I started planning and getting everything together just a couple of weeks before we left, which, honestly is the best way for me to plan. If I have too much time to plan I have a harder time nailing things down and saying "yes", so last minute planning is my jam.
I'm part of a facebook group for travelers that are living in Bahrain so we share travel tips, tour guides, and general information about the things we're doing and have learned since Bahrain is such a great place to travel from. One of the ladies on that page wrote up about her trip to Egypt and it sounded amazing so I contacted her and got her guides information and sent out messages. As luck would have it both the guides she used for Cairo and Luxor were free and could travel with us during our trip!
We headed out on 13 February after Christopher got off of work. Our flight left at 6:30pm and was only three hours long!
We landed in Cairo at 8:30 (they're an hour behind Bahrain) so it was dark already so all we saw were city lights
We headed through security and to get our visas... which was a weird process. We had to go to the bank and pay $25 each in American money and then go to passport control. We stood in line with some other confused westerners, but at the end of the day, it worked. Its funny how different every countries entry processes are and you have to just go with the flow and not freak out about it when you get there (although you do have to do your research and make sure a visa can be obtained upon arrival... some countries you have to get it before you land).
After our visas were stamped and we went through more security, we headed for our hotel. There are a few places in the world where it doesn't matter where you stay or what hotel, hostel, B&B, etc that you choose. Egypt is not one of those places. So I chose a big name, 5 star hotel. Lucky for us, the Le Meredien has an airport hotel attached to Terminal 3, which is where Egypt Air flies in to (our airline from Bahrain) so we had a short walk and then we were checking in and then headed to bed to get some rest for our first full day in Egypt the next day!
The next morning we ordered room service and had breakfast in our room while we got ready for the day. We met our guide, Marwa in the lobby at 8:30 and got started on our adventure! We met our driver and headed to the Cairo Museum first.
The city of Cairo is HUGE. There are about 100 million people in Egypt and 30 million of them are in Cairo! So, its crowded and crazy!
Gorgeous mosque driving through the Muslim quarter
Once we drove through the muslim quarter, we entered the more European style quarter. It was seriously like driving through Paris or Belgium.
Egypt, while predominantly Muslim, also has 35% of their population practicing Christianity. There used to be a good sized Jewish population as well, but once the conflict for the Sinai Peninsula ensued, Israel opened up immigration for Egypts jews and most left. Marwa said there were only 16 older jewish ladies left and they weren't really practicing anymore so all the Jewish synagogues were closed, save this one thats only open for tourists.
Driving through Cairo was interesting. The drivers are crazy...crazier than the Bahraini's even! And people will just walk through a crazy busy street to cross the road and will stand there in the middle waiting as cars fly past them. Also, lanes are just a suggestion. It was a free for all. Marwa said she refuses to drive and I dont blame her!
The Cairo Museum
Our guide, Marwa, fell in love with Ancient Egyptian history as a young girl and even though she graduated at the top of her class and could have chosen any field, Egypt had a hold of her heart and she went to University in Egypt to learn as much as she could and graduate in the top ten of her class. To be a tour guide in Egypt is no simple thing. They have to hold a degree in archaeology or egyptology, know Ancient Egyptian language and have to continue their education for the rest of their lives.
Stella and I with Marwa!
Entrance to the museum... the Scarab beetle is a symbol of luck
Marwa has a wealth of knowledge and an absolute passion for all things Ancient Egypt... learning from her was so effortless and amazing because she just made you want to soak up every little kernel of knowledge you could while she spoke.
This is a statue of Menkaure- he's the owner of the third pyramid at Giza and he's part of the 4th dynasty from around 2500BCE. A note about his stance... Marwa explained that he's taking the step forward to show his readiness to do whatever needed to be done to serve the gods and his kingdom. The goddess to his left is is the goddess Hathor (an important goddess representing female fertility and creation and connected to the sun god Ra) also stepping forward and she's set further ahead than the goddess to his right, who is a lesser diety.
