When I could bear to peek, I saw traffic cops—not in ones or twos but in committees, set up at intersections and acting with the efficiency and decisiveness usual to committees. And I saw a driving school. What could the instruction be like? “No, no, Anwar, faster through the stop sign, and make your left from the far right lane.” Surely John Kifner, Chris Matthews, and NBC News are kidding when they use “Arab street” as a metaphor for anything in the Middle East. Or, considering the history of the Middle East, maybe they aren’t.
The bar at the Mena House Hotel, in Giza, has half a dozen floor-to-ceiling windows, and the view of the Great Pyramid of Khufu fills them all. A number of people were in the bar. Unfortunately for business, they all worked there. Several waiters craned their necks, trying to catch my eye. Across the roomful of empty tables a musical trio abandoned their classical repertoire and began cracking one another up with jazz noodlings of “Woman in Love.” Out in the lobby, by the front door, was an unattended metal detector. Every now and then it emitted a merry buzz, and everyone in the bar looked up hopefully, only to see another idle taxi driver on his way to the men’s room.
I wandered across the street to the pyramid complex, now closed for the evening. Behind a police station was a stable yard with horses and camels kept for foreign visitors who, in better times, when there are foreign visitors, want a Sheik of VisaCard moment on their home videos. There I met Mousa, who presented himself, in so many words, as the Night Mayor of Khufu. He promised a forbidden after-hours tour.
“Can we climb to the top?” I asked.
“It is forbidden.”
We walked through an alley, past a large hole in the wall that surrounds the pyramid complex. “Japanese tourists did this,” said Mousa, “to climb to the top.” Has anyone had any success understanding Japanese culture?
Mousa worked as an unlicensed guide from eight at night until two-thirty in the morning. He supported, he said, his father, his wife, three daughters, his sister whose husband had died, and his sister’s child. “I must tell my father there is one tourist in Egypt,” said Mousa.
I asked him about the September 11 terrorist attacks. “Whoever does this ruins my life,” said Mousa. “I do not know who does this.”
Perhaps taking my silence as a rebuke, Mousa continued, “Maybe Osama bin Laden does this.” He warmed to his theme. “Osama bin Laden does the killing in Luxor.” Mousa was referring to the murder of fifty-eight tourists at the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, in November 1997. And Mousa may have had a point. According to Egyptian police, one of the killers, Midhat Mohammed Abdel-Rahman, had traveled to Afghanistan and Sudan for terrorist training. “Osama lives in Egypt before,” Mousa said. (Maybe not, but the family business, Binladen Brothers for Contracting and Industry, employs forty thousand Egyptians.) “And has no respect for Egypt. He tries to destroy our country.”
We walked across the outskirts of the village of Nazlet as-Samaan. The people who helped with the building of the pyramids once lived here. Now the people who help with the gawking do. We went behind the Sphinx into the quarry where pyramid makings were cut, forty-six hundred years ago, and climbed to the edge of the Giza Plateau. There was Khufu—immense, 449 feet high, almost exactly 745 feet on each side.
The stones aren’t as big as those the Hebrews in The Ten Commandments hauled across the movie screen. The real blocks of granite and limestone are about the size of industrial air-conditioning units on strip-mall roofs. They look depressingly unfake. You can imagine the awful labor of heaving and pulling these rocks—2.3 million of them, according to Mousa.
There is a question that less sophisticated Americans ask (and more sophisticated Americans would like to): Why are the people in the Middle East so crazy? Here, at the pyramids, was an answer from the earliest days of civilization: people have always been crazy.
A certain amount of craziness, if not possessed already, can be acquired trying to walk in Cairo. The city is well supplied with sidewalks, but they just take you around the block. You can’t step off them because of the traffic. The locals manage to cross streets. I began thinking that Cairenes employ some chapter of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, which I missed when I was a hippie, that tells them how to keep going after they’ve been squashed between two trucks.
It took me forty-five minutes to cross the Shari El Corniche to get to the Nile embankment—and then, rather than try it again, I hiked almost a mile to what I thought was a walkway overpass. It wasn’t an overpass. It was a stairway for pedestrian access to one of Cairo’s few stretches of expressway. I guess this was installed for those bored with ordinary Cairo jaywalking: a sort of double-black-diamond run for the Cairo shoe slalom. Later, in a taxi on this same expressway, my driver missed an exit and backed up to it from somewhere beyond the next one.
