginia (for an 18th-century celebration); Mexico City; and Quebec City.
[On the way to New Hope, Pennsylvania, in 1985, my parents and I stopped to watch Washington Crossing the Delaware at Washington Crossing. In 1976, I had performed the role of Hessian Colonel Johann Rall, the mercenary defender of Trenton who was defeated by Washington’s Continentals on Christmas night 1776, in William Mastrosimone’s Devil Take the Hindmost (see my post “Johann Rall: A Historical Portrait,” 10 and 15 December 2009). The play was presented in the bicentennial year; the historical reenactment we saw was staged on the 209th anniversary of the crossing.
[Abroad, I saw Christmas in Paris on my 16th birthday in 1962 and London the next year. Zermatt, Switzerland, home of the Matterhorn, was the site of several holidays after that, and one in Gstaad. I observed one memorable holiday at the 700-year-old home of a family of friends in the tiny French town of Villefranche-de-Lauragais in 1971. I was in Beijing in 1980 (the period of my next transcribed journal), followed by Cairo in 1982.
[I’m not even counting the places where I was living when 25 December came around—Washington, D.C.; Koblenz, Germany; Berlin; New York City.
[But I
digress . . . . Please return to Rick On
Theater on 11 August for the next part of “Travel Journal: Israel &
Egypt, 1982.”]
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