Titi, Saqqara, Memphis Museum, and more

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One of the things that strikes me is how run-down most of the areas of Cairo look - there is trash everywhere, as well as dung. Cars share the road with buggies pulled by horses or mules. Camels are all over.

Outside the city, there are areas where there are lush palm trees all over, and fields of farming - very pretty.

We headed into the pyramid of Titi, which from the outside doesn't look like a pyramid, but instead a huge mound of sand and stone. This is one of the first pyramids to be inscribed inside.

Inside we first went down about 20 meters and the first chamber is beautiful - light colored walls with two entire sides of the wall covered in hieroglyphics - simply beautiful.

The second room has a ceiling full of stars engraved in the wall, and more hieroglyphics on the white walls with a huge black sarcophagus with a cracked lid. I can look inside, which reveals hieroglyphics on the inside of the stone.

The small entry ways into the burial room, and a side room are covered in hieroglyphics as well, as we duck down a lot to enter and exit each room. The third room is mostly empty - no hieroglyphics, but simply two stone slabs inside. This was a much better pyramid to go inside, because of all of the beautiful inscriptions inside.

Next we headed into the tomb of Ka-Gmni (c. 2340 BC). Along the walls, there are pictures engraved in the stone of daily life scenes. Also the entry was guarded by two engraved soldiers. Most of the engravings don't have any color to them, but there are still a few spots that have color to them. The tomb had been collapsed, so they have reconstructed some of the structure, and you can tell where, because scenes are cut off along a line. The scenes involve hippos eating alligators, people fishing or dancing, all sorts of birds, armed military men, and people carrying baskets of food. The colors that are left are a dark skin color and some grayish blue in the background. So much detail to the art, including sandals and fingernails.

One of the first things stolen from a tomb was the wooden doors that separated each room, because they would import cedar wood, which wasn't found around here. The only wood available then that is still around here today is sycamore trees.

Then we went into the tomb of Mere-Ruka (c. 2340 BC). This is similar in style to the other tomb. The detail of the engravings is amazing. I tried to sketch a picture of a fishing scene, but did it so poorly - they did an amazing job of making each person look real as well as the fish they were catching and major detail to the boat. There is a statue of Mere-Ruka inside - it's not overly detailed, but stands about 7-8 feet tall. Left leg out, no beard. 😊

Next we headed to Saqqara, which was the first pyramid ever built, and saw the first construction ever made out of stone (that's still standing). The first stone structure was a huge wall with 12 pretend doors and one real door. The entry has smooth stones with a glassy finish (almost). Some reasons that Saqqara was originally built included that it looks like a sunray with the sun at the top point of the pyramids and the light expanding out from it. The ancients felt that it was the best protection for mummies, because of the structure.

In the distance, we saw a couple of pyramids that we weren't going to get to see upclose, which included the broken angle pyramid - this was a bent pyramid on left then attempt #2 on right, which is considered the 1st perfect pyramid.

All pyramid entries are to the North - because it was stable and the kings watched to the North. On the North side of the Saqqara pyramid is a little stone box with two holes and a statue of Zoser (replica statue - we saw the real one in the Cairo museum). The holes are too wide for someone to look through them at the same time, and when someone looks through one hole, you can only observe about half of the statue at one time.

Then we headed to the Memphis museum. Memphis was the capitol for 600 years. There is a large statue of Ramses the Great (aka Ramses II), when you first enter. It weighed 46 tons. He married 42 wives and fathered 156 children. There were 13 different Rames, but he was the "greatest" one. The museum was mostly outdoors in a courtyard area, where there were a variety of statues and structures to peruse.

There are dogs all over, the Egyptian people don't usually keep them as pets - they expect that God will take care of them. They worry more about feeding the poor than feeding pets for pleasure. This makes sense, especially in a 3rd world country, and it's interesting how we don't necessarily take the time to take care of our poor in our country - instead we spend our money on our own pleasure and entertainment. While many of us give money to charities, etc, we still make ourselves our number one priority.

After the museum, we headed to a carpet school, where we learned about how carpets are made by hand. There are two techniques for handmaking carpets, one is a knotting technique and the other is a weaving. The knotting of a 7 ft by 10 ft piece of carpet takes approximately 3-6 months to complete - and can be made of silk or wool, sometimes with cotton backings. The process was really amazing to watch, but in some ways makes me sad and feel unappreciative of the quality and process and the price we would pay for such an item. We learned that you can tell when a carpet is made of silk on silk, because when you spin it, it changes between darker and lighters tones of color.

The next entry will detail the remainder of the day... since it was a LONG one.

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