Egypt: The Gift of the Nile

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

The upper deck of any cruise ship about to disembark is a swaying seething swarm of neck-twisting, camera-carrying body-bumping people. Their noisy chatter drowns the ship's repeated requests to keep the gangway area clear. Our cruise ship, the Navarino, docks, and the perspiring mass pours out onto the streets of Alexandria: a flood of tourists into the third largest port in the Mediterranean and into such a clatter of confusion that the struggling tourist army, in contrast, seems a disciplined regiment.

Alexandria explodes. It bursts into a frenzied action as on cue from a mad movie director. "Shout," he must have bellowed and the citizens of Alexandria oblige. "Move, multiply," he screams and a mob, unchanged in 50 centuries, responds. Egypt, the second oldest civilization known to scholars is now paradoxically a young "developing country." Its 80 million inhabitants increase at the rate of almost one million every nine months: the average age of its people is 27 years. Although the nation acknowledges its needs to concentrate on education, its population is little changed from its beginnings three thousand years before the birth of Christ. Water buffalo, their ribs painfully thin, still draw plows in the field and silent women, black dressed and downcast-eyed still walk the dirt roads balancing bales of straw on their heads.

Stepping into Alexandria, the gate to Cairo is bending backwards into time. And bedlam. Shouting port officials, waving taxi drivers, begging children and marching soldiers compete with cackling hens, screeching geese, braying donkeys and kicking goats. Merchants selling beer, truckers hauling bricks, peasants baking bread sit next to metal welders, shoe polishers, basket makers, all hawking their wares and clutching with their flashing eyes the passersby as they struggle along on their visit to the "cradle of civilization." Hanging from dusty broken frames in the sun-soaked, narrow streets are sides of beef, bales of cotton and rolls of carpet. And bright balloons, colorful fruits, swaying chickens and faded postcards. Limp laundry, used tires, and Adidas suitcases, occupy the same space as tailors, barbers and goldsmiths. Mercedes Benz cars are parked beside primitive mule carts, and black eyed widows in mourning stand, by chance, under Arabic movie house signs advertising The Death of Bruce Lee. The traffic tears around you as if a dam has burst its bank. Everyone drives with one hand on the horn, another hand wildly waving out every window and a third hand occasionally on the wheel. There are no street accidents. If there is only one God and Allah is his name, then Allah surely doesn't sleep at night until the last vehicle of the day has screamed into its resting place to cool its burning rubber and ease its throbbing engine.

There are about 4 million people in Alexandria and more than 8 million in Cairo and you'll meet them all on your first day in Egypt. And when you first set foot in Egypt if you're surprised by the noise and confusion, prepare to be disappointed over the way the last the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is presented to the tourist. The area of the Pyramids seethes with importuning camel drivers and beseeching children. "I take photos!" says a brown eyed brown faced grave little man aged about seven who snatches your camera from your hands and with sticky fingers on your lens fiddles with it while commanding you to stand beside your wife.

"Say 'cheese', say 'whiskey', chest out lady, hold it, CLICK, three American dollars sir, I take photos," and he's off to the next tourist as you turn to refuse yet another camel ride or reject another batch of "jewelry" despite the assurance that it was once worn by Cleopatra. And yet you are standing before a world's wonder. And the well-traveled tourist knows it's wrong to compare the foreign country with his America. Egypt is truly a unique chance to touch history: to stand where Alexander the Great, Caesar, Mark Anthony, Cleopatra, and Napoleon have stood. And Montgomery and Eisenhower and Winston Churchill. For, at each day at dawn, the Sphinx, facing East, catches the morning sun as she has for fifty centuries. Indeed as the Bagdad physician Abdellatif once said in 1161: "Everything fears time, but time fears the Pyramids."

It was another great physician of ancient days, the Egyptian philosopher, statesman and architect Imhotep who built the first pyramid. The Step Pyramid for the Pharaoh Zoser was constructed in 2816 BC, and the Great Pyramids of Giza followed. They were built in the desert (15 miles from what is now Cairo) because the dry climate would maintain preservation of the Royal mummies contained within and because arable land was too precious to waste.

The largest of the pyramids is that of Cheops. With a height of 450 feet and a length at each side of 750 feet, it contains 3 million blocks of stones some weighing 30 tons. Napoleon, who was fascinated by Egypt's ancient history, calculated that there was enough stone in the three pyramids at Giza to put a wall around France 10 feet tall and one foot deep.

The Great Pyramids are the most impressive of the 80 pyramids found in Egypt, even although Cairo has grown, doubling its population in ten years, to bring urban slums to the pyramids' very door. The pyramids were plundered by professional grave robbers soon after they were built, but many statues and artifacts from the past are found on display in the Egyptian Museum at Cairo. Of course, of prime interest are the items from the tomb of King Tutankamen, the least important but most. famous of all the Pharaohs, because his tomb alone was discovered intact.

Other tourists attractions in Cairo are the Coptic Museum with rare early Christian exhibits,-the Al Azhar Mosque and University founded in AD 972 and hence the oldest university in existence, and the Citadel of Saladin built in 1183 AD and still dominating Cairo from the height of the Mokattam hills. The Khan El-Khalili oriental bazaar, one of the best known in the world, calls out to every tourist; the Papyrus Institute, which has relearned the ancient skills, is also worth a visit, as is the Mena House Hotel itself at Giza.

