Bearing in mind the huge range
of years which the title ‘From Dot to Cleopatra’ suggests - billions of
years - it may be surprising that the first chapter consists of only a
few pages yet covers all the time up to about 3000 BC, yet
the remainder of the book covers only the Ancient Egyptians over about
3000 years. Now that you have read Chapter One you may be wondering
“Well, what is true?”, which is really the reason why I have included
it. My intention was not, however, to confuse you or make you feel any
pointlessness in studying history; on the contrary it is designed to
give you a taste of forming your own conclusions, establishing your own
beliefs and starting you off on the fascinating journey of unravelling
the fact from the fiction. There are certainly a lot of gaps in our
knowledge of our past and the past of our planet and the universe, a lot
of ‘dark’ times about which we have little or no knowledge and have to
rely largely on guess work and theory. In addition there are very many
theories and beliefs and different interpretations of the solid
discoveries that have been made.
History and Egyptology
are both subjects which, like science, rely on observation, but in these
cases the observations are of ‘items’ left either purposefully or
accidentally, from the past. What these things mean is a different
matter. Like scientists we must look at what we have before us and form
a theory; then we must look at whatever else we know for sure and check
the theory out for consistency. If the facts don’t fit we have to
change the theory. Remember it was not so long ago that mankind
believed the Earth was flat and that we could fall off the end. That
was a theory based on observation. But there came a time when someone
sailed round the world and never did fall off and then we had to get rid
of the idea and believe the Earth was round.
There are
two types of past which I am talking about, the Prehistoric and the
Historic. History is the study of the past based on records kept, of
particular interest to us now; records of people, places, events,
activities and changes in society, the people and the rulers. In a
perfect world, history would be an unbroken record of what actually
happened. Unfortunately the world of man is never perfect: there are
plenty of gaps in our knowledge. For a start, before we could have
records we had to have some sort of writing or drawing in symbols. Then
we had to feel the need to record events for posterity. Then those
records had to survive until today, or at least until someone else could
find and rewrite them, in which case that person’s interpretation would
come into play.
Prehistory, then, is the study of the
time before records were kept. On a world scale this time finished on
different dates in different places. The Ancient Egyptians started
writing about 3000 BC, whereas in Britain and Europe it
came much later. Prehistory becomes history when we reach the stage in
the development of the civilisation where they considered dates
important. Before that we have to rely on what we can see now and on
what is recorded as having been seen in the past. Scientists such as
astronomers, cosmologists, cosmogonists, archaeologists and geologists
base their theories on what is seen to happen, what it looks like has
happened and what they postulate will happen, making the best guess
possible. These guesses may be reasonable inferences or vague ideas.
Sometimes there are so many observations which confirm the ideas that
the theories become accepted as facts.
Consider, for
instance, dinosaurs. We know that they existed, because plenty of bones
have been found. We can infer their appearances by imagining how the
bones fitted together and how they would be covered by muscle and skin.
We can guess at what they ate by looking at fossils found from the
same periods and looking at their teeth and comparing them with teeth of
other creatures. We can guess that they were not very clever from the
size of their brains, supposing that their brains were in their heads!
But do we know what colours they were? Do we know what they did each
day? Do we know why, after surviving for millions of years before any
recognisable form of man came along, they suddenly died out? When
dinosaurs roamed the world the ancestors of the creatures which would
one day walk and talk, write and sing and cook and use tools and so on,
that is us, were little more than clever little rodents living off
leftovers. We can only guess at the answers.
History,
being based on written records, should produce a more reliable picture
of the past, but, you will see, that is not always so. We have a lot of
modern day techniques such as radiocarbon dating, which enables us to
date organic materials by measuring the percentages of a particular
radio isotope of carbon, carbon 14 and we have computers to tabulate and
analyse finds. We have stone stele and papyrus scrolls to study, often
fragmented and needing rebuilding like a jigsaw puzzle. We have
literally thousands of finds to ponder on. We have the tombs with their
wall paintings and huge pyramids and temples with hieroglyphic
carvings. From all this we can get a fairly good picture of what was
happening.
