Egypt in the Still-Translucent Past
Oct. 4th, 2019 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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A client wanted a rush piece on (of all things!) Mughal Empire coins, so I spent a very pleasant day yesterday learning all about Shahrukhi, and silver rupees, and pure gold mohurs, and the odd numismatic quirks of the great Emperor Akbar who read the Mahabharat, Ramayan, Ved-Puran, and Gita for kicks even though he was a Muslim and lived in unimaginable opulence, with fist-sized rubies, diamonds, and emeralds for bling and golden elephant prods encrusted with walnut-sized pearls.
In the evening, I came across the news that they finally discovered Ptolemy IV’s tomb. The Ptolemies were low-rent Pharaohs, descended from one of Alexander the Great’s counselors—kinda like if Trump gave Rudy Giuliani Ukraine for his very own to rule, and Rudy begat a loser line of imperial Rudies.
Nothing particularly interesting in that tomb! Which is about what you’d expect from the tomb of a Ptolemy.
Still the old thrill ran through me.
As a kid, I was so absolutely obsessed with Greek and Egyptian mythology that in 1978, I took the last of my modeling money and ran off to Luxor for a month where I spent my days exploring Karnak Temple, Luxor Temple, and the Valleys of the Kings and the Nobles.
On, to find a travel agency that specializes in traveling backwards in time! And offers travel insurance.
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As a kid, I spent every Saturday either at the American Museum of Natural History, which was right around the corner from where I grew up, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was just across the park.This was long before museums started charging admission.
I traveled to Egypt with my friend Ann who these days is a highly respected HIV/AIDS scientist based in Seattle. Ann refuses to talk to me because she finds this era of her life highly embarrassing.
Some time, I should write up what I still remember from our Egyptian adventures, which were quite wild.
But as I am pressed for time, I will confine myself to three brief memories:
My intense discomfort in Tahrir Square! We’d gone to Cairo to see the Egyptian Museum, which in those days at least was absolutely fabulous, but apart from the museum, I absolutely loathed Cairo. It was filled with these incredibly scrawny, predatory-looking men in pajamas. And it was very clear that they hated us though in those days, I was far too solipsistic and politically ignorant to understand why.
I distinctly remember an elevated walkway around which thousands upon thousands of people milled counterclockwise in the harsh sunlight. And this is bizarre because I’ve since looked at photos of Tahrir Square: There is no elevated walkway.
Anyway, I kind of flipped out on that elevated walkway. I had this hallucination that I was a foreign protein, and that all of Egypt was having an antibody reaction against me, wanted to destroy me. No drugs were involved!We must have done the normal Cairo tourist things, too, because here is a picture of Ann with the Sphinx in the background. And I have some equally uninspiring snapshots of me against the Pyramids.
We’d had a better time in Alexandria where we’d been befriended by a group of students who were in love with the West and spoke perfect English and took us around to all the sites the tourists didn’t know about, rubble piles that were all that were left of the ancient, ancient past. The sites that tourists did know about were mostly relics of more-or-less recent colonial English occupation.
We took the train to Cairo. And by mistake, we got on the wrong train. We got on the train that the locals use! So we spent the entire 14-hour train ride cowering on the luggage rack, beating off the snaky hands of the afore-mentioned scrawny, predatory-looking men in pajamas with our umbrellas.
Once we got to Luxor, though, we had a great time. Luxor is—or was—a sleepy little village. At the Temple of Karnak, we befriended one of the engineers who was a Coptic Christian and who proposed that we visit his village on the banks of the Nile for a couple of days.
We agreed!
Egyptian travel in those days was strictly circumscribed. Perhaps it still is. So the only way we could visit our friend’s village was for him to smuggle us there in the trunk of his car.
The little Coptic Christian village was this utterly paradisiacal place with bulrushes and feluccas floating close to shore and a tiny ceramics factory from which I bought a bunch of ankhs.
For years, it was my custom to give one of those ankhs to anyone I loved.
I should have kept one for myself, right?
But then, I’ve never felt particularly loving toward myself.
Here is a picture of Ann and our Coptic benefactor. I’d guess now they had sex though the thought didn’t cross my mind back then. I was kind of willfully blind back then. A very useful strategy! It kept me safe from all sorts of things.Ann slept with so many people in those days that she’d given up referring to them by name! “My second Greek,” she’d say. Or, “my third Egyptian.”
Ann didn’t have much use for English native speakers.
###
In other news, bought the California plane tickets for me and RTT. Which set me back a depressing sum of cash.
“I’ve been really, really sick,” RTT told me.
“So have I,” I said.
I guess we’ve had the same cold
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Date: 2019-10-04 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-05 12:24 am (UTC)Or she took him to church. Which would be more like Ann.
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Date: 2019-10-05 12:50 am (UTC)