Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982 – Part 10

 

[“Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982 – Part 10” begins my voyage down the River Nile.  The rest of the journal is taken up by this cruise, which ends with a flight back to Cairo and a night in an airport hotel preparatory to returning to the States.

[I’m not an especially romantic person—sentimental sometimes, but not romantic—but the notion of floating down the Nile from Aswan to Luxor generated visions of Cleopatra (who looked remarkably like Liz Taylor) and Marc Antony.  Of course, in the image, they were sailing in a papyrus vessel and I was on a motorized riverboat . . . but you can’t have everything!

[If you’re just joining us on this journey, it would be a good idea to go back and pick up the first nine installments of the account.  Part 1 was posted on 11 July and Parts 2 through 5 followed at three-day intervals.  I interrupted the schedule to post a journalistic report, but Part 6 appeared on 2 August and the three-day schedule recommenced.]

ALONG THE NILE

Cairo/Abu Simbel – Day 1 of Sheraton Nile River Cruise/Aswan – Sunday, 26 December

I didn’t have my “Nile Balcony” breakfast because of the early hour and short deadline.  After getting our bags into the corridor having a very early breakfast (I don’t think I’d eaten as early as 3:00 in the morning since the army where such hours were known as “oh-dark-thirty”!), we went to Cairo International at 3:30 for a 5 a.m. EgyptAir flight to Abu Simbel.

Abu Simbel Airport is about 700 miles south of Cairo, almost to the Sudanese border (Upper Egypt).  It’s about a 2¼-hour flight (we were scheduled to arrive at 7:15) for a visit of just two hours.  The tiny airport serves only one destination: the world-renowned Abu Simbel temples in Nubia, which includes the southern part of Upper Egypt and half of Sudan.  The temples are dedicated to Pharaoh Ramses II (ca. 1303-1213 BCE; reigned: 1279-13 BCE) and his wife, Queen Nefertari (ca. 1300-ca. 1255 BCE; m. Ramses: ca. 1287 BCE).

(Rameses’ Queen Nefertari shouldn’t be confused with a more famous Egyptian queen, Nefertiti [ca. 1370-ca. 1330 BCE], the Eighteenth Dynasty wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten [reigned ca. 1353-36 or 1351-34 BCE].  Nefertiti is the subject of the iconic stucco-coated limestone bust in a Berlin museum.)

On arrival, off we went, straight from the airport to the massive temples of Abu Simbel, a ten-minute ride away. 

The Great Temple of Ramses and the Small Temple of Nefertari were carved into the mountainside on the west bank of the Nile between approximately 1264 BCE and 1244 BCE, during the Nineteenth Dynasty reign of Rameses II.  (He’s also known as Rameses the Great and is believed by many historians to have been the pharaoh of the Exodus.)  They stood there, with their monumental statues of Rameses (66 feet tall) and Nefertari (33 feet), for 3,000 years.

That was until 1968.  That’s when the whole kit-and-kaboodle was moved to its present location 71 yards higher and 219 yards back from the river.  Why, you may well ask (if you’re too young to remember or have just forgotten)? 

When the Aswan High Dam was begun in 1958 to control the annual Nile flooding—it was completed in 1970—it formed Lake Nasser, which threatened to inundate the temple complex.  In 1960, a rescue plan, backed by UNESCO, was conceived by architects and engineers.

Archeologists, engineers, and heavy equipment operators took the temples apart in chunks and transported them to the new location where the temples were reassembled like a gigantic 3-D puzzle.  Not only were the temple structures and their attendant statues of Rameses and Nephertari reconstructed above the lake, but the modern-day temple-builders also constructed an artificial mountain into which the newly-sited monuments were fitted.

The feat was humongous.  It took four years and a crew of 500 workers operating day and night to accomplish, not to mention over $40 million [equal to $337 million in 2021].  But what I was imagining on our way down to Abu Simbel was the meeting of the cabinet of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-70; President of Egypt: 1956-70) at which the engineers and architects proposed the scheme.

“You want to move what WHERE?” I hear Nasser exclaiming, as the ministers all sit stunned and stare at the experts (who, incidentally, were all foreigners).

In the end, however, the reconstructed temples look as though they were always in that place—at least to an ordinary tourist like me.  Even the artificial mountain looked natural.  Now, I saw Abu Simbel only 14 years after it was rebuilt.  I wonder if age and weathering will make the seams show?  In, say, 50 years, will the site look like an aged movie set?  [That would have been in 2014 . . . I wonder.]

(Another archeological treasure that was endangered by Lake Nasser and moved was the Temple of Dendur [built around 15 BCE].  It was given to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967 because the museum pledged to build a special exhibit space for the treasure.  It’s been on display there since 1978.

(The Temple of Dendur is one of my absolute favorite exhibits at the Met.  Not only is the temple itself a stunning little architectural gem, but the Met’s designers created an unquestionably spectacular presentation environment for it.  It’s a stage set, and the temple is the star of the production.

(It’s so visually striking that since it opened, I’ve harbored the fantasy of using it as a setting for a production of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra.  If I couldn’t do it at the Met, I’d have the whole environment, temple and all, replicated in a performance venue someplace.)

Our visit to Abu Simbel was over in less than two hours because we had to be back at the Abu Simbel Airport for a 9:15 EgyptAir flight to Aswan, about 40 minutes to cover 175 miles.  This was the starting point of the Sheraton Nile Cruise, four nights during which the river boat would be our hotel.  [The Sheraton cruises ceased operation in 2000.]

We arrived at Aswan International (that’s right, it’s international!) Airport at just before 10 a.m.  We went from there to Aswan and the Sheraton pier—they have their own—to board the boat.  Boarding time was noon, and I don’t recall how we killed the time before then. 

