Boat Trip Through History: A Stop at the Papyrus Institute
Over the years, I have gone to many, many living history sites at which people in period costume demonstrate blacksmithing[1], quilting, weaving, making soap, and cooking in a pre-modern kitchen. Even when it is a traditional skill that I have seen demonstrated many times before, I always come away with a sense of amazement.
I did not expect to have a similar experience at the Papyrus Institute.
In many ways, the Papyrus Institute reminded me of the rug workshops that are an unavoidable stop in any country with a handwoven rug industry, in which the “lesson” about rug weaving is only a pitch for selling rugs.[2] And in fact, the “institute” was clearly designed to sell tourists the works made on papyrus that hung on its walls[3] —better quality and much more expensive than those sold in the small bazaar that surrounded every monument we stopped at but still obviously designed for the tourist trade.
There was no attempt to evoke the past. In fact, the counter at which a staff member demonstrated making papyrus reminded me of a high school science lab station, as did the demonstrator’s presentation style. He spoke briefly about the symbolic significance of the papyrus plant as the heraldic emblem for Lower (i.e.) Egypt.[4] Then he took us through the steps of making papyrus paper —slowly, carefully, calmly.[5] Fibrous layers were removed from the stem of the plant in strips. The strips were soaked and then laid side by side in two layers: one layer laid lengthwise, then topped by another layer at right angles to the first. The two-ply stack was then pressed together; as it dried the glue-like sap of the plants cemented the layers together, creating a sheet of paper.[6]
To my surprise, it was absolutely fascinating.
Payprus document ca 1900 BCE
Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Art Museum
A few other papyrus tidbits:
- The earliest extant piece of papyrus is a blank scroll from around 2900 BCE.
- The first examples with text date from about 2500 BCE, which is about the same period as the earliest known statue of a scribe.
- Although paper is the best known use of the papyrus plant, ancient Egypts, also used it to make small boats, mats, boxes, baskets, sandals, and ropes, similar to the way birch bark was used in North America.
- Papyrus could be erased and reused.
[1] Eternally fascinating as far as I am concerned Almost magical.
[2] We made that stop several days prior to visiting the Papyrus Institute. Watching a rug maker at work was interesting the first time I saw it, but it doesn’t continue to grip me the way blacksmithing does.
[3] And yes, I succumbed to a very appealing landscape that I need to have framed.
[4] It is worth pointing out that the Nile flows north to the Mediterranean, not south. So when you take a boat ride down the Nile, you go north. This may feel wrong, but it is true. Look at a map if you don’t believe me.
[5] One of the variations of a mantra that our guide repeated many many times a day as we walked on uneven surfaces through a gauntlet of vendors selling papyrus bookmarks and fake alabaster statues. (In retrospect, I regret not buying a pack of the bookmarks, which were ten for a dollar. I go through a lot of book marks)
[6] I am missing a step or two, but you get the idea.
Boat Trip Through History: The Temples at Abu Simbel
When we sat down to review the materials from the tour company for our Egypt trip, my BFF from graduate school and I had to make several choices about optional excursions that weren’t included in the basic trip.[1] The biggest of those excursions was an all-day trip to the temples at Abu Simbel. (Including a couple of flights in a prop plane!) As far as we were concerned, it was an immediate yes. It was definitely worth it.
Unlike most the of the Egyptian temples we saw, which were built from blocks of stone transported from the quarries of Gebel Silsila,the temples of Abu Simbel were carved out of the mountainside. They were commissioned in the thirteenth century BCE by the pharaoh Ramses II, aka Ramses the Great,[2] as a monument to himself and the first of eight Royal Wives, Queen Nefertari (b. 1301 BCE).[3] (They married before he became pharaoh and the sources suggest it was a genuine love match.)
Time passes even if you’ve styled yourself “the Great.” Over the centuries the temples fell into disuse and were slowly buried by sand.
Abu Simbel was rediscovered[4] in 1813 by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burkhardt (1784-1817), who saw the top frieze of the main temple sticking out from the sand. Five years later, excavation of the temples began after Italian archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni[5] (1778-1823) located an entrance to the temple.
The temples at Abu Simbel are astonishing. Ramses II’s temple is dedicated to the sun gods Amon-Re and Re-Horakhte. (Nefertari’s smaller temple is dedicated to the worship of the sky-goddess Hathor. )Two enormous seated statues of Ramses II sit on either side of the main entrance to the temple. Three consecutive inner halls, decorated with pictures celebrating events in Ramses reign, extend 185 feet into the cliff.[6] The truly extraordinary feature of the temple is that it was designed in such a way that the first rays of the morning sign penetrate its inner chamber twice a year near the equinoxes— highlighting the faces of three of the four gods portrayed therein, Amon-Re, Re-Horakhte, and Ramses II in his persona as the living incarnation of Re-Horakhte on earth. The fourth guard, Ptah, the god of darkness remains unlit.
The fact that the temples can still be seen is equally astonishing.[7]
In the 1960s, the pending construction of the Aswan High Dam,threatened Abu Simbel and other Nubian antiquities with inundation in the giant artifical reservoir that the dam would form, now known as Lake Nasser. UNESCO spearheaded an international effort to save the monuments, described by André Malraux, the French Minister of Culture as “a kind of Tennessee Valley Authority of Archeaology.” It was the organization’s first major campaign since its formation in 1945. Some thirty countries formed national committees to support the operation; more than fifty countries donated money to the effort.