To the southwest is the Saqqara area with its collection of pyramids including the Step Pyramid, and the massive, fallen but intact, statue of Ramses II. Much further south is Luxor described as “the most awe-inspiring conglomeration of ancient monuments in the world.” Here in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, 64 of the Pharaohs of Egypt had their final resting places hewn out of sheer rock.

South is another impressive example of the work of man: the High Dam at Aswan, the third largest dam in the world, built on the 4000 mile long River Nile, the second longest river on earth. "It never rains in Egypt hence Egypt is the gift of the Nile," the saying goes. Cairo, in fact, gets only about three days of rain a year, and the country's only water supply is this bread expanse of water which flows through it. Like the Ganges in India, the Nile is revered. Sitting astride this river of mercy is the only rich land in Egypt, the strip varying at times from 20 miles to only a few yards. Truly Egypt can be called a land 750 miles long and 20 miles wide. You can stand in Egypt with one foot in arable land and one foot on desert.

Desert indeed occupies 96 percent of this land, a huge square with sides 750 miles long. The country has seldom in its long history been invaded. It's as if no conqueror would want to inherit its problems. Yet Egypt has been a fairly stable country, its villages joined in unity by the Nile, perhaps the most important river to man.

The River Nile flows north nurturing the country, passing villages whose houses are made from its mud, their roofs covered with straw as extra insulation. People wash their clothes next to women cleaning pots and pans, beside men carrying out their daily ablutions. The Nile waters fields of garlic, peas, beans, artichokes, wheat, rice, cotton and clover. Oxen, forever turning 7th century BC irrigation water wheels, slow down in their journey to nowhere to sniff its promise but, they cannot see the river, blindfolded as they are to prevent vertigo.

 

The Nile is running more lazily now -- into its delta, past potato and tomato fields and signs which say: "Foreigners are forbidden to leave the main road," and finally it reaches Alexandria, at one time the most brilliant center of civilization in the Mediterranean after Rome and Constantinople.

And paradoxically a city almost devoid of any evidence of its former glory. Alexandria has been continuously lived in for 2,300 years. Each civilization built on the remnants of the previous one, making the narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean and Lake Mareotus a veritable sandwich time.

"We need the city more for the living than for the dead, says Aziza Abou Hamba, a tourist guide. She knows that much of the history of the Mediterranean lies underfoot but a bustling city of more than 4 million people with one million annual visitors cannot afford the time, space or money to explore its own environment.

The city stretches for twenty miles along an east to west axis, and is growing longer each day. Its development patterns a checkerboard of streets at right angles, a sort of York City three centuries before Christ, but with its own brand of Gotham City taxi drivers who career through the narrow streets as if simultaneously rendered blind, speechless and insane. "Red must mean go!" says one tourist watching taxis flash past the traffic lights. There is constant bustle. Eighty-six percent of all goods imported to Egypt pass through this port, which acknowledges only Genoa and Marseilles as greater Mediterranean seaports.

The 5th century Fort of Qait Bay, housing a Naval Museum now stands on the site of the Lighthouse of Pharos. One of the Seven Wonders of the World, this showed the way to shipping just as this city, built by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, shone for centuries as "the cultural beacon of the known world.

Strangely it was the curiosity of foreigners which revealed evidence of this former culture. Napoleon's scholar Champollion started the revival of interest in Egypt's past and in 1960 a Polish archaeology group discovered a twelve-terraced Roman Amphitheatre now excavated in the downtown district of Kom El Dekka. Diggings suggested this amphitheater connects with the three-tiered catacombs of Kom El Shugafa which were carved 100 feet below ground out of solid rock -- in the first century AD. These underground burial sites were revealed in 1892 when a donkey fell down a pit later found to open into a Roman burial shaft.

The Roman conquerors, in fact, came to embrace the Egyptian belief that the dead would return again to occupy their former bodies. Thus mummification became a procedure practiced by those Romans exiled in the land of the Pharaohs. The so-called "Pompey's Pillar" of 297AD is another reminder of the Roman dominance, and the Graeco-Roman Museum houses 40,000 items from those ancient times.

The Al Montaza Palace, the summer residence of ex-King Farouk, though interesting, somehow fails to match the splendor and significance of the rest of Alexandria's past.

More recent history can be seen 65 miles to the west at the El Alamein Museum where tourists can recall what some historians say was the most important battle of World War II. It is more likely that the visitor will come instead to bargain at the bazaars for copper and brass and gold and silver. Or for Egyptian cottons, papyrus paintings, alabaster lamps and ivory scarabs. Just remember to bargain -- the merchant will almost feel cheated if you agree to his first price.

And Egypt will feel cheated too if you leave having looked at her without seeing. Without learning her lessons of life: That the ancient farmer with his hundred year-old face, his thousand year-old faith and his two thousand year-old swirling galaheyah has survived -- his strength, simplicity. That the peasant fellahins endure more than the mighty Pharaohs. That time, on the Nile, has no meaning for man.