Authors: Bruce Feiler
“Think of Tutankhamen, and how much more important Khafre was than him,” Avner said. “Then you can imagine what was in this room. My personal theory is that he died before the pyramid was completed, which is why this chamber was not higher. It’s a sign of the reverence they must have felt toward him that they continued building even after he was dead.”
“So let me ask you,” I said. “If you could have witnessed one moment in the construction, which would it be?”
“I always imagine the moment when they remove the last stone that was blocking the passageway until the pharaoh’s coffin was lowered into place and all the stones came tumbling down to fill up the passageway.”
“And if you could’ve asked one question?”
“For me the question is not ‘how?’ ” he said, “but ‘why?’ ”
We walked back to the entrance of the compound and took a cab back to the city. Though it may seem ungrateful, the only thing more disconcerting than Cairo with all the cars is Cairo without them. At 5
P.M.
the streets were totally empty, as Muslims broke their daylight fast for Ramadan. The only people visible were the scores of police eating tin bowls of rice and chicken and coming back to life with the rush of food. This daily Ramadan ritual, breakfast, is so important that two days earlier, the guard operating the metal detector at the Luxor airport waved passengers through his checkpoint so he could eat. Such determination, though, doesn’t get in the way of courtesy. At least half the people I encountered eating their first meal of the day offered me a bite. In Luxor I was sitting by myself in the airport lounge when an elderly man who had been mopping the floor sat down across from me and pulled out a paper bag. He looked in his bag, looked at me, then came and sat down next to me. Without saying a word, he put the entire contents of his meal in one hand: three dried dates. Despite my protest, we ate his meal together that evening.
This evening our destination was Helwan University, where Ali Omar, of the Department of Tourism, had invited us to break the fast with his staff and meet the former head of the Egyptian government’s department of antiquities. Upstairs a banquet was under way, with a dozen tables arranged in a square and brimming with chicken, meatballs, rice, moussaka, pita, tomatoes, cucumbers, and mango juice. When the distinguished archaeologist took time to write on a calling card “Professor Dr. Abd el Halim Nurel Din, Professor of Egyptology, Head of the Department of Egypt, Cairo University, Giza,” I feared we had
another case of inflated formality. I could not have been more wrong. Professor Nurel Din, pushing seventy, and dressed to Third World professorial perfection in a brown tweed suit, brown leather vest, mustard shirt, and brown tie, was a charming man with an easy laugh and an avuncular insistence that we eat dessert—sweet cakes topped with honey and pistachio chunks—before talking about ancient Egypt.
The first thing I wanted to know was why there was such confusion about who built the pyramids.
“I can’t answer that,” he said. “Everybody is trying to take credit. When Qaddafi came here, he said the pyramids were built by the Libyans. The black Americans say, ‘These are our pyramids.’ It’s nonsense. I have hundreds of reasons to say these pyramids are Egyptian, they were built by Egyptians, with Egyptian mentality, on an Egyptian plateau. And if you take the Jews, or the Libyans, or the Americans, if they’re so smart, why didn’t they build the pyramids in their country? They were kind enough to come here and build them for us? It’s all very funny.”
“But there are two thousand theories,” I said, “involving aliens, lasers, slaves.”
“It’s just a pyramid,” he said. “It’s the result of four hundred years of experimentation to achieve that shape. People wanted to be connected to the rays of the sun. Also, Egyptians believed the earth came out of the water in a pyramid. They wanted to be buried in a monument with the same shape. It has nothing to do with astronomy or astrology. But once you’re impressed with something, you can’t get it out of your mind. I’m sorry to say, that’s why we have Egyptmania. That’s why we have Pyramidiots.”
I asked him about the Bible, and about how closely he thought it reflected Egyptian history.
“First of all, as an Egyptologist, as a person acquainted with the ancient Near East, I do not believe very much in trying to have a link between the biblical prophets and certain periods, or certain people, in Egypt. I never try to discuss that, simply because we don’t have any evidence that the Israelites were in Egypt. We don’t have any evidence that they left Egypt. We don’t have any evidence of Joseph or Moses. When we don’t have evidence, it’s just too hard.
“But I’m a good Muslim,” he continued, “and good Muslims should be respectful of other religions. Also, it’s hard to imagine why the Israelites would invent a past in slavery if they didn’t experience it. That’s not evidence, but it is interesting. I think it’s safe to say that they were here, and that they learned a lot.” So what did they learn?
