And more Ancient Egypt

My post about Luxor is below my post about the Prophet's Birthday, I guess because I started it Tuesday and finished it today. Just so y'all know.

Today I tagged along on an Egyptology field trip with my Grinnell friend, Michelle. It was a long day, and I am full of sand, and there is pyramid in my shoes.


Our first stop was Dashur, the pyramid field just outside Giza. You can tell that these pyramids are earlier than the Giza pyramids because they messed up on this one...this is the Bent Pyramid, and it started collapsing when it was halfway completed, so the builders had to change the angle. The professor called it "trial and error engineering". This is the pyramid with the most remaining limestone coating; the other pyramids were this smooth once, too.
At the same site we went inside the Red Pyramid, which looks similar to the Great Pyramids at Giza.


We had the site pretty much to ourselves; Dashur was opened only a few years ago, because it used to sit inside a military training facility. So even though we weren't supposed to take pictures, the guards didn't seem to care too much what we did...

So everyone took pictures. This is the ceiling inside the first chamber of the Red Pyramid (which is empty). Climbing inside a pyramid is, by the way, sweaty, dirty, suffocating, and smelly.

We traveled a bit father south to Meidum, which is also partly collapsed.

Most of us chose not to go inside the Meidum pyramid, because it was the same as the Red Pyramid. We did, however, go inside the burial chamber of the royal family, which was right next door. To get inside this one we had to use the tomb robber's tunnel, which required crawling through dirt, climbing a ladder, squeezing through holes, and walking across wooden planks. Here's the sarcophagus (empty).

After Meidum, we left the Nile Valley and drove through the desert to Faiyum Oasis, Egypt's largest oasis and one of the most fertile areas in the country. This is technically Middle Egypt (or Upper Egypt), whereas Cairo is in the Delta area, or Lower Egypt. All through Faiyum and in the Nile Valley outside of Cairo we saw fellaheen (farmers) driving donkeys, or wandering around their fields, and women washing clothes in canals, and tons of brick buildings sitting in between palm groves, painted in bright colors, roofed with palm leaves. Unfortunately I saw all this through a bus window, so I didn't get any good pictures.

We stopped at Hawara, another collapsing pyramid, before heading out of the oasis to Karanis, the ruins of a village dating to the time when Egypt was part of the Roman empire (about 2000 years ago, I think). This was possibly my favorite ancient site in Egypt so far.

Karanis was totally deserted, like many of the other sites we visited. It was just us and our entourage of 6 or 7 armed guards (another student had a good point: the guards might be sort of useless, because it's highly unlikely that anyone would attack such a remote tourist spot--plus there hasn't been any terrorist activity in the area for a long, long time. But it does give young men jobs, and joblessness is a big factor in creating terrorists, so maybe it isn't totally useless).

This was my first real glimpse of the Western desert.

It wouldn't be Egypt without some sort of strange contrast. Here's the huge lake in the middle of the oasis. Our side is green fields and the opposite side is unbroken desert. The lake is almost as salty as the Dead Sea.