The discovery of a stone tablet which you will
read about, now called the Rosetta stone, which was found in Egypt at a
place called Rosetta and, after about 20 years hard work deciphering it,
we have been able to start to read the thousands of inscriptions and
papyri. So we are able to create a picture of what happened all those
years ago. But there will always be questions unanswered. For
instance, imagine a stone tablet found out in the desert; it may hold
script including the name of the writer and information from which we
can date it - we cannot use radiocarbon dating on stone. Do we know
this was the name of the person who wrote it? Well we do know that
certain Pharaohs wrote their names - or rather got workmen to carve them
- on their predecessors’ monuments, thus making them appear to be
their’s instead. Sometimes even a royal name was chiselled out and a
new name put in, or left blank. Another occurrence could have been
when someone came along later and carved a name where there had been
none, the name he may have thought should have been there. Would we
know whether the name was the right one, carved at the time of building,
or even a thousand years later? There was a particular Egyptian
historian who became interested in the ‘Ancient Monuments’ some 2000
years after they were built and he is known to have visited the Step
Pyramid at Saqqara. Upon seeing the absence of the king’s name on one
of the other pyramids, he chiselled it out - Unas, or Wenis.
Imagine
another situation where a tomb or a hole in the ground is discovered
and in this is found a corpse together with some everyday objects such
as a comb, a doll, or a piece of jewellery. On one of these items there
is a name. Is this the name of the owner? Was this the name of the
living person whose body is in the grave? Often there is no way of
knowing. Certainly there have been finds in places where such items
would not normally be expected to occur. Maybe the item was
transported, lost or robbed, and buried or sold on. This type of
discovery was made in Giza near Cairo, at the site of the Great Pyramid.
The Great Pyramid did not seem to bear the name of the builder, which
would seem rather strange if it had been built as a monument to the
Pharaoh of the time. Many people have thought that the Great Pyramid
was built as the result of an egotistical urge of the Pharaoh to
proclaim his greatness. This argument has serious flaws; for a start
they say that the Pharaoh’s successor also built a pyramid, but if it
also was a result of ego then we may well ask why this Pharaoh built one
slightly smaller and why the next Pharaoh built his one smaller. But
how do we know who these Pharaohs were? Well, not far from the outside
of the Great Pyramid, deep within an underground shaft, was found a very
small statuette of the Pharaoh Cheops (now in Cairo Museum). In fact
this is the only representation of Cheops so far ever found and it was
upside down as if dropped. Based on this find it is generally accepted
that Cheops was the builder of the Great Pyramid, although the reasoning
is hardly reliable.
What about stories handed down
generation after generation before being written down? How reliable are
those? If you have ever played ‘Chinese whispers’ with about seven or
so people, you will have seen how repeated words can change. Over
hundreds or thousands of years the stories would certainly be subjected
to colourful embellishments and exaggerations. Even if an event was
recorded at the time, was that how it happened or simply how the writer
or his superior wanted it to look? Did Adam walk on Earth? What about
Osiris? Was there a great flood? If there was, did the people who
survived know what caused it, or only guess? Who selected what to
record and what to miss out?
In the Bible the name Egypt
is mentioned hundreds of times, yet in Egyptian history the name Israel
is hardly mentioned at all. In the Bible, Moses is mentioned and the
king is simply referred to as Pharaoh, so we do not know for sure which
one it was. Whoever it was, the Exodus of the Israelites from Egyptian
slavery must have been a momentous event, yet there is no record of it
at all in Egypt’s records and no mention of Moses. Maybe the defeated
Pharaoh, like most people, preferred to record his winnings to his
losses!
So Egyptology is vague. In this book I am trying
to show you the difference between what I know, what I am reasonably
sure of and what I can only guess at and leave the decision of what to
believe up to you. As you go on to read more you can always change your
mind and opinions without shame. There is not always a clear cut right
and wrong. For a moment think about the fantastic discoveries from the
Tomb of Tutankhamun in The Valley of the Kings. There was huge wealth
inside. We can reasonably believe that the items were put there due to
religious beliefs and stayed there because it was not found earlier!
Other Pharonic tombs, when rediscovered in modern times, mostly
contained nothing save a damaged mummy. We can surmise that this was
because they were robbed and we know that this was a big problem in the
time of Ramesses X. Since many of the Pharaohs were a lot richer than
Tutankhamun it is reasonable to say that their tombs would have
contained a lot more than his. So where did all that stuff go? Who
were the robbers? Poor men, workers maybe, corrupt officials, later
Pharaohs, foreign invaders? Nobody knows.
