EGYPT – THE LAND THAT DARED TO DEFY DEATH

EGYPT – THE LAND THAT DARED TO DEFY DEATH
( A Tourist’s perception)

When the Scientific Director of the Large Hadron Collidor project at Geneva described their achievement as the current civilization’s reply to the Great Pyramids, my mind was made. It had to be only Egypt - The land of gigantic pyramids, vast temple complexes and imposing citadels. But above all, a land that had dared to defy death! Scouting around the options provided by a dozen tour operators in the city, I decided on Alps Tours Agency – more influenced by the persuasive and amiable nature of its owner, Abhijit Dhar, than the cost benefits analysis of their promised itinerary.

Our journey to the past began on a Gulf air flight from Kolkata to Bahrain. With an overnight stop at Bahrain we were en route to our destination. As the Bahrain-Cairo flight steadily lost height, a shrill voice in the flight intercom announced that we were about to land on the Cairo Airport in another ten minutes. Excitement ran high and those who had the privilege of having window side seats craned their necks to get a glimpse of pyramids. From a little above the city all that was visible was a dry and arid landscape, conspicuous by a near complete absence of green cover. As the tyres of the plane bit harshly into the tarmac, realization dawned upon us that we were at long last in the land of pyramids. The time was an hour past midday.

After checking out at the airport, we were greeted by an Egyptian guide. His broad smile, European look and fair complexion belied our expectation of Egyptian skin colour. “I am from Wings Tours, Cairo and at your service till you leave Egypt. Everything in this tour- food, tickets, intercity travel and even the porterage – are already paid for by Alps Tour and Travels to us. I would therefore request you to do one and only one thing – enjoy Egypt”, he announced with the authority of an ancient pharaoh addressing his obedient court. At that time, it seemed like a typical glib oratory from a professional tour guide. But at the end, we did realize that he was not far off his claim that day.

Within no time, we were inside a luxury air conditioned coach, driving past the lanes of ancient Cairo as the guide tried his best to make us familiarize with various city landmarks on our way to hotel. We were booked at “The grand Pyramid” hotel, located in Giza... Cairo is not as ancient as the Pyramids. It was founded nearly 1000 years ago - a fairly recent event in the Egyptian time scale. The ancient city of Memphis, not Cairo, was the capital during the Pharaonic period. Cairo and Giza are twin cities separated by river Nile. The great pyramid complex is located at the Giza necropolis. Cairo metropolitan area has nearly 17 million people and is the 16th largest in the world in terms of population. Nearly a forth of the entire Egyptian population lives here. As we checked in, we noticed a large wall painting of The Great Pyramid behind the Reception desk. The pyramids straddle the Egyptian consciousness everywhere. You can see their picture from in the wall hangings of star hotels to the bath towels and even behind telephone cards. Tourism is biggest source of revenue for Egypt after the Suez Canal. No wonder, ten million tourists visited Egypt last year - double than that of entire India. After check-in we relaxed for the rest of the day and waited for the next day for our tryst with history.

The next morning, after a huge breakfast that would have done justice to a pharaoh returning from a satisfying conquest, we proceeded to the Giza Necropolis. The tour leader from Wings , Mr. Ahmed was bang on time in the hotel lobby at 10.00 am. As the coach rolled on, we could see the hazy structure of pyramids playing hide and seek in the concrete jungle of Cairo. Suddenly all the stories about the pyramid that I read in school history books came alive in my mind. The mummies of the pharaohs seemed to beckon me to listen their untold stories lying buried here since forgotten centuries. Before long we were at the great pyramid complex at Giza and were walking on the very spot where you can feel history with your bare hands.

