Getting Your Cartouche Cleaned
The other day we took a ride around the Borghese Gardens in an enlarged golf cart. It wasn’t part of a plan, but the cart showed up when we got out of our cab and it was hard to pass it up as a way to see the entirety of the lovely gardens before ambling down the Via Veneto to the Cappucin Crypt Church on the Piazza Barberini. One of the things we saw in the gardens was the famous Water Clock of Giovanni Battista Embriaco, the Dominican Friar who famously followed the celestial works of Galileo. On Galileo’s tombstone is the epithet, “Eppur si muove” or “And yet it moves”, said of the earth vis-a-vis the sun. That day the Water Clock was not working because its waterworks were being cleaned and all the water had been drained. It caused us all to say, I guess the Villa Borghese is getting its clock cleaned. It felt like a witticism to us at the time. That was our last day in Rome before heading here to Cairo.
On our first day on Egyptian ground, we were scheduled to start in Saqqara to see the earliest pyramids including the 3,100 B.C. Step-pyramid of Djoser. I wonder if that is the same Djoser from Ghostbusters, or was that Gosar? From the breakfast area of the Marriott Mena Hotel one has only a few palm trees between us and the massive pyramids of Giza, which are almost close enough to touch., but those are for later in the day since our guide has decided that our Pyramid day is best done in a chronologically correct order. That being the case, after a half hour drive in suburban Cairo traffic where 30 million residents commute via private bus/van arrangements to their $150/month workaday jobs, we got to see the earliest of Egyptian tombs and mausoleums as well as the most ornately decorated interiors from 2,400 B.C.
This entire area to the west of the Nile was designated one big ancient cemetery by the Egyptians for several reasons. Our guide Achmed Aziz, tells us that it has to do with the belief that life is to the rising sun of the east while the afterlife is off to the west where the sun sets. By today’s standards I would have argued that it had more to do with the thousands of miles of barren Sahara desert to the west, but then again his spiritual explanation may carry more weight. I say that because he also reminds us that these pyramids were NOT built by slave labor as our old Modern Civilization Courses tried to teach us, but rather by regular Egyptians who believed that they needed to favor their kings and queens in order to gain sufficient favor with the gods to also achieve an afterlife worth living. That may seem silly to our internet brains, but when you see the effort that went into building these mausoleums and tombs, all you can conclude is that there had to be some form of motivation to push their construction forward over the twenty or so years they took to create at the hands of 100,000 laborers working three shifts a day.
We started by walking through the original walls and colonnade of the Djoser Pyramid before heading to the adjacent, but much older Pyramid of Unas that looks less like a pyramid and more like a pile of dirt. It seems it only took several centuries for the kings and queens of Egypt to move through a pyramid building competition where bigger was better, to one where the efforts were shifted to interior decoration of the tombs themselves to speed these royal souls into the afterlife. To see these adornments, one needs to get inside the tombs. While only Mike and Melisa had the size and flexibility to go into the tunnel of the Pyramid of Unas (after crawling in they had to give a generous tip to be allowed to crawl out again), we all went into another nearby tomb (no crawling required) in the Pyramid of Sekhmenhet in the complex, and saw amazing bas relief Egyptian tiles all over the walls of the necropolis depicting in great accuracy all of the animals, wild and domesticated, of the ancient Egypt of that time. We got a sense of those animals, but in our time they took the form of the hundreds of people that tried simultaneously to crowd past one another into the tomb rooms at once. In actuality, it was not so very crowed as it was less than well controlled for entry and exit. Something tells me that the ancient Egyptian construction supervisors were better organized. But to be able to touch and smell these antiquities up close and personal almost seems impossible in this day and age, but there it was. Saqqara was certainly not as spectacular and huge as the nine pyramids at Giza, but in some ways it was even more special.
Before heading back to the van, Achmed Aziz pointed our the two pyramids ten miles to the north. It was quite visible that one of them looked right whereas the other looked a bit cockeyed. One might assume that the ravages of erosion and time had caused the distortion, but it seems that construction bosses tried to cut corners even in the millennia before Christ. Apparently the architect of the first pyramid for that particular king of the 7th or 8th Dynasty fucked up his calculations and no one noticed that the pyramid was starting to go awry until it was too late to fix. Oops. I’m sure they tried to put some lipstick on the pig or to explain it away as a nouveau version of a pyramid (the shape, according to Achmed Aziz being derived from the triangular rays of the life-giving sun), but that didn’t do the trick. I guess tearing down a pyramid was not in the budget, so what’s an Egyptian king to do but build another pyramid next to the first and put a “For Sale” sign on the first boo-boo? I’m sure the king and queen had a few choice conversations over that little approach the way Ralph Cramden and Alice would chat about Ralph’s latest venture across The Honeymooners diner table. The really funny part of that story is that the architect who fucked up the first pyramid was granted the commission to design the second one. That goes to show you that the art of blame shedding is, indeed, an ancient craft.
From there we went to Giza where the awe is had on the outside rather the inside of the tombs. These pyramids of Cheops (Khufu in Egyptian) and Khafre (Jr. To Khufu) and Menkaure (III to Khufu) are MASSIVE structures that cover some 13 acres of land each at their bases. That means that each pyramid covers about three city blocks. Not even the Trump Dynasty would try to do that today. It is also interesting to note that each of these three generations of kings had three queens with their respective, but smaller tombs at their sides. That means that the Giza complex has a full nine pyramids that we would view from the hillside desert restaurant where we went for lunch. Mike and I sat enjoying a cool drink while Kim and Melisa insisted on camel riding over from the pyramids. I have better ways to wrack my body with aches and pains than camel riding.
We then went down to see the Sphinx, which is the entry way to the Khafre Pyramid. It is a large limestone adornment that clearly is the sign that the son was greater than his father…so there!
We ended the day by going to the government souvenir stores. We decided to shop for some cartouches, which are oval hieroglyphic-clad pendants of silver and gold that spell out the name of the bearer. They were used to remind the gods about who belonged to whom, which was probably more necessary after mummification and desiccation of the royal bodies involved in these massive and impressive tombs. When we were finished and ready to head home for some well-earned rest, Achmed Aziz asked for a minute to talk to the cartouche sellers about getting his own cartouche cleaned. Who knew that clocks and cartouches had to be cleaned with such regularity? Tomorrow, on to the Nile.