If you decide
to scratch a little deeper into the mysteries of Ancient Egypt you will
find every section an ever deepening intrigue before you; you will
realise the contradictions between authors both in opinion and so-called
fact. You will see whole dynasties moved about through hundreds of
years and anomalies such as tombs apparently built before the owner’s
birth. Many are the remaining mysteries. Yet sacred Egyptian writings
promise that one day all will be revealed.
Next I want to
mention the names of the Pharaohs and how we know them. Firstly
consider that we know the hieroglyphs were all consonants; there were no
real vowels. So if we get a name like, Rmsss, it could be Ramesses,
Romassis, Remosses and so on. So we are not entirely sure we are
pronouncing the name as it was pronounced in those days, but that really
is not very important since a name is merely a means of reference and
providing we keep to the same name for the same person, we should not
get too confused. Think of them as nicknames.
A lot of
the information we rely on was written by historians of the past; in
particular, we rely on them for lists of Pharaohs’ names. The first
person who wrote history was a son of the famous Ramesses II, called
Khaemwese, who lived about 1250 BC By this time the
pyramids were ancient and the Valley of the Kings old. Khaemwese was
actually a Magician and a High Priest of Ptah. He visited many tombs at
Saqqara and studied books in the Royal Library. He was the one who
chiselled the name of Unas on the pyramid at Saqqara and he also carved
a message saying that it was he who carved the name, “since it was not
found on the face of the pyramid, because the priest Khaemwese loved to
restore the monuments of Upper and Lower Egypt”.
In about 450 BC
a Greek writer called Herodotus visited Egypt and tried to sort out the
fact from the fiction, basing his work on the results of discussions
with people, in particular the priests. Herodotus had been born in
Halicarnassus and travelled a lot and in his later life wrote a book
called ‘The Histories’. He is now considered the ‘Father of History’
and we rely upon his reports, although he was sometimes inaccurate,
relying so much on hearsay. Some of his information, such as the time
when the Pharaoh Cheops was said to have closed the temples, has since
proved inaccurate, but his information on certain other Pharaohs, such
as Amasis, is all we have. In fact we know very little about Herodotus
himself. The lives of the writers were not recorded in great detail, or
at least none have been found. We know that Herodotus was the son of
Lyxes called Carian and Dryo. He seems to have been very much
influenced by the Inonian culture of Greece and, in fact, Ionic was the
language in which he wrote. His large volumes contained information on
the geography, history and ethnography of Egypt. His observations in
Egypt, at the time after the invasion by Cambyses, are invaluable.
Herodotus wrote of Egypt “Such animals as there are in Egypt, both wild
and tame, are held to be sacred”.
During the reign of Ptolemy II, there lived a priest called Manetho (305 - 285 BC)
and it is to him we owe the division of the Pharonic times into 31
dynasties. Manetho wrote in Greek and took his information from
surviving documents, now lost. He gave the ancient Pharaohs Greek
names. Some of the dynasties he listed were contemporaneous with each
other, there being one ruler in Upper Egypt and another in Lower Egypt.
These were competing dynasties.
As well as dividing the
large time span into dynasties modern day historians have divided it
into periods. These are the approximate dates of the different
periods:-
Archaic Period 3100 - 2686 BC
Old Kingdom 2686 - 2181 BC
First Intermediate Period 2181 - 2133 BC
Middle Kingdom 2133 - 1633 BC
Second Intermediate Period 1633 - 1567 BC
New Kingdom 1567 - 1085 BC
Third Intermediate Period 1085 - 750 BC
Late Period 750 - 323 BC
Ptolemaic Period 323 - 30 BC
As with most dates from ancient Egypt these are subjective.
During
Roman times tourists were able to move around and visit many of the
monuments, including the Pyramids and the Valley of the Kings and they
often left graffiti to commemorate their interest. What were in those
days simply uncalled-for scribbles on the monuments have become, to us,
historic inscriptions in themselves!
In 25 BC
a Greek called Strabo wrote 17 books called ‘Geographia’and although
mainly about geography, the last book provides some interesting
information. Strabo mentions the two huge statues of Amenophis III, on
the West Bank at Thebes, known as the ‘Colossi of Memnon’. They once
flanked a large mortuary temple. In 27 BC there was an
earthquake which cracked the monuments and led to a very strange and
eerie sound in the mornings. By the time Strabo arrived there were
tales of the singing colossi! However, it is now known that it was
caused by the morning temperature rise which made the insides of the
statues vibrate as the warm air passed through the cracks. Strabo
listed the names of towns, pyramids, tombs, temples and also made notes
on the Nilometer at Elephantine, near Aswan. A very useful 2000 years
old list.
