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In between bouts of serious depression about losing the cat, I have been trying to write about Egypt. We went there. I don’t really know what to say about it. It was amazing. It was exhausting. In addition to the touron imperative to mainline the land of the Pharaohs in ten days, there was the other thing. The other thing has to do with authenticity, trying to glimpse the humanity of a place. It was hard to do in Egypt, namely because there are two very distinct Egypts. It’s as plain as the money in your hand. Two Egypts: on the front, some Pharaonic antiquity; on the back, a mosque. And that is Egypt near as I can figure. The ancient and the modern. The dead and the living. The fascinating and the feared.

The National Geographic Egypt is a diorama, an outdoor museum, a thing seemingly unreal: temples, tombs, hieroglyphics, the pyramids and the sphinx - the stuff of imagination, some hybrid of the Charlton Heston’s 10 Commandments, Indiana Jones, and a heavy dose of romanticism. But it’s all dead. It is old rocks in the sand that the imagination weaves into dreamlike fantasy. No one worries now about how Thoth or Osiris will judge their ka. There are no more offerings to Amun Ra. There are only stones that still largely hide their secrets and only give hints at what once inspired greatness. And every year, millions come to marvel and dream. However, in the mad rush to see it all, there is much time given to thinking about the implications:
Why and how did all of this cultural wisdom - mathematics, astronomy, medicine, writing - suddenly appear at once, whole and complete, rather than incrementally and accumulatively?
Or that little curiosity that the Pyramids (Fourth Dynasty 2550 BCE), were the earliest, the inception, not the culmination of Egyptian culture.
Or how many of the faithful out there know how indebted they are to ancient Egyptian mythology? Sunday school tells you of the Exodus, but it doesn’t tell you that all that Genesis in the beginning was the word stuff and the ten commandments and the god being pissed off and deciding to flood the world have virtually identical parallels in the much older Egyptian Book of the Dead.

But who has time for that when the bus leaves at 4:30 AM and there are no rooms left in town and the last ferry across the Nile leaves in 10 minutes and the price of a bottle of water just tripled for no apparent reason and there are ten people hounding you to buy ten different things you don’t want and good lord that woman must be dying under that burkha and for the love of god (jesus or thor or isis or mohammed or whoever), why the hell can’t I have a moment of peace and a cold beer in this country! Exhausting.

The irony, is that for the vast majority who descend on Egypt, they want nothing to do with Egypt. Nothing to do with modern Egypt that is. Certainly nothing to do with the calls to prayer, the funny incomprehensible scribbles saying something but meaning nothing, or the fair share of women wandering the streets draped head to toe in black like beekeepers in mourning. None of that shit makes any sense. There is no tacit knowledge to navigate that reality. And unlike the hieroglyphs on the walls, there is little interest in trying to do so. Moreover, living Egypt is a dictatorship (trying to pass itself off as democracy by the not terribly clever ploy of calling Mubarek the ‘president’) plagued by economic, social, and gender inequality, and disconcerting little facts like 80% approval of beating your wife. What some might call ‘bad stuff’. And then of course, most frighteningly, Muslims, the boogeyman of the western mind. That isn’t what they advertise in the tour brochure. That isn’t what is being bought.

But real Egypt, justifiably, wants some of the largesse showered on ancient Egypt. Like a swarm of mosquitoes, you are relentlessly pursued through the streets: “Friend! Friend! Remember me! Come look. No hassle. Looking free. Special Price. Where you go? Remember me? Do you need guide? Where you from?”

“Where you from?”, the key determiner of inflation, is a thorny question. The principle of the road is: be an American, because though light as a feather, mundane human interaction with the ‘other’ is the only counterweight to the perception molded by the Koran burning preacher in Florida, the shrill vitriol of the xenophobic cowards who hide behind their microphones and jangle the strings of their craven sycophantic political puppets, and the legacy of Bush’s war crimes. Be an American because that is the only hope of rebuilding the shining city on the hill. That is the principle, but in Egypt sadly, utility often trumped principle. Being Chilean bamboozles the pricing structure; it isn’t immediately clear how much can be extracted. In tourist Egypt, excepting entrance tickets, everything of value is variable. Nothing is constant. Nothing is fixed. Better to be from Chile, outside the parameters of known reckoning.

Many, if not most, evade the reckoning. En masse, they move from the sanctuary of their hotels to the sanctuaries of antiquity in large air conditioned delux tour buses. Peering down from their rolling refuge, they can safely photograph the real Egypt happening outside the window without risking interacting with it. By the end though, the sanctimonious holier than thou hubris has crumbled and we decided to hide out in the six-story super mall, luxuriating in the blissful disinterest of modern Egypt.

Bonus Feature: recently read and worth reading:

The Sign and the Seal Graham Hancock
search for the Arc of the Covenant, which is said to be in Axum, Ethiopia.
Lords of Poverty Graham Hancock
why the UN and the IMF and the World Bank etc. are useless at best, dangerous at worst
A Continent for the Taking Howard W. French
why Africa is fucked
The God Delusion Richard Dawkins
why what you believe is rarefied nonsense
A Primate’s Memoir Robert M. Saplosky
a twenty-one year study of baboons and the author in Kenya

Also, if anyone has access to an academic library, I would very much appreciate a PDF of
Kitchen ‘Some Egyptian Background to the Old Testament’, Tyndale House Bulletin, no 5-6, Cambridge Apr 1960

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