From the earliest times, Egyptians denied the physical impermanence of life. They formulated a remarkably complex set of religious beliefs and funneled vast material resources into the quest for immortality. For the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, Death was their great obsession and immortality, the ultimate wish. They loved life on earth so much that they wanted it go on for ever . In fact Pyramids are nothing but protective tombs, gigantic stone structures constructed to house the processed dead bodies’ (called the Mummies) of their royals. It is from here that the royal souls were expected to be resurrected and start their journey to the afterlife along with the son god Re. The mummification of dead body was an incredibly complex process, almost to the point of being a fine art. Each organ of the dead king, except the heart, was removed and kept in a jar, protected by special Gods. The royal brain was sucked out by a fine wire through the nose .The heart remained in the body as it was believed to be the seat of the “soul”. With mysterious chants, the body was bathed in exotic perfume, salt water and other preservatives to last till the day of resurrection. Egyptian believed that the afterlife would be like their earthly life, but only better. So the kings would require servants even in afterlife. Small mummy like figurines, called the Ushebtis , kept in the tombs represented the servants. They, of course, would do all menial works for the pharaoh through magic in the afterlife. Life actually gets better and better after it is over, at least in ancient Egypt!

The journey to afterlife would start with the most important God –The Sun God Amun Re. Egyptians believed that the Sun merely does not set in the evening; it actually dies and gets reborn in the next morning. (Isn't it starange that the Aztecs in Mexico also thought the same well into the 16th century !) So after the sunset on the day of resurrection, the Pharaoh, retrieving the body parts kept in the scared jars by his coffin, would make the journey into eternal life with Sun God Re on a divine boat (So a boat, preferable golden, has to be kept in the tomb of the king for his use. Why a boat? Because the boat was the principal mode of commutation on the Nile for the ancient Egyptians). But still the journey of 12 hours of that night was not easy, not even with God Re by your side. There would be monsters, serpents and deserts on the way .So, no fewer than 471 minor gods and goddesses lend their helping hands to defeat these forces. On the seventh hour of that night, the sun god Re confronts his archenemy, the serpent Apophis, who swallows the waters carrying the sun boat. Isis and other goddesses hurl magical spells that cut and bind Apophis, destroying his power. In the top row, deities decapitate and punish other enemies. In the bottom row, the god Horus presides over twelve gods and twelve goddesses crowned with stars and symbolizing the twelve hours of the night. But getting help of these benevolent gods and goddesses require skills on an unprecedented scale. You have to recite hundreds of right chant or the right formulae. So in each of the twelve hours of this fateful night, the pharaoh has to read one chapter out of the twelve from a magical book called “ Amduat”. For easy remembrances, Pharoa-Thutmose-II (April 24, 1479 BC to March 11, 1425 BC) , called the Napoleon of Egypt ,even painted this whole book on the walls of his tomb which survives till today in the “Valley of Kings” at the Thebes Necropolis at Luxor . Immortality does not come easy, you see!

The great pyramids were built by the Egyptian Pharaoh under “Khufu” of the fourth dynasty around the year 2560 BC. It is the largest of the three pyramids standing at Giza. The other two were built by King Khefren and Menkaure .A hundred thousand people are believed to have worked over a period of 20 years to build it. Throughout their history, the pyramids of Giza have stimulated human imagination. They were referred to as “The granaries of Joseph” and “The mountain of Pharaoh”. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 his pride was expressed though his famous quote “soldats, Du haut, De ces, Pyramides, 40 Siecles Nous, comtemplant” (Solders! from the top of these pyramids forty centuries are looking at us). When it was built, the great pyramid was 145.75 meters. Over the years it lost 10 meters of its top. It ranked as the tallest structure on earth for more than 43 centuries. The slopping angle of its side is 51 degrees and 51 minutes. The horizontal cross section of the pyramid is square at any level with each size measuring 229 meter. The maximum error between side lengths is astonishingly less than 0.1%. The area covered by the great pyramids can accommodate St.Peter’s in Rome, the cathedrals of Florence and Milan and Westminster and St.Paul’s in London combined. It has been suggested that there are enough stones in the three pyramids to build a 10 feet high and 1 foot wide wall around France. The great pyramids were actually a part of a complex that include a special walkway, two temples, and other smaller pyramids for queens, concubines and other nobles, boat pits etc. The precision with which the pyramids were executed is often the source of marvel and speculation. The base of the pyramids is level within 2.1 cms and the only difference in length of its size being 4.4 cms. The blocks used in the pyramids have an average weight of 2.5 tons and the granite blocks used in the roof of the king’s chamber have an estimated weight varying from 50 to 80 tons. The top of the pyramid faced a fixed star in the heaven as if for astronomical observation. There were no wheels, no levers, no precision instruments .How did they do it 4600 years ago when in other parts of the world people struggled to make a proper stone house!