Cairo’s buildings are Cairo’s traffic in concrete. Every structure seems halfway through construction or halfway through demolition, and some seem to be undergoing both. This is modern Cairo. You can find old stones in the town if you let your tour guide drag you to them. My tour guide, Peter, did his best to show me a first-century Roman fort, the ninth-century mosque of Ibn Tulun, and Saladin’s twelfth-century citadel. But even the pyramids are as beside the point in Cairo as the Dutch wall is on Wall Street. Essentially all of Cairo is modern. The population was only 570,100 in 1897. The number of residents has more than tripled in the past twenty-five years. I saw a cement truck, barrel turning, load ready to pour, driving down a Cairo street at two o’clock in the morning.
The upthrustings and downtearings in central Cairo’s business district look the way they do in every busy place. Or they would if you could see them behind the profusion of blimp-sized billboards that look the way they do in every busy place. As it turns out, the Nile is just a river in Egypt—not nearly as wide as the Hudson River at the George Washington Bridge. Cairo’s rich have river views and live, as most rich do nowadays, in apartment houses of faceless effrontery. The only apparent difference from the apartments of the American rich with river views is that in the Cairo apartments every single room has a huge chandelier.
But the emblematic building of Cairo is the small tower block—five or six stories designed in a fashion so functional that the Bauhaus architects were lapdogs of ornamentalism by comparison. Slab floors are supported by reinforced-concrete posts and beams, like the skeletons of timber-frame colonial farmhouses—and, like colonial farmhouses, the tower blocks tend sometimes to the rhomboid. The spaces between the posts are filled with jumbles of approximately brick-shaped bricks and punctuated, apparently at random, with little windows and balconies. The outside edges of poured-concrete staircases poke through the masonry, their runs and risers making zigzag patterns. Dried oozes of mortar cling to the brickwork. Water pipes and electric wires are tacked onto the outside walls as if in halfhearted, rust-staining homage to the Pompidou Center.
In Europe these myriad domiciles would look like self-storage units for the urban proletariat. In Egypt, concrete mosques are crammed between the tenements and festooned with colored lights—as if for Christmas decoration, except no red, just the green of Islam. Commerce hums on the ground floors in shops and restaurants, one called Pizza Hat. Roofs are adorned with the festive dishware of satellite TV. The walls of the little balconies are plastered and painted blindingly cheerful shades of swimming-pool blue and lawn-chemical green.
“Plain exteriors,” said Peter, “mean less taxes to the government. Interiors are very often elaborate.” And peering into bright living rooms, I could see another emblematic Cairo item—the astonishingly ugly sofa. An ideal Egyptian davenport has two Fontainebleaus’ (the one in France and the one in Miami) worth of carving and gilt and is upholstered in plush, petit point, plaid, and paisley as if Donald Trump and Madame Pompadour and Queen Victoria and the Doors had gotten together to start a decorating firm. Often there’s a pair of matching chairs.
You see the astonishingly ugly sofa everywhere—in the homes of the we
ll-off and the otherwise, in hotel lobbies, office reception areas, furniture-store windows (of course), and, most spectacularly, on Egyptian television sitcom sets. One actor sits down on it and makes an exasperated face while the other actors gesticulate comically. I couldn’t understand what was going on in Egyptian sitcoms, but I could tell it was more charming than Montel Williams.
I got to watch a lot of Egyptian TV, owing to a miscalculation in my attempt at cultural understanding. I’d arrived in Egypt in early December, in the middle of Ramadan. Not that Ramadan itself is hard to understand. It’s a kind of Lent or extended Yom Kippur, with fasting from sunrise to sunset. Nothing is supposed to pass the lips, not even a smoke or a sip of water. And Egyptians, at least in public, observe the rules. Clubs and discos are closed. Coffeehouses are empty. People in airport lounges are reading the Koran aloud. I was changing money when the call to midday prayer came from the PA system of the local mosque. The bank guard put his rifle aside, unrolled a rug, and performed his devotions. Fortunately, bank robbers were as pious and made no depredations. But Ramadan also has the aspect of a monthlong Thanksgiving dinner with the family. When the sun goes down, everyone rushes home for the iftar feast. Another big meal, suhour, is served before dawn. There’s a bit of Christmas, too, with shopping for toys and clothes to be given to children during the three days of Eid al-fitr, when the fasting is over. Stores are open at all hours of the night, and folks are out in the streets at three and four in the morning, children in tow. I’d been in Egypt for a week before I realized I was a diurnal creature in a nocturnal biosystem.