“Egypt was a pioneer in many things,” he said. “It was one of the strongest countries in the ancient Near East. But above all, Egyptians had a feeling of dignity, of grandeur. They believed they were special. They believed they were blessed. Maybe that’s what the Israelites learned: a sense of destiny.” And where might the Egyptians have gotten that feeling?
“They had a chance, because they were living in a place that was safe. The borders were secure. The weather was good. It was easy to reach other countries. Plus, they had the Nile. Ancient Egyptians found themselves in a situation that facilitated their having great achievements. Once you leave, the world becomes much less friendly. In any direction, you get desert.” I thanked him extensively and sneaked one last piece of cake. As we were heading out, I mentioned that we were leaving the following morning for the land of Goshen, where Moses was born, and for the Red Sea. Did he have any advice?
He looked a bit concerned. “Be sure and keep your passports with you,” he said. “And unlike Moses, I hope you come back.”
O
ur final wake-up call in Cairo came at 4
A.M.
The predawn fog, mixed with the pollution, created a double veil over the city. The Cairo Tower, a 617-foot, latticed, concrete minaret in the shape of a lotus flower, was not even visible from our hotel window, just across the river.
Downstairs our driver and guide were already waiting. At the urging of several friends, we had hired not only a jeep but also a police escort for our day in the Delta, an area regarded as too unstable for foreign visitors. Our driver, however, a former policeman himself, had purposefully evaded the escort on his way to the hotel and suggested we go alone. He was backed by Yasser, our guide, a burly man in his twenties who was wearing black combat boots and a black uniform, and carrying a black walking stick, all of which gave him the slightly menacing appearance of an army commandant or, worse, an officer in the S.S. Under the circumstances, we had little choice. We were in their care for our most ambitious day so far, as we set out to re-create one of the monumental passages of the Hebrew Bible, the Israelites’ flight to freedom across the Red Sea. Instead of just visiting this site, we hoped, in a bit of romantic folly (and an indication of how committed we were becoming to our effort) to cross the water ourselves. Along the way, we also hoped to tackle some of the most heated debates about the historicity of the Bible. What caused the plagues? Who was the pharaoh of the Exodus? Where was the Red Sea? And, of course, could it have been parted?
The streets were as empty at 5
A.M.
as they had been at 5
P.M.
the previous day. The deserted overpasses, underpasses, and tunnels made crossing the city like being in a giant race-car video game, especially when our driver, Ahmed, a mustachioed man with an iron gaze, took the occasion to accelerate over ninety miles per hour, even while we were still downtown. Most people would have had their morning meal at 4
A.M.
, Yasser said, then elected for “a bit of a lie-in” this Thursday, ahead of the weekly day of rest on Friday. “It’s Ramadan,” he said. “People are lazy. By six o’clock tonight it will be busy.” As a result, the streets remained empty even beyond the airport, and a drive that had taken well over an hour during my first visit took less than twenty minutes.
The northeastern quadrant of Cairo is the city’s plushest, with casinos, nightclubs, art deco houses, a soccer stadium, and palaces built for successive kings, sultans, caliphs, emirs, pashas, strongmen, dictators, consul generals, military generals, and, now, presidents for life. Unlike their counterparts in ancient Egypt, contemporary leaders not only live on the east side of the Nile, they’re buried here as well. Nasser’s grave is in the area, as is the tomb of the unknown soldier. The shah of Iran died here during his last years in exile. It’s also home to a memorial to the 1973 war, called the Tenth Ramadan War in Arabic and the Yom Kippur War in Hebrew, in which Sadat regained, then relost some of the Sinai. Eight years later Islamic radicals infiltrated a parade in honor of the war and assassinated Sadat, who was subsequently buried in the area. One reason so many palaces are here is that it’s closer to the Sinai, so leaders could flee in times of peril. It’s also closer to the airport, for the same reason. “Life is nicer here,” Yasser said, “and more expensive.” He estimated the cost of a two-bedroom apartment at half a million Egyptian pounds, around $175,000.
Yasser was an affable, talkative man who had graduated with Basem from Helwan University and was studying for a master’s degree in the history of mummification. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of hieroglyphics and near flawless use of Egyptologist English—polaris, natron salts, spinal cord marrow—but almost no knowledge of where we were going. “Most tourists have no interest in these places,” he
pleaded. He did, however, have a great nose for character. When we mentioned we had met the director of the pyramids the previous day, he needed no prompting to announce, “I don’t like him much. He doesn’t deserve the tributes he seeks.” He added, “He’s not like Professor Nurel Din, who advanced rapidly from professor to head of antiquities for all of Egypt. He’s a great man.” We were off to a promising start.