The drive from the airport, just 11 miles away, only takes a half hour at most, so we would’ve arrived in Aswan around 10:30 or so.  Maybe we had a second breakfast—lunch would be served on board—since we’d eaten so early and we’d been rushing about for eight hours already!

So, we checked in to the boat at 12 and after dropping in on our cabins, immediately had lunch.  (The food was more than passable.  The boat wasn’t large, so I assume the galley was a tight fit.)  The Sheraton ran four boats on the Nile in the ’80s, and I think I was on the 78-cabin H/S Tut. 

(The other Sheraton river boats were the H/S Anni [64 cabins], the Hotp [64 cabins], and the Aton [82 cabins].  H/S stands for “Hydraulic Ship”—as opposed to “Steam Ship” [S/S] or “Motor Ship” [M/S].)

After lunch on our first day aboard the Nile River boat, we saw sights in Aswan.  We made a stop at the Mausoleum of Agha Khan, the burial place of Agha Khan III (1877-1957), the 48th Imam of the Nizari Ismaili sect of Islam.  It’s an immense tomb on the west bank of the Nile in Aswan on a hilltop overlooking the villa the Agha Khan and his wife used as a winter residence.

(Interesting note: the Agha Khan left instructions in his will that he was to be buried near the villa two years after his death.  He died and was first buried in Versoix-Geneva, Switzerland, where I went for my junior year in high school.  I wrote about this period of my life recently in “Going to a Swiss International School,” Parts 1-3 [posted on Rick On Theater on 29 April and 2 and 5 May 2021].)

The Agha (or Aga) Khan is an honorific title bestowed on the Imam of the Nizari Ismaili Shia.  The Nizaris are the largest branch of the Ismaili Muslims, who, in turn, are the second-largest branch of Shia Islam.  The Agha Khan claims descent from Muhammad and is the spiritual leader of his sect of Muslims in vaguely the same way that the Dalai Lama is the leader of the “Yellow Hat” school of Tibetan Buddhism.

The mausoleum, which is built of pink granite, is designed to resemble the Masjid (mosque) al-Juyushi, a Fatimid mosque in Cairo built in the 11th century.  The Fatimids were an Ismaili Shia dynasty that ruled North Africa in the 10th through the 12th centuries, making Egypt a Fatimid power center.  Presumably, this is why Agha Khan III chose this site for his final resting place.

[In 1997, the Begum, the wife of the Agha Khan, closed the mausoleum to the public, though the grounds remain accessible.  At the time I was there, it was still open to visitors.]

After the mausoleum, we visited two small islands in the Nile that are part of the city of Aswan.  Elephantine Island is the larger of the two, and is located closest to Aswan off the east bank of the river.  The island’s only 3,900 feet (less than three-quarters of a mile) long and 1,300 feet (about a quarter of a mile) across at its widest point.  (By comparison, New York City’s Roosevelt Island is about two miles long with a maximum width of 800 feet.)

The island’s odd name may have something to do with its history.  In ancient Egyptian, guidebooks told me, the name meant both “elephant” and “ivory.”  The island was a trading center for African ivory.

Some guides also pointed out that the large rocks on the island look like elephants standing in water.  That strikes me as little fanciful, but at least it’s feasible.  Another observation was that the shape of the island from the air resembles an elephant tusk.  I can’t confirm that . . . but, umm, how would an ancient Egyptian get to see the island from the air, anyway?  From an ancient Egyptian helicopter, maybe?  Or the observation deck of a very tall ancient Egyptian skyscraper?

The island’s prominence in trade comes from its location.  It sits in the Nile on what was the border between Upper Egypt and Nubia.  That made it an ideal spot for exchanging goods among traders plying the Nile, an important trade route.

As a result, the island had a fairly significant existence for such a tiny place.  The archeological evidence over the decades has been important enough for Elephantine to be the home of the Aswan Museum (which also contains artifacts found in or salvaged from the monuments that were excavated when the dam created Lake Nasser).

Elephantine Island is also the site of a fort built in the 17th or 16th century BCE, part of Egypt’s defense of its southern border.  Because the Egyptian religion held that the island was the home of Khnum, the god who controlled the flow of the Nile—he inhabited caves beneath the island—there’s a temple dedicated to him and his two companion deities. 

The Temple of Khnum, on the southern end of the island, is the oldest ruin on Elephantine.  It dates from the Third Dynasty (2686-2613 BCE), with a smaller temple from the Sixth Dynasty local governor (around 2278-2183 BCE).  Khnum is depicted with a ram’s head and there’s a mummified ram, sacred to the god, in the Aswan Museum.

The little island also contains one of the several granite quarries in Aswan that supplied stone for many of ancient Egypt’s historic monuments.  All of these sites are the focus of ongoing digs.

Next to Elephantine Island to the west is what used to be called Kitchener’s Island (now more commonly known as El Nabatat Island).  It’s even tinier than Elephantine, weighing in at only a little over a half a mile in length and about a third of a mile in width. 

The island has had several names and continues to be called varying ones even today.  The designation Kitchener’s Island was the result of the island’s being given to Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener (1850-1916), when he was British Consul-General in Egypt from 1911 to 1914 (during the British occupation).

Lord Kitchener made the island his military headquarters and filled it with exotic flowers and rare plants and trees from as far as India and Malaysia.  When Kitchener left Egypt, the island reverted to the control of the Egyptian government; when President Nasser took office in 1956, he called the island Geziret En Nabatat, which means Plant Island.

Today, El Nabatat is the Aswan Botanical Garden, specializing in subtropical, exotic, and rare plants from all over the world.  The island and gardens, which are popular with both local residents and visitors, can be reached by felucca, motor boat, or ferry.  (A felucca is a traditional wooden sailboat that sails the Nile.  We saw lots of them from the cruise boat on this trip down the river.)