During the hours of daylight, Egyptians are—considering that they’re hungry, thirsty, and really want a cigarette—remarkably cheerful. That is, when they’re awake. People sleep late. Arriving in Egypt during Ramadan is like arriving in an American small town on a holiday weekend about the time that the bowl games come on. Ramadan is, in fact, Egypt’s peak television-viewing period. “Best TV Land is in Ramadan,” I heard an announcer say as I surfed past what might have been an Arabic version of Late Night with Conan O’Brien. The celebrity guests were sitting on an astonishingly ugly sofa.
The effusive, jolly ugliness of furniture suits a city that should be depressing but isn’t. And the city should be squalid, too. It’s an impoverished metropolis with a population density three times New York’s. But Cairo is clean—if you don’t count a sky that ranges in color from cheap-motel bedsheet to frightening diaper.
There’s little begging, although plenty of Whereyoufrom Youbuypostcardokay? if you look like a tourist, and I do. Nobody is living on the street. The homeless, Peter explained, have teamed up with the lifeless. The city’s huge Eastern and Southern Cemeteries are filled with house-sized mausoleums used as houses. The Egyptian government, surrendering to the perennial Cairo housing shortage, has provided the cemeteries with a modicum of water and electricity—a humane version of American big cities’ just giving up and getting Target to provide the homeless with snappy Michael Graves-designed trash bags to sleep under.
According to Peter, there are postmortem sublets in the so-called City of the Dead. The tenant of record’s heirs charge rent to the viable occupants, who have to make themselves scarce on holidays and special occasions, when bereaved families come to picnic or even spend the night with the deceased. Peter said there have been squatters among the tombs since the fourteenth century. But the taste for elaborate mausoleums goes back further in Egypt—and so, maybe, do the squats. Perhaps disaffected experimental colossus carvers, young barley-beer addicts, and aspiring scribes with papyrus sheets full of edgy new hieroglyphics had crash pads in the Great Pyramid of Khufu.
Peter and I went ten miles south to Memphis, the capital of Egypt during most of pharaonic times. For three and a half millennia Memphis was the most important city in the country. Then, in the tenth century, the Fatimid general Jauhar al Rumi pillaged its stones to build Cairo. The dikes were neglected. And now Memphis is gone beneath the silt of the Nile.
But the former capital’s necropolis, Saqqara, survives, marked by the Step Pyramid of Djoser. The Step Pyramid was completed about 2635 B.C. Peter said, “This was the world’s first stone building.”
I said, “In a country that’s nothing but stone, with not a tree for miles, surely somebody …”
“The ancient Egyptians,” Peter said, “built their houses out of mud and their tombs out of stone—to last for eternity.” Most of Saqqara has collapsed into rubble.
Nearby is the Bent Pyramid. “This was the first pyramid of the true smooth-sided type,” Peter said. To me it looked like a monument to middle-aged adultery—an affair begun with an aggressive angle of attack that couldn’t be maintained. Apparently, building a pyramid was less straightforwardly Herculean than one might think. Peter explained, though not in these words, that there was more to it than making the top pointy so that the ancient Egyptians would know when to stop. Peter said the craft of pyramid building required a hundred years to perfect, leaving five pharaohs under large but irregular piles of stuff.