In the years of the Roman occupation of Egypt there lived another historian, Pleny the Elder (27 -79 AD)
who wrote his ‘Historia Naturalis’, drawing from many older sources
which have since disappeared. He described the Sphinx and obelisks (one
of which was transported to Rome and stands there to this day) and
mentions some of the techniques of preparation of mummies.
A few years later Plutarch (50 - 120 AD)
wrote an account of the myth of Osiris and Isis. This is very fortunate
for us, since no original Egyptian version has survived until today.
At
the same time a Roman historian, Flavius Josephus, wrote his own work
using extracts from Manetho and making comments on Moses, the Exodus and
the Hyksos invasion.
In the following few centuries AD,
Egypt became a Christian country for a while. The Christians held no
respect whatsoever for the monuments, destroying many of the
inscriptions on temples and even scraping the paint off the walls of
tombs. The Christians considered the ancient religions of Egypt to be
evil. Monks who adapted tombs as their living quarters often defaced or
obliterated the wall paintings.
By the time the Arabs arrived in Egypt in the 7th century AD,
the population had forgotten all about the early civilisations and lost
the ability to read the hieroglyphs. The Arabs, like the Christians,
considered the monuments evil, thinking that the huge pyramids and
statues had been built by giants or magicians. They ignored them, except
when they wanted to destroy one, or take it apart for the materials for
their new buildings and mosques.
In more recent times, especially since Napoleon Bonaparte’s visit to Egypt in 1798 AD,
interest in the old cultures has regrown. There were several major
explorers and discoverers who have contributed a tremendous amount to
our knowledge. Belzoni (1778 - 1823 AD) discovered the
tomb of Aye, the magnificent tomb of Seti I and four others. He was
also responsible for opening the Pyramid of Khephren and the discovery
of the colossal statues of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel. His competitors,
John Lewis Burckhart (1784 - 1817 AD), Bernardino Drovetti (1775 - 1852 AD) and Henry Salt (1780 - 1827 AD)
were also very active in Egypt, often bringing items back to European
museums. Drovetti, an Italian, made a major find, the Turin Canon of
Kings.
Various people had tried to understand the hieroglyphs over the years. It was one William Warburton (1698 - 1779 AD),
who became the Bishop of Gloucester, who recognised that hieroglyphics
was in fact a written language and not just symbolic. But none of his
contemporaries liked his ideas much, sticking to the notion that it was a
symbolic script which would be impossible to understand.
In
1741 William Stukely, a doctor and famous antiquarian who was active at
Avebury and Salisbury (in England), founded the Egyptian Society in
London. Interest in ancient Egypt became more widespread. Stukely had
examined the hieroglyphs on a statue in Turin and concluded that they
were completely different from Chinese characters, which ‘experts’ were
claiming had been derived from the hieroglyphs. He claimed that it was a
symbolic script and that the hieroglyphics were beyond understanding.
Napoleon’s
troops discovered the Rosetta Stone in Egypt. Wax impressions of the
scripts (there were three on the stone - Hieroglyphs, Greek and
Hieratic, which was an easier and quicker everyday form of hieroglyphs
for everyday documents), were circulated amongst historians in Europe.
The Stone itself was brought to Britain after the British troops had
ousted Napoleon’s men from Egypt in 1801, following Nelson’s victory at
the Battle of Aboukir.
Thomas Young (1773 - 1824) became
fascinated by hieroglyphics and discovered the other written languages
of Ancient Egypt. He realised that hieroglyphs were in fact
alphabetical as well as ideogrammatic. He also suggested that the oval
shaped Cartouche contained Royal Names, which we now know is true.
A
major advance in our knowledge resulted from the decision made by Jean
François Champollion to try to decipher the hieroglyphs. He spent his
early years learning many languages and scripts, including Hebrew,
Sanskrit, Arabic, Parsi, Persian, Zend, Pali, Chaldean and Coptic. He
realised that the hieroglyphs were phonetic. When he eventually started
to understand the inscriptions they were able to find out more about
who owned what. In 1768 another great discoverer, James Bruce, had
found a tomb in the Valley of the Kings but was not able to discover
which Pharaoh it had belonged to. It turned out to have been Ramesses
III’s.