We returned to the boat at about 5 p.m. where the crew were serving Afternoon Tea.  (They did this every day of the cruise.  Remember that Egypt was run by the Brits for over three decades.)  Dinner was served on board at 7 or 8:15 (depending on your Seating), and then the on-board Discotheque was opened, as it was most evenings. 

(This being the early ’80s, disco was still popular, especially in Europe, which would have been Egypt’s template for Western tourist entertainment.  At 36, I wasn’t really drawn to it myself.)

As I said, we spent nights on the vessel, which remained tied up in Aswan for the first night of the cruise.

[I guess this isn’t really a “cruise” yet, since we haven’t actually sailed anywhere.  Starting with “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982 – Part 11,” however, we progress down river, making several stops en route.  Between Abu Simbel (temples) and Karnak and Luxor (temples), we visited . . . guess what.  More temples!

[The song says “See the pyramids along the Nile,” but they’re inland from the river.  What were built on the banks of the Nile were the temples—so, if you sail along the river, it’s a guarantee you’ll see lots of ’em.  (“See the temples along the Nile” doesn’t scan, however!)

[Part 11, the penultimate installment of “Travel Journal,” will be posted on Tuesday, 17 August.  Please come back as I wind up this chronicle of my visit to two countries whose origins stretch back to the beginning of human history.]

Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982 – Part 9

 

[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.]

Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982 – Part 8

 

[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.”]

Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982 – Part 7

 

[After a brief hold-up to publish a timely post on an important announcement by Actors’ Equity Association (see “Actors' Equity's Open Access,” 28 July), I returned to the posting of my travel journal for a 1982 trip to Israel and Egypt.  I posted Part 6 of the series on 2 August, after the interruption, and now comes Part 7 of “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982,” the first installment of the Egyptian half of the journey.

[As I have all along, I strongly recommend that readers who haven’t been following along continuously from Part 1 go back to 11 July and catch up.  Parts 1 through 6 of my chronicle, covering my visit to Israel, started on that date and continued on 14, 17, 20, and 23 July, and 2 August.]

CAIRO, EGYPT

Cairo – Wednesday, 22 December

We arrived at Cairo International Airport and were met by some staff of Egyptian Express Travel, the company handling the Egyptian half of the Unitours program, and after processing through the usual customs and immigration folderol, we were transported to the Cairo Sheraton Hotel [now called the Sheraton Cairo Hotel & Casino].

I think this is where I first heard what would become a key phrase from our guide: “Yallah, yallah, yallah!”  Yallah means “Let’s go!” or “Hurry up!” but I gather it’s also used as just an attention-getter like “Over here!” or “Look this way!”

We heard it from the guide when he was on the move or trying get us to gather ’round him, and we heard it from vendors and peddlers in street markets and tourist-site souvenir hawkers.  (I never heard it spoken—or, rather, shouted—in anything but threes.)

It was ubiquitous—and one of a couple of Arabic terms I picked up just from listening.  (Another was shukran for “thanks.”)

The hotel is actually in Giza, just across the Nile from downtown Cairo, walking distance from the Egyptian Museum, which holds most of the Egyptian antiquities in the city.  The hotel sits on the western bank of the river, just across a bridge over the Nile. 

(Giza is officially a separate jurisdiction, or governorate, but it’s effectively a close-in suburb of Cairo, as can be surmised from the name of the Cairo Sheraton Hotel.  It’s sort of like, say, Cambridge, Massachusetts, is to Boston—separated by the Charles River.  Generally speaking, the Nile separates Cairo proper from Giza.  Cairo is east of the river; Giza is west.)

When we got to the hotel—very mid-20th-century modern with little, except decorative appointments, that said “Egypt” (ancient or modern)—and got ourselves checked in and received our room assignments and keys, I went up to my room.  (The Egypt group was much smaller than the Israel one, so I didn’t have a roommate.)

The room looked out on the Nile!  I should say, “looked down,” as the hotel was right on the riverbank and I was several stories directly above it.  What’s more, I had a little balcony hanging right over the Nile!  I decided then and there that I would have my breakfast on that balcony every morning.  I mean . . . it’s the River Nile—you know what I mean?

Cairo – Thursday, 23 December

After breakfast—which I had on my “Nile Balcony” as I promised myself—we took off for Memphis (and I don’t mean Tennessee!  —with a hat-tip to Chuck Berry).  That’s the ancient capital of Egypt, 18 miles south of Cairo along the Nile. 

The ancient city of Memphis is today an archeological ruin, designated a World Heritage Site in 1979 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).  It’s located near several modern towns that are within its historical borders; the closest is Mit Rahina.  (We visited only the historical ruins.)

According to legend, the city was founded by King Menes—for whom it’s named—who flourished around 3200-3000 BCE and who united Upper (counterintuitively, that’s southern because the Nile flows south—up river—to north) and Lower (i.e., northern) Egypt and established the First Dynasty. 

(Along the Nile, the topography of Egypt slopes downward from an elevation of over 600 feet near the Sudanese border in the south to less than 20 feet at Alexandria on the Mediterranean Sea in the north.  Cairo sits at an elevation of 75 feet above sea level, while Aswan, 540 miles south, is 636 feet above sea level.)

King Menes made Memphis—the Greek adaptation of Menefer, the city’s Egyptian name—the capital of the united country, and it remained the seat of the kings and pharaohs until the Ninth Dynasty (ca. 2160-ca. 2130 BCE).  It continued to be an important center for business, trade, and religion.

The first true scientific exploration of Memphis was during Napoleon Bonaparte’s (1769-1821) campaign in Egypt (1798-1801), during which the Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799.  The first excavations of Memphis were made in 1820 and digging continued into the 20th century [and the early years of the 21st century].

