Egypt 2023 - Day 2 - Cairo Museums & the Alabaster Mosque

 Today was a full day, starting at 8am with the hotel breakfast. Our good friend Gordon arrived late the night before, and his arrival marked the completion of our six-person group. The tour gave us a little upsell presentation about all the “extras” we could participate in (and pay for) on the cruise. Since we’re likely not to return to Egypt any time soon, we opted into almost all of them despite the added expense.

Our first stop was the massive Egyptian Museum. According to their website, they house more than 170,000 artifacts in over 10,000 square meters of space. December is the peak season for Egyptian tourism, so the museum itself was packed to the gills with people. Our tour guide steered us through the crowds to all of the best “highlights” of the museum, including a large statue of Ramses, the ‘first-ever’ known painting (its of ducks), the best preserved wooden statue in antiquity, the earliest known painted statue, and of course, the relics of King Tutankhamen.

Let’s focus today, though, on a quite interesting Pharaoh, Hatshepsut.

Head of a statue of Hatshepsut, Egyptian Museum 

Hatshepsut was the queen married to the Pharaoh Thutmose II in the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, who also happened to be her half-brother, as her and her husband’s father was Thutmose I. When her husband died, the natural progression of the line should have gone to her stepson, Thutmose III, but instead, she sent him off as a general of the Egyptian army to conquer Nubia (which he did). She assumed the Pharaocy instead, but since the Pharoah traditionally needed to be a man, she did so with a false beard, wearing men’s garments, and lived and acted as a man during her reign (this later part, according to our tour guide.) Egypt was quite prosperous during her reign, but when her stepson conquered Nubia, she jailed him there to prevent him from ascending and taking her kingdom. When she died, her stepson, Thutmose III, assumed the throne and attempted to remove all traces of his step-mother’s dynasty from the world by destroying or hiding her statues and obelisks.  Very few pieces remain.

The other really interesting piece that resonated with me in the museum was the Canopic Jars of Tutankhamen. Canopic Jars contained the organs of the mummy — specifically the lungs, stomach, liver, and intestines. The heart was left in the body to be judged by Osiris in the afterlife. The canopic jars of Tutankamen were made of Alabaster and stored in a wooden chest covered in gold. The alabaster glowed like an eggshell.

Canopic Jars of Tutankamen, Egyptian Museum

The narrative of the Egyptologist seemed to skew a bit towards the nationalistic on a lot of things. Each of the highlight artifacts was the first, oldest, finest, or most beautiful in the world. The most incredible (in the original sense of the word) of his stories was in regard to the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.

In this version of the story, the British Archaeologist Howard Carter, who had been searching for the tomb for 10 years in the Valley of the Kings after having found a papyrus indicating that it existed, was riding his horse in a specific portion of the desert and fell into a small pit. Carter abandoned the horse and returned to camp, and a young Egyptian boy then discovered the entrance to the tomb after clearing out the sand from the pit where Carter had fallen. He ran off to tell Carter, who then confirmed it was the entrance to Tut’s tomb. The Wikipedia article on the tomb's discovery seems to confirm relatively well that the young boy indeed made the initial discovery.

Of course, we did see the beautiful golden head mask and sarcophagus of Tutankamen, which are gorgeous and nearly flawless pieces, two of over five thousand artifacts discovered in his tomb, the only one in the entire Valley that hadn’t been raided by robbers over the many thousands of years.

After a few hours in the museum, we returned to our buses and headed out to a large hill overlooking Cairo, atop which is perched the Fortress of Salah ad Din, anglicized to Saladin, which houses the Alabaster Mosque. You can actually see the Alabaster Mosque from our hotel room, far off in the distance.

The Alabaster Mosque at the Fortress of Salah Ad Din

The Fortress was built by the eponymous ruler of 12th-century Egypt to keep out the Crusaders, a function for which it was never actually used. He built the Alabaster Mosque after twenty years of reign. It is modeled after the Blue Mosque in Turkey but is significantly smaller. The mosque is still quite grand in scale and beautiful, with its silver domes and minarets reaching towards the sky. You might find it interesting that female tourists are not required to cover their hair inside the mosque, which is still used for worship, but we all did have to put on shoe coverings to tread its marble floors. Inside, the mosque is exquisitely patterned with mosaics and Arabic writing. Of course, there are no paintings or icons of any kind, but the lettering at the bases of the domes was art in itself. Our tour guide gave us a brief overview of the 5 pillars of Islam and told us that the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is required of all Muslims of able body and financial means, costs over 10,000 USD to perform these days! If you cannot afford to do the Hajj, you can have someone go in your stead, which our tour guide said he did for his father. Walid said he did the Hajj for his father and himself at the same time and joked that it was a great two-for-one deal.

Our last organized stop for the day was to another museum, the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization. This museum was almost brand new at the time of writing this, having opened in 2021, and focuses on the progression of Egyptian culture from prehistory to the 19th century. It also houses almost all of the Pharaonic mummies in existence and displays them all in temperature-controlled glass cases. I wish I had some pictures of the corpses because they were really fascinating, but no photography was allowed in the mummy exhibit. A few even had CT scans showing their skeletal structures and indications of trauma, disease, and cause of death. Really wild stuff. There was also a nice room that showcased the progression of garments and textile work across the millennia. All in all, it is a very nice addition to Cairo’s cultural sights.

Statue of Ankenhaten at NMEC

It was about 16:00 at this point, and everyone was wearing down. The jet lag was starting to take its toll. We returned to the hotel and rested for about an hour, then retired to the bar where cold martinis were hammered and good talks were had. Realizing that tonight was Christmas Eve (the first time any of us had even thought about it), we suddenly grew concerned that we wouldn’t be able to find a place to eat at the hotel that night. The Egyptian restaurant, Zitouni, the same place we have breakfast every morning, was doing a Christmas Eve buffet-style dinner, but they had no reservations available. Luckily, Uniworld has a lot of sway, and Stephanie got on the phone with our handler, Ahab, the Captain, and he pulled the necessary strings to get us in. It was a pretty amazing spread, the highlight being the spectacle of the dessert table filled with tarts, Yule logs, cookies, macarons, jellies, puddings, and a very interesting bread pudding called Om Ali, which is runnier and less sweet than our traditional bread pudding, but very creamy. I liked it. Some of our group weren’t so keen.

Dessert Table for Christmas Eve at Four Seasons Cairo

Tomorrow starts very early. 5:00, in fact. We must get to the airport to catch a local flight to Luxor with the rest of the cruise-goers. Tomorrow, we’ll be headed to the temple complex at Karnak and then board the ship for a (hopefully) relaxing remainder of the day. Thanks for reading, everyone!