Robert Hay (1799 - 1863) constructed 49 volumes of
beautiful and detailed drawings of the monuments. This is now housed in
the British Museum. It was about this time that another keen
investigator of antiquity founded ‘Egyptology’ in England. This was
John Gardner Wilkinson, 1797 - 1875. Wilkinson excavated many tombs at
Thebes, adding much to knowledge of the Pharaohs.
Egypt
was now becoming a popular tourist attraction for the wealthy. Florence
Nightingale visited the monuments of Luxor in 1849. When she saw the
Colossus of Memnon on the west bank, she exclaimed that it did not look
so big after all, and that it was consistent with its surroundings
stating that she thought it is us who were the dwarves. Another who
visited to Egypt was Mark Twain in 1869.
A Frenchman called Auguste Mariette (1821 - 1881 AD)
became interested in Egyptology after his son, Nestor l’Hôte, had been
to Egypt with Champollion. He studied Egyptian writing and started
building catalogues of items in the museum in Boulogne. He was then
sent to Egypt himself, to collect rare manuscripts. He visited Saqqara
and noticed the head of a sphinx sticking out of the sand and, having
read Strabo’s descriptions of an avenue of Sphinxes, decided to start
digging. This resulted in the discovery of the avenue, several tombs
and the Serapeum where the Sacred Bulls had been buried. These were
sensational finds at the time, especially the finding of the mummified
bulls. Mariette decided he would love to open a museum in Egypt itself
and, after some political changes in Egypt, Mariette was offered the
post of Director of Ancient Monuments. This was the start of the first
Egyptian museum. He then initiated excavations all over Egypt, at
thirty-five different locations, including Dier el- Bahari, Karnak,
Thebes, Abydos, Esna and Elephantine. His work led to an international
exhibition including the precious jewellery of Queen Ahhotep, which was
found at Thebes. Unfortunately though, it may be that Mariette’s
enthusiasm for artefacts left a trail of damage and debris; seldom did
explorers take care with how they worked, often using explosives instead
of slower methods, to force entry, destroying untold valuable evidence
of the past.
Until 1870 nobody (in the modern world) knew
that Royal Mummies had been moved in the time of Ramesses X and XI, in
the Valley of the Kings. The mummies were simply assumed to be missing
or destroyed. It was Gaston Maspero (1846 - 1916 AD) who
rescued them after they had been discovered in a cache in 1871 by a
local villager called Ahmed Abd er-Rasul, accidentally, while he was
searching for a lost goat!
Since then there have been many Egyptologists working all over the country. People like Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie (1853 - 1942 AD) and Howard Carter (1874 - 1939 AD),
a student of Petrie, have made monumental discoveries and filled
museums in Egypt and around the world. There are 120,000 objects in the
National Museum in Cairo. One could spend weeks roaming the corridors
looking at statues, stele, small items, mummies, sarcophagi, papyri and
so on. But without a very good guide book and, at least some ideas of
who was who, one would probably be becoming more and more confused.
Petrie
discovered tombs at Abydos, information on the Pharaoh Akhenaten and
royal treasures from near the pyramid at Lahun. He also discovered over
two thousand predynastic graves at a very ancient site, Nagada and the
old city which had been given for the Greeks to live in, Naucratis.
Howard Carter discovered, of course, the incredible tomb of Tutankhamun,
amongst others, in the Valley of the Kings.
An American,
George Reisner (1867 - 1942) was responsible for finding the tomb of the
IVth dynasty Queen Hetepheres at Giza and the Valley temple of Menkaure
and mastaba graves of nobles on the same site.
Mummies
had become a valuable commodity in Europe and Asia, because people
believed they had medicinal properties, which led to the exportation of
mummies on a massive scale. One wonders which of the ancient Pharaohs
and nobles were eaten in Europe, to cure a wide range of ailments such
as coughs, nausea, ulcers, concussion and abscesses! The word mummy,
derived from the Persian for bitumen, was often confused with bitumen
itself. Even the King Francis I of France carried some ground up mummy,
mixed with rhubarb, to cure his aches and pains. In 1809 Queen
Victoria was given a gift of a mummy from the King of Persia. By the
18th century trade in mummies was so huge that it had to be made
illegal.
As for the names of the Pharaohs, we rely on several sources, which together still do not give us a complete list. These are:-
(a) Manetho, who wrote Greek versions of the names.
(b)
The Turin Canon of Kings, also known as the Turin Papyrus, now in the
Museum of Turin. This is a Hieratic papyrus from the time of Ramesses
II, which, although ruined gave us eighty to ninety Kings’ names.