Memphis was a populous city, ranging in size from 6,000 to 30,000 inhabitants during its rise in prominence to the height of its importance.  Witness to this are the large number of temples—mostly to Ptah, the god of craftsmen and architects, and the city’s patron deity—built by the various rulers who reigned from here.  

For the same reason, there are numerous necropolises.  The best known is the Necropolis of Sakkara (also spelled Saqqara), an ancient burial ground of Egyptian kings and nobles, about 17½ miles south of Memphis and a bit west of the Nile.  

There are numerous tombs, including both mastabas, rectangular burial structures for non-royal Egyptians, and pyramids.  (Aside from their shapes, mastabas and pyramids are differentiated by their construction media: pyramids are made of quarried stone, granite for the substructure and limestone for the facing; mastabas are built out of mud bricks—the kind written of in the Old Testament story of the Exodus.) 

The Sakkara necropolis is a vast place, covering an area of a little less than 4 square miles (about the size of East Orange, New Jersey; Brewster, Massachusetts; or Hempstead, New York), a true “city of the dead.” 

The most famous of the 16 royal pyramids as Sakkara is the Step Pyramid of Zoser (Djoser), built during the Third Dynasty (2686-2613 BCE).  It’s the oldest-known intact stone structure in the world.  Pharoah Zoser reigned for a period of from 19 to 28 years (depending on the source of information) sometime between approximately 2686 and 2611 BCE. 

The pyramid is the main feature of Zoser’s vast burial complex of ceremonial structures and decoration surrounding an immense courtyard.  It’s made up of six steps, or set-backs, reaching a height of 205 feet with a base 358 feet by 397 feet.  (The Great Pyramid of Cheops in Giza, by comparison, is 481 feet tall on a base of 755.6 feet square.)  The top is flat; there’s no pyramidion, the pyramid-shaped stone that forms the peak of a true pyramid or an obelisk.

After our visit to Memphis, we had lunch at the Mena House Hotel, originally a mid-19th-century hunting lodge in Giza about eight miles southwest of Cairo.  It was converted into a hotel, named for King Menes. which opened in 1886.  [Since 2018, it’s been operated by Marriott.]  It’s in view of the Great Pyramids of Giza, about 600 yards south.

(In December 1977, Egyptian diplomat and delegate to the United Nations, Esmat Abdel-Miguid [1923-2013], and Osama el-Baz [1931-2013], Egyptian diplomat and Chief of Staff to the Egyptian president, sat down with Eliahu Ben Elissar [1932-2000], Israeli politician and diplomat who was Director-General of the Office  of the Prime Minister of Israel, and Israeli lawyer and diplomat Meir Rosenne [1931-2015], who served as legal adviser to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at Mena House to discuss a peace settlement.  

(Also attending as observers were U.S. Under Secretary of State Albert Atherton [1921-2002; U.S. Ambassador to Egypt: 1979-83] and United Nations representative General Ensio Siilasvuo [1922-2003] of Finland, head of the U.N. peacekeeping force in the Mideast.  

(The result of this Mena House conference was the Camp David Accords, signed by Anwar Sadat [1918-81; President of Egypt, 1970-81] and Menachem Begin [1913-92; Prime Minister of Israel, 1977-83] on 17 September 1978.  It was those accords that made it possible for me and my traveling companions to visit both Israel and Egypt on one trip and cross directly from Jerusalem to Cairo the way we did.)

After lunch, we went to the edge of the Western Desert, an area of the vast Sahara that lies west of the River Nile, to see the Great Pyramids of Giza, also known as the Giza Pyramid Complex.  The complex, on the eastern edge of the desert (about eight miles southwest of central Cairo), includes the Great Pyramid of Cheops (also known as the Pyramid of Khufu); the slightly smaller Pyramid of Chephren (or Khafre), about 275 yards southwest; and the Pyramid of Mykerinos (or Menkaure), another 300 yards or so farther.  

Also part of the complex are several small pyramids associated with the Mykerinos  pyramid, a number of other structures such as temples and tombs of lesser nobles and the pyramid-builders, statues of the pharaohs interred there, and several large cemeteries containing mastabas.  The Great Sphinx lies on the eastern side of the complex.  The entire complex, named a world Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979, covers a tad over 62½ square miles.  (That’s a little bigger than Louisville, Kentucky, and Akron, Ohio, and a little smaller than Davenport, Iowa.)

Of course, half the reason to go out to the Giza complex is to see the Great Pyramids, especially the Pyramid of Cheops, by far the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the only one still extant.  Constructed between approximately 2580 and 2560 BCE, it’s the oldest of the pyramids in Giza and also one of the largest structures ever built, twice the size of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome (commonly known as the Vatican).

It could have taken as long as 27 years to construct the royal tomb for Pharoah Cheops (reign: ca. 2589-2566 BCE) of the Fourth Dynasty (2613-2494 BCE).  At originally 481 feet tall, when the polished limestone casing was removed over the centuries (including the pyramidion), the height of the Great Pyramid had been reduced to its current 454.4 feet.  Still, for more than 3,800 years, it was the world’s tallest structure. 

(The central spire of London’s Lincoln Cathedral, completed in 1311, is believed to have been 525 feet tall, surpassing the Great Pyramid’s height by 44 feet—until the spire collapsed in 1548.  After that, the Eiffel Tower, built in 1889, became the tallest structure at 1,063 feet.)

Like all the Fourth Dynasty pyramids in Giza, Cheops’ tomb was built of granite blocks and then faced with white limestone so that the sides looked smooth.  The limestone was highly polished so that it reflected the sunlight like a giant gem in the desert.  The facing stones were stripped from the pyramids starting centuries ago for use in other construction.  A few of these stones are still in place at the base of the Great Pyramid.

