[It’s Christmas Day in Cairo, the last morning in the city before our departure for Upper Egypt (which, if you remember my note, is actually in the south because it’s up river from Alexandria and Cairo and at higher elevations).
[I had my last “Nile Balcony” breakfast, watching the life along the river beneath my hotel room window, then I took advantage of our free day, as you’ll read below. In the evening of 25 December, we returned to the Giza Plateau to see the sound and light show at the Great Pyramids.]
Cairo – Saturday, 25 December
Today we had a free day and the birthday gift I gave myself was a return visit to the Egyptian Museum (see Part 8). I walked across the Nile bridge from Giza into the center of Cairo, a short distance, and spent the morning reexamining the exhibits we rushed through on our guided tour and then went on to parts of the museum we hadn’t visited.
I made my remarks about what I saw earlier, but I’ll reiterate that this kind of stuff really gets me. Part of my response is a result of my fascination with really old things, the same way I am with ancient places, but part, and I think the greater part, is because the objects are so gorgeous. I look at them more as art than artifacts.
I had the same experience at the Athens Archaeological Museum, which I visited in 1973 [and the National Museum of the American Indian on Washington, D.C.’s Mall, which I saw in 2006, soon after it opened in 2004].
[I’ve covered NMAI in several posts. See, for example, “Fritz Scholder,” posted on 30 March 2011; “Awake and Sing!, et al.,” 3 April 2017; the section on The First American Art in “Art By Indigenous Peoples,” 5 January 2018; and “Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait,” 15 January 2018.]
When I was stationed in West Berlin in the early and mid-1970s, I used to go often to the Dahlem Museum [formal name today: Ethnological Museum of Berlin], which was in the same district as the U.S. Army headquarters and my billet. Even though I saw the works in the art section of the museum (which included the world-famous Man with the Golden Helmet [c. 1650], believed then to have been the work of Rembrandt), I was most fascinated with the ethnological section, where the objects (from cultures of Africa, Oceania, East and North Asia, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Central Asia, and native Americans) were displayed with all the aesthetic sensitivity of any art museum in the world.
[It really doesn’t matter the culture. I’m drawn to shows like the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s The Aztec Empire in 2004 and The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya at the National Gallery of Art that same year. I spent hours of pleasure at China: Dawn of a Golden Age, 200-750 A.D. at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004 again; The First American Art: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection of American Indian Art, also in 2004, at the Bowling Green (New York City) satellite of the National Museum of the American Indian; and, in 2007, African Vision: The Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection at the National Museum of African Art.
[Note that all these memorable exhibits, with the exception of First American Art, were mounted at art museums not ethnological or natural history institutions—and they all were art shows. Not only are so many of these items simply beautiful and expressive, but I am always stunned to see so much that’s delicate or made from perishable material that’s survived for hundreds and even thousands of years.]
Before returning to the Sheraton for our evening outing, I went in search of a Cairene lunch on my own. Not that there was anything wrong with the food at the Sheraton. It even served a fair selection of Egyptian dishes—shawarma, fava beans, lentils, grape leaves, hummus, falafel, kebabs, kofta, and such (not dissimilar from Israeli or Turkish food)—but it’s “sanitized,” so to speak. Not just hygienically, but “visually” for the Western eye and palate.
I went looking for a Cairo café. If it was reasonably clean-looking and busy (that is, popular). I gave it a try. I settled on a place that turned out to be a lunch spot for Cairene office-workers. (In Hong Kong, when I was on a trip to China, a couple of years earlier, I went to a native dim sum restaurant near the harbor. The menu was entirely in Chinese—the clientele was virtually all local residents—and I just turned myself over to the waiter. It worked out excellently, so I did the same thing in Cairo! Also excellent.)
I don’t remember what I ate—except that there were fava beans. They’re pretty much a staple, I gather. [By the way, this was almost a decade before Silence of the Lambs. Until 1991, favas were just oversized limas!]
After a brief respite at the hotel, that evening we returned to the Giza Plateau for the sound and light show at the Great Pyramids. Most people nowadays are familiar with sound and light shows; they’ve been around for over half a century and are pretty much seen all over the globe.
For those few who don’t know what one is, a sound and light show is the use of lighting effects projected onto the side of a building or ruin of some historical note while live or recorded narration accompanied by music dramatizes the history of the place.
The sound and light show at the Great Pyramids of Giza, the first in Africa, has been performed since 1961. The narration was performed by the Egyptian actor Omar Sharif (1932-2015) and the music was composed by Halim El-Dabh (1921-2017), a pioneer of electronic music, who drew on ancient Egyptian themes and texts.
I’m not a big fan of sound and light shows; I find them hokey and enervating. The most interesting thing about the performance at Giza was that it was the same show that Roger Moore’s James Bond was at in the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me. The word is that the script hasn’t changed in decades—and the technology hasn’t much, either.
The Great Pyramids sound-and-light was somewhat gimmicky in my opinion. The Sphinx recounts the story of the pyramids and the three pharaohs, Cheops, Chephren, and Mykerinos. There’s dramatic music and the lights change color and shift from the façade of one tomb to the next. It’s all very ersatz-dramatic, like the difference between a film-strip and an actual movie.
I’ve only seen a couple of sound-and-lights; I can’t even remember what the others were. My problems are with both the sound—the writing is stiff and artificial (at Giza, the “ancient” Egyptians spoke “biblical” English: a lot of thou’s and hast’s) and it was all spoken in stentorian tones—and the light—the Sphinx and the pyramids were arbitrarily lit in bright colors that had no connection to anything historical.
The history—or legends, since little is really known about the Fourth Dynasty pharaohs—is very sketchy and not always related to the pyramids or the Sphinx, despite the fact that that’s what we’re looking at.
Remember what I said about the desert on winter days? Well, on winter nights, it gets cold fast after the sun goes down. Sitting for an hour—at some distance from the pyramids in folding chairs, I might add—it’s necessary to have a warm sweater or jacket to stay comfortable.
I can’t say this was a highlight of my visit to Cairo. [I don’t know what the tickets cost when I went since it was part of the tour package, but today’s prices are $19 for a regular seat or $23 for a VIP seat (the first three or four rows).] The Giza monuments are way more impressive just as they are in daylight than in the sound-and-light.
The next day was our departure from Cairo and we were flying. Reveille was at 2:30 a.m. with breakfast at 3. We had to have our luggage outside the rooms at that hour—so it was pack up and turn in . . . and hope to be able to get right to sleep.
[In “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982 – Part 10,” I’ll be seeing a remarkable engineering feat—and, believe it or not, I’m not talking about the Aswan Dam. Then I spend the rest of my Egyptian adventure aboard a Nile River boat seeing not the “pyramids along the Nile,” but the ancient temples.
[It’s
coming up on Saturday, 14 August. Please
come back to Rick On Theater for the next installment
of this recovered journal.]
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