Exodus
When Moses said, “let my people go!”, Pharaoh said, “ not so fast.” Today is our last day in Egypt. and strangely enough we are headed in almost the exact same direction as Moses was headed when he left for the promised land. We won’t be wandering in the desert of Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights, but we will be flying to Amman, Jordan in the morning and our first stop will be at Mount Nebo, the supposed site where God allowed Moses to see the promised land that he would never reach. Call me crazy but that all sounds pretty biblical to me.
We had a lazy start to our day today since we weren’t being picked up by our tour guide until 11 AM. So, we met Mike and Melisa in the breakfast room at 9:30 and had a leisurely breakfast out on the terrace. The weather in Cairo right now is extremely pleasant with the mornings being cool and sunny. The Nile Ritz Carlton, where we are staying, has a wonderful breakfast buffet, and we took full advantage of it.
When Achmed Aziz showed up, we went across the plaza to the Egyptian Museum, as planned. The museum situation in Egypt is in transition. The new national museum is being built by the pyramids at Giza and is ultra modern from the look of it. It is already way behind schedule and there’s no sign of exactly when it will open although it’s expected to open sometime in 2023. The downtown Egyptian Museum that we are going to was built in 1897 and fully operational by 1904. It is a classic colonial era building that looks like something T.E. Lawrence would’ve walked into to order a gin and tonic. In fact, since the building was around when T.E. Lawrence was in town, he probably did walk into the building.
Egyptian authorities make a good show of being security conscious by placing magnetometers and security people to check anyone who enters or exits, public buildings, and even commercial buildings like our very own hotel. The only problem is, they don’t really have the magnetometers working, so, when you walk through it’s really all for show since I have yet to see them stop or even search any one of us. So, we entered the Egyptian museum with no difficulty along with several thousand other people who were there this morning. Achmed Aziz told us right at the entry that everything in the museum is authentic antiquity with one exception. That exception is the Rosetta Stone, which was taken by the British 120 years ago and never returned to Egypt. The Egyptian museum has a replica of the Rosetta Stone at the entrance just to remind everybody that the most important piece of Egyptian antiquity does not reside in Egypt. Achmed Aziz then proceeded to show us around the first floor of the museum and it is, quite frankly, a marvel of antiquities. I think I finally understand why the Egyptian Antiquities authorities don’t care whether you touch some of the other temple walls and hieroglyphics in southern Egypt. Once you see what they’ve collected in the Egyptian Museum, which we are told represents only about half of their collection since the other half has already been placed in the new museum in Giza, you realize what an abundance of magnificent antiquities there are in Egypt.
We saw the oldest antiquity in Egypt, which is a shield shaped stone carving which depicts one of the kings from 3300 BC, both before, and after his conquest of his neighboring lands, and being a part of the unification of the north and south of Egypt. There were multiple sarcophagi. They were both stone and inlaid wood, as well as multiple painted limestone, life-size, and larger than life-size statues and figurines. Some of the statues are natural stone, but some of the statues are painted in lifelike manner, depicting a very realistic sense of what ancient Egyptian royalty looked like.
One of the most interesting things that Achmed Aziz told us about this morning involved the largest of the pyramids, the Pyramid of Cheops. It seems that unlike all the other kings of Egypt, for whom they have found multiple statues of all sizes, they couldn’t find any statues of Cheops. Actually, they did find one itty bitty statue of him about 2” tall, the sort of statue you might find in a coffin of an ancient Egyptian who wanted to have some company in the afterlife. This struck me as quite poignant. And it made me think that perhaps Cheops was not the most popular guy. I imagine that all the kings that have many statues made of themselves into statues have survived down through the millennia and must’ve been the kings that garnered a certain amount of respect from their people. I also imagine that a king like Cheops, who went to the trouble of making the largest pyramid known to man, might’ve had a rather large ego and therefore might not have been the nicest or most popular guy. I note that many of the statues in the Egyptian Museum depict kings, where their two arms are positioned symbolically to represent strength (as a fist), and compassion or mercy (as a palm down on his knee). That says to me that the ancient Egyptians understood the difference between power and mercy, and the importance of a king showing balance of having as much mercy and kindness, as he has power and strength. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Cheops was all power and too little mercy.
That all made me wonder what our future will look like as people are looking back at our history for the 21st Century, and specifically with regard to our U.S. presidents. I’m fairly certain that Barack Obama will be depicted with great admiration and respect as a man of great wisdom and prudence, whereas a man like Donald Trump may well get depicted as a bit of a scoundrel, who eventually was sued and indicted in multiple ways, and thereby lived in infamy for eternity. I will now forever think of Donald Trump as the King Cheops of the United States, trying so hard to create a big impressive pyramid of himself, and yet with only a small figurine to show for whatever was his misspent public life.
After the first floor, Achmed Aziz took us to the second floor of the museum, where approximately 1/2 of the Tutankhamen relics are on display. While King Tut’s, mummy still sits in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings and many of his burial relics sit patiently in the new Giza museum, the most significant of his relics are still in the Egyptian Museum. We saw several of his thrones. We saw his organ casques used for his mummified organs and kept in alabaster casks. We saw a golden container where those alabaster casks were kept. And last, but not least, we saw the 11 kg solid gold funeral mask of the boy king.
It was all very impressive and explains all of the excitement over King Tut, even though, as a king, he did very little in his nine year reign, being no more than a boy. I guess it’s fair to say that some men are remembered for what they do in life, and some men have little but their afterlife to fall back on, being remembered for what’s left of them in death. Ramses II, who was pharaoh during the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, is remembered through his temples, his tomb and the various statues that see spread across Egypt with his image. Meanwhile, Moses is memorialized in one of the greatest books of all time, the Bible, and is worshiped as part of the religious basis of 90% of the world, being part of the Judaic, Christian and Muslim traditions. By my estimation that means that the exodus separated the men from the boys as they say, and left Ramses II as the boy to Moses the man.