The two other great pyramids, the tombs of Pharaohs Chephren (ca. 2558-2532 BCE), one of Cheops’ sons, and Mykerinos  (ca. 2532-2503 BCE), a son of Chephren, are both smaller than Cheops’—Chephren’s, completed in approximately 2570 BCE, only slightly, but Mykerinos’, completed in about 2510 BCE, very noticeably.  Chephren’s pyramid exhibits a considerable amount of the limestone casing at the top.

Among its attendant structures—all the burial pyramids are themselves complexes in addition to being parts of the overall Giza complex—the Mykerinos  pyramid has three subsidiary pyramids, known as “Queen’s Pyramids” (though their actual purpose may have had nothing to do with the burial of the pharaoh’s wives).

At about 980 yards (a half mile) southeast of the Great Pyramids lies the Great Sphinx, possibly the most iconic sight in all of Egypt and one of the most recognized images worldwide.  A monumental limestone sculpture of a reclining mythical creature with the head of a man, the body of a lion, and the wings of a falcon, the Sphinx is the other half of the reason to come to the Giza Plateau. 

The face of the Sphinx appears to represent Pharaoh Chephren, prompting Egyptologists to posit that it was intended to guard his tomb and suggesting that it was created between 2600 and 2500 BCE.  The Giza Sphinx was carved from the bedrock of the Giza Plateau.

‘Sphinx’ is a Greek word that may be derived from the verb ‘to squeeze’ or ‘to strangle’ (presumed to relate to the way lionesses kill their prey—Greek sphinxes usually had the head of a woman); but this is disputed and many authorities believe that the Greek word was adapted from the Egyptian name for the sculpture of the beast (as differentiated from the mythical creature itself, the Egyptian name of which is unknown). 

The ancient Egyptians called the statue of the Sphinx shesep-ankh, which means ‘living image’ (which also referred to other representations of royal figures).  It was a reference to the “living rock” present at the construction site from which the statue was carved rather than brought from another location.

The statue is badly, but unevenly corroded—mostly by desert wind and blowing sand.  The bedrock of the Western Desert out of which the Sphinx is made is accumulated in layers which offer varying susceptibility to erosion.  That’s why the lowest level around the lion’s legs and the head, sculpted from harder stone, are more intact than the middle portion of the beast’s body, which is softer and weathered in striations.

One incident of visible damage seems to have been deliberate, however.  The missing nose appears to have been chiseled off sometime between the 3rd and 10th centuries CE and there are many legends purporting to explain this vandalism.  The two I’d heard are that Napoleon’s artillery took potshots at the Sphinx out of disrespect for the Egyptian people and their culture and that early Muslims defaced the man’s head because Islam forbade depictions of human figures.

Both of these are clearly apocryphal.  Aside from Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt being at least eight centuries later than the most recent dating of the defacement, the evidence of chiseling eliminates the use of cannons to blow off the nose.

The story of the Islamic prohibition of human representation is probably wrong because the Koran forbids idolatry, the worship or reverence of icons or images.  There is also a prohibition of depicting Mohammed and other prophets.  These wouldn’t really have applied to the Sphinx—except for one putative explanation of the destruction. 

A 14th/15th-century Arab historian posited that a Sufi Muslim found that the local farmers were making offerings to the Sphinx to increase their harvests.  The mystic defaced the statue in an act of iconoclasm.

I suppose this could be credible . . . if there were sufficient explanation for it to have happened 400 years later than the scientific estimate of the damage.  Dating anything in Egyptian history with accuracy is a fraught endeavor.  Which is part of the reason, I suppose, that everything about ancient Egypt lends itself to mystery and imaginative speculation.

Like most of the ancient sights I saw in Egypt, standing in the desert looking at the Great Sphinx was awe-inspiring.  I mean that in the literal sense: I was overtaken with awe.  Forget the damage and the weathering, this enigmatic creature, immense and even noble-looking, had a mysterious hold on my imagination. 

The Great Pyramids were astonishing and impressive.  There are some generally accepted theories about how the ancient Egyptians (and their Hebrew slaves) built the monumental tombs, but it’s still all miraculous to me.  Standing in front of those huge structures rising out of the desert . . . they shouldn’t have been able to exist.  But they do—and there they were.  The treasures found inside them (I had seen The Treasures of Tutankhamun at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City [15 December 1978-15 April 1979]) and some of the funereal art inside the chambers was gorgeous.  But the Sphinx was something else again.

(I do have a thing for the ancient Egyptian tomb paintings.  For a class, I did a project that was designs for the costumes for George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and I drew the presentation renderings to look like tomb paintings.)

I’ve already said how I react in the presence of really old places like Stonehenge and Jericho (see Part 4).  The Sphinx was all that at over 4,000 years old, plus mystery and magic.  Stonehenge is just a rock circle—okay, with spiritual overtones; Jericho is just a city—immensely old and biblical, but still . . . .  The Sphinx is a mythical creature, a keeper of secrets, the guardian of the dead.  I mean . . . WOW!

(On Saturday evening, 25 December—that’s right: the night of Christmas Day and my 36th birthday—we came back to Giza to see the sound and light show at the pyramids; see Part 9.) 

I should say a thing or two about being in the Sahara for a day.  Essentially, it’s a huge sandbox.  As I commented earlier, our deserts in the States are mostly dirt and rock; the Sahara is sand, just like in the movies.  It’s the largest hot desert on Earth; only the deserts of Antarctica and the Arctic are larger.

The Sahara can have a strange sort of beauty and fascination, especially if you know you’re getting out of it soon, but aside from the places like the Giza Plateau with the pyramids and other structures (and the tourists) and the narrow stretches along the Nile (which I’d see in a few days; see Parts 10-12) which are green, it’s bleak and stark.