The Sphinx at GizaNear the great pyramid, sits a huge creature with the head of a human and a lion's body. It was built by King Khafre by the same workers who built the second of the three pyramids at the Giza Plateau. Over 4,500 years ago Khafre's workers shaped the stone into the lion and gave it their king's face. Khafre's name was also mentioned on the Dream Stele, which sits between the paws of the great beast. This monumental statue, the first truly colossal royal sculpture in Egypt, known as the Great Sphinx, is a national symbol of Egypt, both ancient and modern. Sphinx is 72.55 meters in length and 20.22 meters tall. The face of the sphinx is four meters high and its eyes are two meters wide. The mouth is about two meters wide, while the nose would have been more than 1.5 meters long. The ears are well over one meter high. Part of the uraeus (sacred cobra), the nose, the lower ear and the ritual beard are now missing, while the eyes have been pecked out. The beard from the sphinx is now on display in the British Museum..

Sphinx had remained buried for most of its life in the sand. It was King Thutmose IV (1425 - 1417 BC) who placed a stela between the front paws of the figure. On it, Thutmose describes an event, while he was still a prince, when he had gone hunting and fell asleep in the shade of the sphinx. During a dream, the sphinx spoke to Thutmose and told him to clear away the sand. The sphinx told him that if he did this, he would be rewarded with the kingship of Egypt. Thutmose carried out this request and the sphinx held up his end of the bargain. Of course, over time, the great statue, the only single instance of a colossal sculpture carved in the round directly out of the natural rock, once again found itself buried beneath the sand.

In the more modern era, when Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1798, the Sphinx was buried once more with sand up to its neck. Its nose had been missing for at least 400 years at that time.
Between 1925 and 1936, French engineer Emile Baraize excavated the Sphinx on behalf of the Antiquities Service, and apparently for the first time, the great beast once again became exposed to the elements. In fact, the sand has been its savior, since being built of soft sandstone, it would have disappeared long ago had it not been buried for much of its existence.

Standing there in awe, I could feel that these monuments- the tombs, pyramids, the sphinxes, the temples - are not mere structures built by an ancient civilization but rather the standing witnesses to humanities eternal quest for immortality . Remember the Vedic hymn “tamaso ma jyotir gamaya, mrityor ma amartyam gamaya” (..Lead us from death to immortality) ? Long before this sacred chant reverberated in our Gangetic valley , the Egyptians had taken the matter to their own hands – worshipping an ever increasing phalanx of magical gods and demigods, building gigantic contraptions called pyramids just to deceive what lesser civilization had already accepted as the inevitable truth of life- death. Here, standing at the foot of the great pyramid, you can see , in flashback, that “Immortality” must have been a flourishing industry here with the best technical minds, genius architects, creative craftsmen converging from all over the world to this mega city for creating these mystical monuments – much like the “Large Hadron Colliders” of today. The very place I am standing was Newyork, 4500 BC !

In fact, most of ancient monuments in Egypt are nothing but relics from the great clash that took place between the most technologically accomplished civilization of that time and “Death”. Only time can tell who won in that battle. Or perhaps, even time can not! As somebody said “The World Fears Time, but Time fears the Pyramids”!

The evening was reserved for the “Sound and Light show”. As the laser lights beamed to the face of Sphinx outlining its distinct contours against the backdrop of the three silhouetted pyramids, a gentle breeze started blowing across the valley, caressing us softly. The atmosphere was simply surreal. As the booming voice of Omar Sheriff punctuated the stillness of approaching night, narrating the history of the Pyramid, the past became present. For a moment it appeared as if the sphinx would break his silence and the pharonic souls would rise from their tombs. The soothing breeze was already bringing down the weary eyelids of many a tourist including mine. When my wife prodded me, the lasers were lighting up the great pyramids one by one with their pencil sharp beams and I woke up , momentarily confused about my position in space and time.

.. To be continued further.