This is King Khafra (also called Chepren) who is the builder of the 2nd largest pyramid in Giza and the son of King Khufu who built the largest pyramid and the father of Menkaure)
The falcon is not only representative of the god Horus supporting the king, it plays a vital role in protecting the statues head and neck, making them stronger and is what has kept it intact all these years later.
On the base of his statue- it is the lotus (representing Upper Egypt) and papyrus (representing Lower Egypt) flowers signifying that he unified upper and lower Egypt during his reign.
So this statue was interesting. He is a priest and was buried in a tomb and when the excavators broke through the tomb walls the lights they had shone onto his face and into those eyes and it terrified them because the eyes look so real and reflect light!
Seriously... if I had been on that team, those eyes would have terrified me too!
Marwa explained to us that hieroglyphics can be read in any direction... up or down or left to right or right to left. It all had to do with what was being said and the direction certain things were facing. So the way to be able to tell was to look at the way faces were pointed- the face of a bird or a person would look left or right and that was the direction to be read. So fascinating, but I can't imagine being fluent in hieroglyphs!
One thing I didn't realize is how much color has survived from the Ancient Egyptians. We see a lot of pictures of stone carvings but I didn't realize how bright and vibrant their colors could be!
Stella was SO into this trip. She was fascinated and super engaged with Marwa asking questions and doing a great job paying attention. (She did get a little restless towards the end of our museum tour and was ready to see the pyramids but that was totally understandable)
A common misconception of the ancient egyptians is that they used Human sacrifice as a method of sacrifice to the gods. There is no evidence of that and instead, they created these small statues to bury with their dead of servants and workers and those statues were believed to be reanimated when the soul crossed into the afterlife and was reunited with its body and all the things buried in his or her tomb.
Our favorite was this bored looking bread maker
Sphinx
The different kingdoms and dynasties had different styles of art and you could really see the difference in this statue. It was made in the Middle Kingdom and the artisans weren't as skilled as they were in the other kingdoms.
Hatchetpsut! Egypt's only female Pharoah
We headed upstairs to see King Tut's riches and the walls are lined with beautiful papyrus scrolls. Again... the fact that these stunning and fragile sheets of handmade paper have survived all this time is just mind blowing.
They're building another museum in Giza to become the big Egyptian museum but they're still going to keep the Cairo museum open, so they're doing restoration work on the museum itself. Marwa said there is enough stuff that they've got from all the excavations that a lot of it isn't even on display right now anyway. They've already moved quite a bit to the new location and have brought things up from the basement to take its place. She laughed saying that the things that were in the basement were just as important as the things already moved and it was crazy to think how much wasn't public yet.
At the top of the upper level is an entire section dedicated to King Tutankhamen and all the incredible things that were pulled from his tomb in the 1920's. His tomb remains the most intact tomb they've found to date. A British Archaeologist named Howard Carter found his tomb in 1922 and it was a treasure trove!
Tutankhamen's mummy was buried in multiple layers of coffins. This is the most outer one. (A little side note here... the word Coffin means "house of eternity" in Egyptian and the word Sarcophagus is a greek word meaning "eater of the flesh"...Coffin is much nicer!)
The second layer
This is a picture inside the room where King Tutankhamen's jewels and incredible death mask
Pictures aren't allowed in that room, but I'm a terrible human being and sneakily snapped this picture of the final coffin that his mummy was inside of. I don't think pictures can do this justice anyway. The detail is incredible and awe inspiring.
After we left that room we walked around this massive hall that held all the treasures of his tomb. Again, pictures really don't do this stuff justice. It was incredible. Especially when you take into consideration that it was all made thousands of years ago and has not only survived time but it SO beautiful and SO detailed and so innovative. This is a folding traveling chair!
Close up of the chair
A folding cot he would have slept on when traveling. The Egyptians were just amazing innovators!
One of very few relics of games played by the Ancient Egyptians- it also serves a reminder that Tutankhamen was a boy king, being crowned at only 9 years old and dying at just 19.
His throne
The Canopic jars of King Tutankhamen
Some of his shoes
A gorgeous ostrich feather fan of his!