It's also hot.  The guidebooks say the winter temps in the desert are moderate, but my experience was that it was very warm during the day.  This is exacerbated by a number of climatic factors: it is very dry, because there’s little rainfall (which is, after all, why it’s a desert!); it’s almost always sunny and very bright, so, in addition to the heat, there’s always a glare (which also reflects upward from the sand)—and virtually no shade except in areas with man-made structures; during the daylight hours, the sand heats up and retains that heat and you start to feel it on your feet pretty quickly.

To add to all this, the hot, sunny, dry conditions attract . . . flies.  They’re worse in the summer and spring, I understand, but they’re out in winter, too.  Before I left home, my parents, who’d been to Egypt a few years before I went, gave me a horsehair flywhisk from their visit.  I thought it was an amusing affectation, like something Hercule Poirot might carry in Death on the Nile.  But NOOooo!  I carried it with me to the pyramids on a whim—and did it come in mighty handy.  Those little buggers (sorry about the pun) sting when they bite!  And they’re annoying as hell!

I hate to sound like a prissy western tourist.  I’m really not.  I traveled quite a bit once upon a time and while I saw the main tourist attractions—the Arc de Triomphes, the Porta Nigras, the Forbidden Cities, the Tivoli Gardens—I also always tried to get to the most interesting places to which not everybody flocked.  I don’t suffer from motion sickness or tourista, and I really like sampling the local food and drink.

And I did that in Egypt, too.  We had free time in the itinerary, and I went wandering (see Part 9).  But the desert climate did eventually get to me, as you’ll hear shortly (Part 11).  But, if I’m honest, I’ve never been real good with heat—not even good, ol’ Mid-Atlantic summertime heat, and I grew up with that.

[Barring another interruption of this series such as last month’s Equity post, “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982 – Part 8” will be published on 5 August—same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.  I’ll be seeing the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, Old Cairo, and the Cairo bazaar.  I hope you’ll all come along with me.]

Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982 – Part 6

 

[As I observed at the end of Part 5 of “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982” (23 July), this is the final installment of the Israeli portion of the account of my travels in Israel and Egypt.  It chronicles my last days in the country, including a visit to Bethlehem five days before Christmas, a day in the Negev Desert in the south of Israel, and then my departure from Jerusalem and arrival in Cairo, Egypt. 

[As I always do, I recommend going back to 11 July and reading Parts 1 through 5 of you haven’t been following along.  Explanations and comments on some of what will come up below are in the earlier parts of the post and what transpires below will make more sense if you’ve read that first.  (Parts 2, 3, and 4 were posted on 14. 17. and 20 July, respectively.)]

Jerusalem & Bethlehem – Monday, 20 December

Today we got a look around the Old City of Jerusalem.  Until 1967, of course, visitors to Israel wouldn’t have been permitted to enter the Old City because it was under Jordanian control, but that changed after the Six-Day War and Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem.

Israel has never formally annexed East Jerusalem, but in defiance of a United Nations resolution condemning the occupation, the Knesset passed the Jerusalem Law of 1980 which declared that a “complete and united” Jerusalem was “the capital of Israel.” 

Upon the occupation, Israel granted permanent residency to all East Jerusalem Arabs present there at the time.  Palestinian Jerusalemites were offered the opportunity to apply for Israeli citizenship, but most opted to remain permanent residents. 

East Jerusalem has been integrated into Jerusalem and the Arab population has become an integral part of the State of Israel.  Members of all religions in greater Jerusalem have access to their holy sites under Israeli administration; Muslims maintain control of the Temple Mount and other Islamic holy sites in the Old City.

The visit to the Old City included following the Via Dolorosa (Latin for ‘Sorrowful Way,’ often translated ‘Way of Suffering’), the traditional route Jesus is believed to have walked from the Antonia Fortress, the presumed site of Jesus’ trial for treason (there is archeological reason to believe that the trial occurred elsewhere, but this is the traditional site since the 18th century) to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, believed to be the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and his empty tomb, possibly the two holiest sites in all Christendom.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was consecrated in 335 CE, which is when the church established that this was the place called Calvary or Golgotha where Jesus was crucified and then buried, and where his burial place was found open and empty by Paul the Apostle three days after Jesus’ death on the cross.  This miracle is the foundational event of Christianity.

The Via Dolorosa is marked by nine of the 14 Stations of the Cross; the remaining five stations are inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  The route and the churches and chapels that commemorate the several New Testament events pertaining to Jesus’ life and ministry in Jerusalem are mostly in the Christian Quarter of the Old City.

The walled Old City, which was the whole of Jerusalem until as late as the 19th century—today’s neighborhoods and sections of the New City were separate towns and villages until absorbed into modern Jerusalem.  (The city walls date to the mid-16th century, built by the Ottomans.  The Ottoman Empire ruled Jerusalem from about 1516 to 1917.  After World War I [1914-18], the League of Nations awarded Great Britain a mandate to administer Palestine; the British Mandate was in force from 1923 until Israel declared independence in 1948.)

Simon took particular delight in taking us to certain of the wall’s entry gates—mostly because of their names.  One was the Golden Gate which, according to Jewish tradition, is the gate through which the Messiah will enter Jerusalem.  To prevent the Messiah's entry, the Arabs sealed the gate several centuries ago.

The other spot, a much older gate (whose actual location is still in debate) that’s mentioned in the Old Testament Book of Nehemiah (Chapter 8), is the Water Gate.  Remember, this was 1982, only 10 years after the Watergate Scandal (so called because it took place in the Watergate Complex near the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.) was revealed and eight years after Richard Nixon’s resignation in disgrace from the U.S. presidency because of his part in the skullduggery.

Jerusalem’s Water Gate is the place from which the priest Ezra (see also Part 5), who is celebrated for bringing the Torah back to Jerusalem after the Babylonian Exile, read the law to the Jerusalemites (from verse 3):

And he read therein before the broad place that was before the water gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women, and of those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive unto the book of the Law.