(c) The Gallery of Lists in the Temple of Seti I at Abydos shows seventy-six ancestors of the Pharaoh Seti.
(d)
The Table of Karnak from the time of Tuthmosis III, discovered in 1825,
originally held sixty-one names but not all have survived to be read.
(e) The Table at Saqqara originally had fifty-seven names but only fifty are legible now.
(f)
The Palermo Stone, badly broken, held the names of the first five
dynasties and went back into pre-dynastic times, listing also the
lengths of the Pharaoh’s reigns. It was originally compiled in the
fifth dynasty. There are only five surviving pieces, now housed in
museums in Cairo, the Palermo Museum and in the private collection of
Petrie in the University College London.
Having several
lists to refer to has both enabled Egyptologists to try to make a
complete list and complicated matters further! This is because the
Pharaohs each had more than one name and different lists refer to
different names. In fact some finds previously attributed to two
different Pharaohs are now known to be the work of one with two
different names. Added to that is the fact that the ancient historians
used other different names, even Greek versions and it is names like
these that are often recognised today, like Cheops who was probably
called Khufu. The works of the ancient historians such as Manetho have
not survived, but were copied by later historians and not always copied
well. It is particularly confusing for the first and second dynasties -
dates are uncertain, names are changed, lengths of reigns are different
in different lists. The first few Pharaohs offer a very small amount
of evidence as to who they were exactly. We call the first Pharaoh
Menes, but his hieroglyphs reveal the name Narmer. We do not know
whether these names belonged to the same man or not. Before Narmer or
Menes we believe there was a great pre-dynastic conqueror called
Scorpion and after Narmer there was a Pharaoh now known as Hor-Aha.
These names may apply to one, two, three or four different Kings, or for
that matter even whole tribes. Apart from these names we actually know
very little about the individual Pharaohs. We know some were great
warriors and conquered other lands, whilst some seemed to have been
peacemakers. Yet others were weak and under the thumbs of noblemen.
One or two were very different, such as Akhenaten, who changed the
religion and was later regarded as a heretic. There are a few stories
which have come down to us from ancient times, which tell us that
so-and-so was a cruel king or a kind king. It seems that the Pharaohs
of dynasty four were quite cruel men, at the time of the building of the
massive pyramids of Giza, although there were very few slaves. Mostly
it seems that the local peoples worshipped the Pharaohs as gods, at
least in the very early periods. As I have said we know very little and
have to guess a lot.
Despite the vagueness and fuzziness
of Egyptology and the large lists of strange names, it is this
uncertainty which can lead to the fascination of unravelling it all. We
are talking of a period of time longer than we are since Jesus and,
apart from the Bible, there is little evidence of Him either. It can
sometimes be far more enjoyable than knowing for sure, just like the fun
of the jigsaw puzzle is in putting it all together.
Over
the years the tombs and monuments of Ancient Egypt have continually
suffered from tourists and explorers alike. From olden times finds have
been exported from Egypt, both for museums and private collections. As
well as removing and destroying mummies, deliberate damage was done to
tombs and monuments by Christians and Moslems. In more modern times
damage has been done accidentally by tourists. The fantastic tomb wall
paintings of Nefertari, for instance, has suffered terribly form the
results of thousands of tourists simply breathing! The salts in their
breath have started to crystallise on top of the paint and chemicals in
the rocks have crystallised under the paint, due to humidity. So the
beautiful images have started falling apart, which, fortunately in this
case, led to the closing of the tomb to the public and reparation work
by experts. Other problems are solved far less easily, or maybe not at
all, being caused by atmospheric pollution from 20th century factories.
What little rain falls around Giza today is acid rain. Bits have been
falling off the Sphinx, no longer hidden by sands, and have to be stuck
back on. Another point of interest here is the face of the Sphinx. In
all honesty it’s very ugly! It was actually badly damaged by invading
Mameluks who decided to use it to test their canons! It is amazing it
still stands at all, this ‘Father of Time’ as the Arabs call it.
Step Pyramid
If
you visit Egypt and pay entrance fees to museums or tombs and pyramids,
you can do so with the awareness that your money is going towards
saving these precious monuments from the ancient past. Once they have
gone they will never be built again!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/From-Dot-Cleopatra-Alun-Buffry-ebook/dp/B007I5N0I4