Several plans for saving Abu Simbel were proposed and rejected before a solution was accepted. It required engineering on a heroic scale: The team dug away the top of the cliff and then dismantled the temples, cutting them into more than one thousand blocks, each of which weighed some thirty tons. They reassembled the temples on an artificial cliff that was 180 miles inland and 64 miles above the original site, carefully aligned to reproduced the biannual entrance of light into the inner chambers.
Relocating Abu Simbel was the most dramatic portion of the Nubian Campaign. Over the course of twenty years, forty separate technical missions, drawn from across the world, saved a total of twenty-twomonuments and complexes from inundation. The last monuments to be moved were the temple complex at Philae, built in honor of the goddess Isis around 370 BCE.
In 1979, the rescued monuments were designated a UNESCO world heritage site.
[1] Though in all fairness, there was nothing basic about any of it.
[2] What made him great? In part the fact that he really, really, liked to build monuments to himself telling us how great he was. Victorian travel writer Amelia Edwards summed it up in her 1877 account A Thousand Miles Up the Nile: “We know now that some of the pharaohs were greater conquerors. We suspect that some were better rulers. Yet next to him, the other seemed like shadows…His features are as familiar to us as those of Henry VIII or Louis XIV.” —Two other rulers with big egos, I might point out.
[3] Not Nefertiti (ca 1370-1330 BCE), who was the great royal wife of King Akhenaten.
[4] A world that always sets off warning bells for me. Obviously local residents were aware that something was there.
[5] Using the term archaeologist to describe Belzoni is a bit of a stretch. He had a passion for collecting antiquities, without regard to their significance, and caused plenty of damage to the sites in the process of getting them.
[6] Roughly the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Cinderella Castle at Disney World. Or if you insist on the usual comparison: a little more than the width of a football field.
[7] If you want to read a detailed account of the story of how the temples were saved, I strongly recommend Empress of the Nile by Lynne Olson.
Boat Trip Through History: Cairo’s City of the Dead
(As close as I can get to a spooky story for Halloween this year)
The down side of traveling through a foreign country with a tour is that occasionally your guide mentions something fascinating in passing that is not part of the day’s tour. It is never mentioned again, and the curious history nerd is left to find out more on her own. Case in point: on our way to the Step Pyramid at Sakkara, our guide gestured and said, more or less, “On the left[1] is the City of the Dead. It is a complex of historic Islamic cemeteries[2] where thousands of families live in and among centuries old tombs and mausoleums.” My ears perked up. And then we moved on.[3]
Photo credit Daniel Nussbaum
The City of the Dead is huge: four square miles in the original core of the city that encircle the Cairo Citadel to the north and south. The earliest section of the necropolis dates from 642 CE, when Muslim Arabs led by Amr ibn al-As, one of the companions of Muhammad, conquered Egypt. It reached its height during the period when the Mamluks ruled Egypt, from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. It contains the graves of common people as well as elaborate mausoleums and tomb complexes built by Cairo’s elite.
People have always lived among the tombs. In the earliest periods, most of the living inhabitants had jobs related to the necropolis: grave diggers, the craftsmen who built the more ornate structures, tomb custodians, and Sufi mystics and scholars who studied in religious complexes attached to some of the most important mausoleums. Over time, small urban settlements in the area, and their residents, were absorbed by the necropolis, creating pockets of residential neighborhoods among the tombs.
Beginning in the late 19th century, the use of the cemeteries by the living increased as a result of rapid urbanization and housing shortages. Some squatted in tombs. Some moved into their own families’ tombs, particularly after the destruction of the 1992 earthquake. More constructed unofficial housing wherever they could find space.
In the course of learning more about the area, I discovered that the City of the Dead is a wonderful place to take a walking tour, with no aggressive vendors or souvenir shops trying to sell you fake papyrus bookmarks[4] and other tchotchokes. There are restored mosques, mausoleums and other medieval Islamic architecture to explore, street murals, and a cultural center that hosts artsy events and concerts, as well as walking tours with local guides. It’s also a chance to see Egyptian life up close in a way that our tour didn’t manage.
Maybe I need to go back to Cairo after all.
[1] Or possibly on the right.
[2] Many of the sources I looked at described the region as a group of cemeteries and necropolises. I immediately headed down a little rabbit hole to find out what the difference is between the two. As best I can tell, a necropolis is a large elaborate cemetery, usually attached to an ancient city.
[3] Over the coming days, we were introduced to many examples of people living in or near the ruins of ancient temples that had been half-buried by the sand. And why not? Ancient monuments were really well built—thanks to the back-breaking labor of thousands.
Moreover, stone is hard to come by in the desert. Most of the stone used in ancient Egypt was cut from sandstone quarries in the Silsila Mountains (Gebel Silsila) on either side of the Nile and then floated down river to Luxor. Gebel Silsila was also an important center for the cult of the Nile. The ancient Egyptians made sacrifices at this point of the river at the time of the yearly floods to ensure the fertility of the land. As a result, the quarries are home to shrines of all sizes and memorial stelae.
The west bank of Gebel Silsila is open to tourists. Alas, we saw it only in passing from the boat. (See downside of traveling with a tour, above)
But I digress.
[4] More on papyrus in a later post.