Jerusalem’s Water Gate was so named because, according to most theories, it was located near Jerusalem’s only source of fresh water. 

(Washington’s Watergate is also named because it’s near water—the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, one of whose locks or “gates” is near the site of the complex and the “gate” that regulates the flow of water from the Potomac River into the Tidal Basin.  There was also the Water Gate Inn, a restaurant that operated on the site before the complex was built.)

The Old City is divided into four quarters: the Muslim Quarter, the Christian Quarter, the Armenian Quarter and the Jewish Quarter.  These are historical and traditional names and no longer have any relationship to the populations of the various sections of the city.

The Western Wall (so called because it’s the remains of the western segment of the retaining wall for the Temple Mount) or Wailing Wall is located in the Jewish Quarter.  (The Temple Mount is the site of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, important holy sites for Muslims.)

After walking through parts of the Old City, we ended up at the Western Wall, which has been designated a synagogue and commands extreme reverence from all visitors, Jew, Muslim, or Christian.  Yarmulkes (that’s a Yiddish word; the Hebrew, more common in Israel, is kippot [plural; singular is kippah]) are worn by Jewish men—there’s always a supply for non-observant Jews like me—or some respectful head-covering for non-Jewish men, and conversation is kept to a minimum and conducted in soft tones.

Historical lectures and tour-guide spiels are delivered back from the Wall itself in the plaza, which also serves as the spectator section for religious ceremonies conducted at the Wall.

Which brings us to the special event of the tour: the bar mitzvah of the young man—since the ritual marks his passage from childhood into adulthood—traveling with us.  These ceremonies are arranged by agencies around the world and there are bar mitzvot going on all the time at the Wall, several at once.  The ceremony is held right in front of the Wall along a narrow stretch of pavement that runs the length of the Wall fragment which serves as the bimah or “stage’ for the rabbi and other participants—in this case, of course, the bar mitzvah boy. 

Tables are set up along the path to serve as reading desks on which the Torah rests during the service.  (There are vaults at the left end of the path where the materials for the ceremonies are kept, including the Torah scrolls, since there aren’t arks on the Wall as there would be on the walls of a synagogue building.

Because the Western Wall is an Orthodox synagogue, bar mitzvot are only for young men.  Girls have their bat mitzvah ceremonies several yards away within sight of the Wall.  Our young man’s sister observed her coming-of-age that way here.

There are always scores of observers at these multiple ceremonies—some, of course, are relatives and friends of the celebrants, but others are just people who like to watch events at the Wall.  Some are visitors like us, and others are Jerusalemites who come out regularly.

On the day we gathered for our traveling companion’s event, there were large groups of Yemeni Jewish women—apparently not an uncommon presence—and they engaged in a customary celebration of the ceremony when it was over: they ululate, a kind of high-pitched vocal trilling resembling a wail, and then they throw pieces of hard candy toward the bimah.  The ululation is an expression, in this instance, of joy and the candy is a symbol of the wish for the boys to have sweet lives.

The ceremony, the only one if its kind I’ve ever witnessed, was touching and moving.  I’ve been to many bar mitzvot over the years, though they were all for boys I knew or to whom I was related.  (I’ve only been to a few bat mitzvot, and they were all for cousins.)  I got to know what to expect—except for this one.  Aside from taking place at the Western Wall, which would make it stand out in any case, it was an Orthodox service, which is less streamlined—and less English—than the Reformed tradition in which I grew up.

Oh, and our little gifts were appreciated—in case anyone was worried.  The children didn’t have mezuzot already (see also Part 3).

In the afternoon, we drove to Bethlehem, a West Bank city about six miles south of Jerusalem.  [Bethlehem’s population then was about 16,300; today it’s about 28,600.]  Until the Six-Day War, Bethlehem was under Jordanian control and inaccessible from Israel; now it’s administered by Israel like all the West Bank, so we were able to pay a visit to the traditional birthplace of Jesus.

But first, a little catch-up.  This was 20 December, five days before Christmas, and I’d brought along my holiday cards, all with greetings written and sealed in addressed envelopes so I could get them stamped and postmarked from Christmas Town—Bethlehem.  I was taking a chance that five days would be enough time for the cards to get to their destinations in the States and elsewhere around the world in good time (I still had a few correspondents in Europe back then).

I suppose it’s no shock that Christmas isn’t a big whoop in Israel—except, of course, in Christian areas and at Christian shrines (like, for instance, Bethlehem).  I needed a few additional cards after I got to Israel, and I was a little surprised to discover how few places in Jerusalem sell Christmas Cards.  Not only were there few stores with any cards at all, but no store that even sold cards had a very wide selection.

(It shouldn’t have been surprising that there also weren’t many Hanukkah cards for sale, either.  First, Hanukkah isn’t as big a holiday outside the U.S. as we make of it here.  It’s American Jewry’s way of competing with Christian Christmas, and it wasn’t really until after World War II and the dawning of the Baby Boom that Hanukkah took on that significance.

(Second, sending out greeting cards of any kind is more an American thing than it is a popular habit anywhere else.  When I lived in Germany, there were Christmas cards—fewer kinds than we have here, but Germans did send and receive them.  But no other holiday or observation was marked with greeting cards the way we use them.

(Oddly, when I got to Cairo, an almost entirely Muslim city, there was more acknowledgment of the Christian holiday than there was in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.  When I was in Beijing on Christmas in 1980, I was really surprised to see holiday decorations in the capital of the officially atheist People’s Republic of China.  Of course, in both Egypt and China, it was for tourists.)

In any case, I had my cards all ready to go when we got to Bethlehem.  Simon not only promised to set aside time for the several of us who had this same errand to take care of it—I thought I was being clever, but it turns out that sending Christmas cards postmarked in Bethlehem is a big thing!—but he informed us that the Bethlehem post office has a special window dedicated to handling Christmas mail.  

Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.  Furthermore, the Bethlehem post office is right on Manger Square, in the center of the town.  So, we Christmas-carders got on the line for the special window and before we knew it, we got our cards processed and we were back out on Manger Square, ready to join Simon and the rest of the group for our visit to the Church of the Nativity, probably the main attraction for visitors, especially Christian pilgrims, to Bethlehem.

The Church of the Nativity, which is shared among several Christian faiths, is built over the traditional site of Jesus’ birth.  Below the sanctuary is a grotto, a small cave that’s traditionally venerated as the birthplace of Jesus, known as the Grotto of the Manger or the Grotto of the Nativity. 

The church, built in the 330s CE, was dedicated in 339.  It’s the oldest major church in the Holy Land and the oldest place in Christendom used continuously as a place of worship.

The birthplace is situated beneath the church’s main altar, and when we went down to see it, I asked a member of our group to take a photo of me next to the grotto.  Unhappily, like the picture of me at Galilee, I no longer have this photo.  (I may not ever have had them; I don't remember getting them from the person who took them—I don't travel with a camera any longer—and we may never have exchanged addresses.)

Negev Desert – Tuesday, 21 December

The next day, we drove south from Jerusalem into the West Bank on our way to the Negev Desert.  Our itinerary said we were going to visit Hebron, a city (population [1982]: 50,000 [2016: 215,000]) 18 miles south of Jerusalem and west of the Dead Sea.  Simon said that Unitours decided to bypass the town because it had been restive lately and could present a danger to western tourists.

Hebron had become the center of the Kach movement, an extreme-right party founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane (1932-90) in 1971.  [The religious extremist who perpetrated the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron was a member of Kach and the man who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 was associated with Kach.] 

The main attraction which we missed in Hebron was the Cave of the Patriarchs or the Cave of Machpelah, said to be the burial place of Abraham and his wife, Sarah; Isaac and his wife, Rebecca; and Jacob and his first wife, Leah. 

These tombs make the cave the second holiest place in Judaism (after the Temple Mount) and one of the four most important sites in Islam.  As a result, Hebron has been a place of contention between Muslims and Jews for generations, predating the formation of Israel, not to mention the Six-Day War.

In the Negev, we stopped in Beersheva (also known as Beersheba and Be’er Sheva), a city of 110,000 in 1982 [210,000 in 2019] 74 miles southwest of Jerusalem.  Another biblical city—associated in the Old Testament with Abraham and Isaac—on this tour, Beersheva’s a little different from other Israeli cities we’ve seen.  Most have had largely Arab populations or Ashkenazi Jews, immigrants from Eastern or Central Europe. 

A large portion of Beersheva’s inhabitants, however, were  Sephardi Jews and Mizrahi Jews who immigrated from Arab countries after 1948.  Also among the arrivals were Jews from Ethiopia (Beta Israel) and India (Cochin Jews and Bene Israel).  [Later, immigrants from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, Ashkenazi Jews, arrived as well (see Part 2).]

Thirty miles further south into the desert is Sde Boker, a tiny kibbutz that became the retirement home of the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.  A farming collective of fewer than 500 residents, Sde Boker was founded in 1952.  Ben-Gurion served from 1948 to 1954 and then from 1955 to 1963.  When he stepped down, he retired from public life and moved to Sde Boker; his modest house on the kibbutz is now a museum.  (Though he died in Jerusalem—at 73 of a cerebral hemorrhage—Ben-Gurion is buried near Sde Boker.)

A little over six miles further south is Avdat, the site of the ruins of an ancient city from the 3rd century BCE.  Built by the Nabateans, a nomadic Arab tribe of successful traders, Avdat was a camping ground for Nabataean caravans.  The former archeological site is now part of the Avdat National Park (not to be confused with the Ein Avdat National Park, a few miles north, which is mostly a nature preserve), established shortly after Sde Boker was founded in the early 1950s.

The Avdat ruins were the location for the filming of scenes in the 1973 movie adaptation of Jesus Christ Superstar. 

Traveling in Israel, you get used to seeing antiquities associated with Judaism, the Romans, Christianity (including the Crusades), and Islam.  The Nabateans were an odd-man-out, so to speak—although, of course, there were many ancient civilizations that came and went in the Near East.

This was my last day in Israel.  That evening, I packed for departure for the airport in the morning and my flight to Cairo.

Jerusalem – Wednesday, 22 December

Those of us continuing with Unitours on the Egypt leg of the trip left for Ben Gurion Airport, Israel’s main international gateway.  It’s sort of between Tel Aviv (15 miles northwest) and Jerusalem (33 miles southeast). 

It was built during the British Mandate in the town of Lydda, for which it was named.  In 1948, when the State of Israel was declared, the airport was taken over by the new nation and renamed Lod, the Hebrew name for the town.  It was renamed again in honor of David Ben-Gurion in 1973, the year he died.

We flew El Al, Israeli airlines, I think, and the flight was about an hour.  But here’s an oddity: since Jerusalem is an hour ahead of Cairo, we arrived at about the same time (Eastern European Time) that we left (Israel Standard Time)!

[It’s time to say farewell to the State of Israel and the Middle East.  In Part 7, to be published on 5 August, I’ll commence my recollections of my journey through Egypt, starting with Cairo, the capital.  I was in Israel for 12 days (departing on the 13th) and my sojourn in Egypt will last 11 days (with departure on the 12th).

[I hope you’ll all return for my stay in North Africa, including visits to the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx, many ancient temples, and a cruise down the Nile (“See the pyramids along the Nile . . . .”  Actually, the pyramids are about 10 miles west of the river!  —With apologies to Chilton Price, Pee Wee King, Redd Stewart, and, especially, Jo Stafford!)]