King Tut's Gold
Trip Start
Sep 17, 2007
1
195
272
Trip End
Oct 08, 2008
Cairo,
Egypt
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
I trailed behind Travis asking questions. He knows stuff about Egypt cause he's a big Egypt nerd (not to be confused with an Egyptologist - an even bigger Egypt nerd). It took all of about thirty seconds of trailing for me to start saying "wow." (I'll be honest, though, between the wows was a great deal of "Why is there so much stuff here? How many sarcophaguses are really necessary to put on display?" But the wows kept me in the building for four hours.
We started in the most ancient of the ancient quarter and worked our way to the mummy room. Most of our adventures on the ground floor were limited to looking at big stone coffins and statuary, admiring some seriously quality heiroglyphics and paint jobs, and staring in disgusted awe at a statue of a Greek sphinx. A Greek sphinx? You may well ask
spinx and the museum
. After Alexander the Great took over the world (except India because no one seems to be able to truly accomplish that), the Greek overlords became the pharohs, so you get a bunch of later Ptolemaic statuary involving weak-chinned, curly-haired, skinny men. It's really not attractive (this is not to say that Greek men are unattractive - please note the distinction). But it is an interesting look into this segment of Egyptian history. There are a couple Rosetta-type stones inscribed with Greek, heiroglyphics, and the common Egyptian language of the time. These are very interesting to examine. I was a big fan of the painted heiroglyphs. Travis was a fan of everything. He fussed whenever I dragged him anywhere, even if it was to see more cool stuff. Point of interest at the back of the ground floor was Akhenaten's room. He was the only monotheistic pharoh, and not terribly popular. Aten was the sun god (hence the pharoic name of Akhenaten), and apparently having a different god also meant having totally different artwork. This room held stone carvings in which the sun's rays were little hands reaching down to make life happen. It also had statuary quite different from other Egyptian statuary. Big hips, squashy tummies, and fat lips dominated the scenes. Here also we noticed the elongated skulls in the carvings. Travis informed me that Egyptians would deform a baby's skull and make it grow into something looking like an alien head because that was cool. I thought it was freakish
entrance
. Travis pointed out it was really like foot binding. I thought this also freakish. At least I'm consistent. I noticed this characteristic on one mummy in particular in the mummy room. The second floor began with a hall full of sarcophaguses. We fortunately bypassed a room full of jars (of all things in museums, jars are the worst), and I wandered from sarcophagus to sarcophagus greatly admiring the uniqueness of the better-preserved ones and certainly awed by the minute details. Every surface was painted, mostly in vibrant colors. Way cool.
At last we arrived in the lair of Tutankhamun's treasures. It all began with a big box covered in Osiris symbols hammered into the gold leaf. In this box was a smaller box, also covered in gold leaf with bird people. In this box was a smaller box, then a smaller box. Basically there were lots of boxes, designed to be set into each other (though for display purposes they were all out), and the last box was a shrine wherein lay Tut's guts. The mummification process involved removal of important internal organs (brain not included). These were stored in jars whose lids had little Tut heads on them. The jars lived in a fancy box, which lived in the shrine, which lived in all the other boxes. It was a great line of unnecessary boxes, decorated with lots of shiny gold. Good stuff.
Post box examination we pondered a few peculiar beds. There were photographs of the beds from when they were discovered in the tomb, and they were piled high (in a most disorderly fashion) with random stuff
modern and ancient
. This I found strange, since the beds were magical and for the use of the pharoh in the afterlife, and really, how do you lay in a bed covered with junk? It's hard to argue that they were much disturbed, since the reason no one ever robbed Tut's grave was because it was burried under another pharoh's grave. Magical beds involve nifty animal bedposts, and I think the king was lucky to get three. I'd go for one. The leopard cow, perhaps. Or maybe the hippo, leopard, alligator. Travis got impatient. We went into the treasure chamber and, steadfastly refusing to leave the best for last, Travis made a bee-line for Tut's death mask. It was pretty. If you've ever seen a pharoic death mask it was probably Tutankhamun's, in all it's gold and inlay glory. It even had pierced ears for earing options, though he wasn't wearing any that day. Even better than the mask (at least in my humble opinion), was his innermost sarcophagus. The one holding it was covered in inlay, and very pretty in its own right, but the innermost one was stunning. Embossed gold with inlay highlights around the head made for an excellent presentation. There's really nothing for all this stuff but for you to see it, though, so you'd just better get on over to Cairo. (If you're scared of people and getting scammed or otherwise bothered, it'd be best to go in a tour, however.)
Before making our way to the mummy room we stopped into the jewelry room, where we found...an Egyptologist studying at Memphis, Tennessee
a very tall minaret
. She told us some interesting things, like one of the mummies in the mummy room had his head bashed in by an axe just like the one we were looking at. And we saw that the pharohs wore some horrendous earrings. They just looked painful. Some nice diadems, though. I told Travis to get me one. I also decided that we might need to bring back that ancient Egyptian collar necklace. It's pretty sweet. So, after some papayrus scrolls and Book of the Dead reading, we made for the Royal Mummy Room. A room full of 11 dead people, with the additional fee of 10 US dollars. Yikes. We went for it. Probably wouldn't have except Ramses II was in there, and you may know that he was Moses's homey.
The first two mummies were women found together in a secondary tomb. One was thought to be the other's nurse. The nursed one was supposed to be obese, and I couldn't figure out how they could figure that out considering that all the fat parts melted away. Travis said skin folds. I accepted this, but if you have better logic I'll hear it. Then we saw Amenhotep I and II. They really did look like father and son. Same chin, you know.
Two of the mummies were still all wrapped up. That's cheating. The mummy with the bashed in axed forehead looked horribly disturbed. Poor guy. Finally we went to see Ramses II. He was born about 3000 years ago. That's a really long time. Even weirder was that he was a biblical character. The other mummies were just pharohs that maybe you know because they played prominently in Ancient Egyptian history, either for their wealth, longevity, or warfare
spires in Islamic Cairo
. Ramses II meant here I was looking at a guy from the Old Testament. Examining his teeth and silky white hair. Try that on for strange. All in all we spent more than 4 hours in the museum, and I didn't regret any of it (although upon leaving I did tell Travis I was grateful he didn't make me go into the jar room or someone may have gotten hurt). And if you're wondering, the mummy room probably wasn't worth $10, but we both agreed we didn't regret it.
The next day in Cairo we didn't accomplish much, since we devoted the morning to getting train tickets. Unfortunately my stomach was being angry, so we didn't get around much after that. In the afternoon we did stroll down to Islamic Cairo for a look at the bazaar and the ancient streets and city walls. When we arrived at the bazaar there were tourists galore, but the minute we left it we were strolling with the locals. We walked by mosque after mosque, fruit cart after fruit cart. We didn't get pestered, and we got to admire the quaint old architecture and the little old men sitting on the side of the road smoking their sheeshas. It was lovely, but my stomach made us cut our walk short. We decided to make a further investigation at the next opportunity.
Erin
![[11] Camel and Pyramids](http://images.travelpod.com/users/el_condor/thumbnail.asia_2005.1143747660.picture_032.jpg)