A canopy frame- this would have been covered with fabric to shade the king
Statue of Anubis- god of the dead and Mummification guarding a chest found in the tomb
Painted head of King Tutankhamen
In the next room over were the mummies of Tutankhamen's great grandparents, Thuya and Yuya. They were wealthy nobles and their tombs were filled with riches and amazing art from the time. They are also the only mummies on display in the museum just out in the open.
Their death masks
Vases and jars found in their tomb. These were absolutely gorgeous!
Canopic jars! Because the organs that were placed in here were also mummified, they had long turned to dust when the jars were reopened. The Ancient Egyptians placed the liver, stomach, intestines, and lungs into their canopic jars. The brain was pulled out of the nose and thrown away and the heart was left with the body because it was the most important organ and integral in their journey to the afterlife.
Papyrus that was found in their tombs. This told the story of their lives and depicted the final judgement.
Thuya's mummy- she was the grandmother of Akhenaten and the great grandmother to Tutankhamen
Yuya's mummy- they are so well preserved. His eyebrows were even visible. (Marwa told us that the mummification process turned their hair that reddish color)
Some sandals from Ancient Egypt- Stella loved that they matched the sandals she was wearing!
This is the coffin of Akhenaten- Tutankhamen's father. He is known for calling the Egyptians to worship only one god, Aton and forsaking all the other gods. He changed his name from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten.
You can see here the name has been struck from the coffin by the high priests of Amun Ra. There was no greater insult to someone than to have their name removed or covered from their statues or coffins and they saw this as his punishment for neglecting the other gods.
Nefertiti was one of his wives so this stone carving of her head was in the room with his coffin
Some of the incredible jewelry
In a hall of coffins.
This was the coffin of a very wealthy dwarf. Marwa said that he must have been very wealthy and well liked to have such an elaborate coffin!
King Amenhotep III and his wife Queen Tiye and three of their daughters. Its made of limestone and almost completely intact.
Not a lot of the old palaces and homes are preserved so this is one of the only remaining examples of a floor from Ancient Egypt! Its painted plaster pavement from Akhenaten's time. It was found in 1891 and a shelter was built over it to protect it, but in 1910 some villagers came in and destroyed it. The remains were brought to the museum and pieced back together.
Huge granite stela thats engraved on both sides. It is the sole mention of Israelites in the Egyptian texts known to date.
We also bought extra tickets to go into the royal mummy room. No pictures were allowed in there, but it was really neat. So many famous kings and queens were in there just perfectly preserved resting inside of glass coffins. You could tell a difference between the royals and Thuya and Yuya- the royal preservation was just incredible.
Stella did talk about how weird it was that they'd been taken from their eternal resting place and put on display. So we had a long talk about hoping that they'd already gone to the afterlife how they imagined it and were happy and pleased that their bodies were being treated with respect and were being protected and helping to teach people about their lives and how they lived them. But yeah... from the mouth of babes, man. It was definitely an odd thing to see the actual mummies and realize that you're standing there gawking at a human body that lived and loved and hoped and prayed and prepared for an afterlife that they would believe has been disturbed. It's one thing to see pictures or to see artifacts and statues, it's another thing entirely to stand before a human body and not feel like you're part of this huge breach of privacy and dignity.
The museum was really awesome, but it was a little crazy how badly it needs to be organized and updated. The people who run the Louvre need to come in and help. There were parts that felt like it was just a giant storage building for artifacts and almost everything was open for people to touch with their bare hands, so that was a little wild!
Us outside of the museum! It was such a pretty day.
Some of the buildings on the way out of Cairo and to Giza. 6 October 2011 is liberation day for the Egyptians. They fought and won a conflict for the Sinai Peninsula in only 6 hours. That day is an extremely important day to Egyptians and they even have a city called October 6th city. After that conflict people took advantage of abandoned buildings and started building on top to create more space without paying for it. Eventually the government shut down this practice, but you can still see the half built levels of buildings.
Driving to Giza... the city of the dead. The Ancient Egyptians buried their dead to the West and life was lived in the East.
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