We went into the tomb of Mereruka, son-in-law of Pharaoh Teti, who reigned from 2355 to 2343 B.C. This tomb was a mastaba, a flat-roofed stone building, with thirty-three rooms. Peter claimed that only royals were allowed to depict the gods in their burial chambers, so Mereruka decorated his with scenes from daily life. And what a life. Carved onto the walls is a nice-looking family with plenty of household help. Frequent gourmet meals are served. There’s surround-sound lute playing, many buff dancing girls, and goldsmiths coming up with something to placate the missus. Packs of happy naked kids—it must have been a progressive day-care center—play tug-of-war and Johnny-on-the-pony. Travel is as adventurous as anything in an Abercrombie & Kent brochure. Mereruka is shown spearing hippos (probably the bungee-jumping of his day). And one whole wall is devoted to a lively illustration of revenue enhancement. Serf personnel are—to put it in Enron terms—allowing their 401(k)s to be used to purchase the corporation’s own stock (at the urging of supervisors with sticks).
Mereruka did well for himself while his wife’s dad was running the show. I was looking at a recognizable yuppie paradise. Nothing here would have been strange to the Reagan merger-and-acquisition years or the dot-com boom. All it lacked was golf.
And yet I was also looking at thirty-three rooms of tomb, every one of which was to be filled with custom-made furniture, precious jewels, designer-label kilts and sandals, supermodel-endorsed eye kohl, vintage grand-cru palm-sap wine, and enough meals-to-go to last forever, not to mention archaeological treasures and priceless items of ancient Egyptian art. Plus there was that mummification, which probably cost more than a year at a spa.
Mereruka had invested the proceeds of his peak earning years in worm’s meat. I was standing in his Aspen ski lodge, his Hamptons beach house, his Gulfstream jet, the professional sports team he never owned, the college education of his kids. (And in the end, Mereruka’s tomb was never finished. Teti’s successor, Pepy I, may have been one of those churlish brothers-in-law determined to get the deadwood out of the family business.)
There’s a temptation to think that understating an ancient culture is easier, or at least less hectic, than understanding its contemporary offspring. The ancient culture holds still for inspection and doesn’t produce new, confusing events such as a fresh episode of Survivor just after three thousand people were voted off the island of Manhattan.
But giant burial vaults can’t have been an economically efficient investment of surplus capital. Riches could have been channeled into more productive use. Channeled literally, as in digging a canal across the flatland between the Nile Delta and the Gulf of Suez. But none was dug until after Darius, the Persian emperor, had conquered Egypt, in the sixth century B.C. Instead, when pharaohs wanted to trade along the Red Sea coast, they dismantled their boats, hauled them through the eastern desert, and put them back together. The Egyptians did not smelt iron. They didn’t even discover bronze until the Middle Kingdom, a thousand
years after the civilization was founded. Irrigation was accomplished with buckets on the ends of long levers or by carrying pots slung from yokes. The waterwheel wasn’t introduced until the Persian invasion. And before the Persians there wasn’t such a thing as money. The ancient Egyptian technological innovation of note (besides the enormous triangular four-sided sepulcher stack) was papyrus paper. According to the Egyptologist Cyril Aldred, the ready availability of paper “made the highly organized Egyptian state possible,” for the privilege of living in which the Egyptian peasantry paid 50 percent of its produce in taxes.
Even so, I felt that I emerged from Mereruka’s tomb into a poorer, more woebegone country. Of course, I didn’t. Egypt today has a per capita gross domestic product of $3,600. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that before the Industrial Revolution, world per capita GDP was about $650 (in 1990 dollars). In 1820 Great Britain was the richest country on earth, with a per capita GDP of only $1,756. In wealth-per-person terms, merrie olde England was a Ghana. The ancient world seems rich to us because its DVDs of Sex and the City have survived rather than its kinescopes of The Honeymooners. And disparities in income, so shocking to our contemporary sensibilities, can’t have been less. Consider the negative net worth of the slaves. They didn’t have a title to, or even a mortgage on, themselves.
That said, in the fields and palm groves along the Nile are low mud houses of a kind unchanged since the days of Teti and Pepy. Identical homes are on display in miniature at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo—part of the LEGOLAND of peasantry and servitude that was placed as an offering in a pharaoh’s crypt.
These Nile-side domiciles, in contrast to the City of the Dead, have been supplied with few electrical wires. Running water has in fact been taken away. Nile floods are now contained by the Aswan High Dam, and Egypt’s fellaheen must use commercial fertilizer to do the job that muck did for eons.
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