The farther we got from downtown, the more the scenery shifted from crumbling apartment blocks to dusty intersections to mud-brick villages to dilapidated farmhouses. The Delta has always been Egypt’s breadbasket, a fan-shaped web of estuaries and canals that sprouted from the Nile like tines on a rake. During the
Gemini IV
space mission in 1965, American astronaut James McDivitt stared down 115 miles and saw what he thought was a giant flow of lava, a triangle of muddy brown pouring into a vast blue sea. The triangle was the Nile Delta and the sea it ran into, the Mediterranean.
Today, despite diminished water because of the dam, the Delta is still the leafiest region of Egypt, the one area outside of the narrow riverbanks where nature seems to sprout uncontrollably. Feluccas sail through fields of cotton, rice, and corn. Water buffalo stomp through marshes filled with herons, storks, and loons. In ancient times, wealthy Egyptians hunted ducks through the swamps, using throwing sticks as weapons and hunting cats for retrieval. There were hippopotamuses here until 1805, when the last one was shot, perhaps by Napoleon’s soldiers, who are said to have shot the nose off the Sphinx.
In addition to the area’s greenery, what was most remarkable about the Delta was how untouched it seemed by time. We fell back into the game we had played on our way to Harran. I spy a worker pulling mud from the river: a slave? I spy a basket made of bulrushes: a baby? I spy some girls doing laundry on the banks: one of them a pharaoh’s daughter? We had stumbled upon another primeval tableau, a land emerging out of watery chaos. We had reached another beginning in the Bible.
One of the more striking features of the story of Moses is how humbly it starts, yet how epic it feels. It clearly aims to mix mythical elements
—a body drawn from water, a slave raised by a king—with historical ones—a pharaoh building cities, a people working in servitude—to create a sort of metahero who incorporates many of the qualities of previous biblical elders, yet ultimately supersedes them. Genesis includes four major characters—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph—as well as Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and Noah. Moses alone fills the next four books, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. He is the central character of the entire Hebrew Bible, yet one of the most human heroes ever painted, plagued by self-doubt. As biographer Jonathan Kirsch has written:“He is a shepherd, mild and meek, but also a ruthless warrior who is capable of blood-shaking acts of violence, a gentle teacher who is also a magician and a wonder-worker, a lawgiver whose code of justice is merciful except when it comes to purging and punishing those who disagree with him, an emancipator who rules his people with unforgiving authority.” Above all, he is “God’s one and only friend, and yet he is doomed to a tragic death by God himself.”
Exodus begins with the advent of a new king over Egypt, “who knew not Joseph.” While the old pharaoh encouraged Joseph’s family to settle in Goshen, the new pharaoh fears their descendants are becoming too numerous and orders that all newborn Israelite boys be drowned in the Nile. During this time a Levite family bears a son, but the mother is able to hide him. After three months she takes a wicker basket, caulks it with bitumen and pitch, and sets her son afloat on the river. The baby’s sister is sent to watch. The daughter of the pharaoh discovers the basket and takes pity on the boy inside. “This must be a Hebrew child,” she says. The pharaoh’s daughter asks the girl who is watching to bring her a Hebrew wet-nurse. The girl, naturally, brings her mother. It’s the pharaoh’s daughter, however, who gives the baby his name, Moses, because, she says, “I drew him out of the water.”
As with other biblical accounts, the story of Moses’ birth has many ancient parallels. Hercules also survived efforts to kill him as a baby; Oedipus was left exposed on a mountain; Romulus and Remus were put in a chest and cast into the Tiber. Perhaps more relevant (because it predates the Bible), Sargon, founder of the Mesopotamian empire of Akkadia in the third millennium
B.C.E.
, was born to obscure origins, cast in a wicker
basket lined with bitumen, and drawn out of the river by a god. But as Avner pointed out, the differences between Sargon and Moses outweigh the similarities. Sargon was abandoned because of an illicit relationship, not a genocidal dictate. Also, Sargon’s finder did not know the boy’s origin, as the pharaoh’s daughter does. “In many ways, Moses is closer to Jesus,” Avner said. “He’s born in humble origins, passes through the highest courts, flees to the desert, then returns with a new set of beliefs.”