The Museum, the Mosque, and the ATM

The Museum, the Mosque, and the ATM
Abdul met me the next morning and took me to the Cairo Museum. Of course the foreign visitor admission was not covered by the tour price but I was almost becoming accustomed to that.
I, long ago, learned that you get out of a subject what effort you invest. My knowledge of Egyptology is cursory in that I know the names of four or five pharaohs and little more. Going into this museum and enjoying it would be in direct proportion to what knowledge I carried. But with Abdul with me, a few doors of information opened that I hadn’t known about.
He showed me a stele on which a pharaoh’s victories were listed. As I recall this was made of granite and since seeing the stele, I’ve read that had I looked at the reverse side, I’d have seen that the device had been taken from earlier pharaoh’s tomb or temple and recycled. Why not write on both sides of the page? The later pharaoh, Merneptah, had bested a list of opponents but one victory stood out since it was darkened by the oil in the hand by being touched over the years. Merneptah said that he had destroyed and dispersed the Jews. To be precise, “Israel is wasted, bare of seed.” I need to do some more reading on this fellow since this is the “second source” as far as the existence of Jews, the Old Testament being the first. Abdul said that what this could mean was that Merneptah may have been the pharaoh of Exodus. The darken hieroglyphics were not caused just by hands of Jews and Christians touching the stone. The Moslems are very interested in the account left by Moses and Mohammad. I’m writing this in Alexandria. There’s a good library just down the street. I must look up Merneptah. (Since I wrote this, I did find mention of Merneptah, not in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is incomplete, but on Wikipedia. The date of the hieroglyphics on the purloined stele was 1207 BC. The source comes from the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt edited by Ian Shaw but the article was authored by Jacobus Van Dijk, page 302.)
The museum is very large and with so much to distract one, I don’t remember seeing much on Rameses II but Amenhotep IV a.k.a. Akhenaton shared a room with his beautiful wife, Nefrititi. This is the first person in recorded history (carved in stone) who believed in one god. It is something of a stretch to connect his nominee, Ra, the sun, with Jehovah but then my grasp of the religious situation in these early times is shaky. This pharaoh cut a different figure in other ways as well. He allowed himself to be depicted with his wife and children in an informal manner, which had not been done before or since. Furthermore while pharaohs are depicted as looking as much alike as peas in a pod, one glance at Akhenaton and you don’t forget him. His face was longer than even El Greco would have stretched it. His eyes were more oriental than western, looking down a long nose and over thick lips. While Rameses II and others where presented as flat bellied and broad shouldered, Amenhotep IV had a paunch and broad hips. Akhenaton was a one of a kind in his thinking as well as his appearance.
The star of the museum is the funerary objects found in the tomb of Tutankhamen in the 1922 by Howard Carter. The entire collection is on display except for the mummy itself. The pharaoh lies in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The objects are crafted to perfection.
A part of the museum that I did not go into, (another charge) is a section focusing on mummification. Some things I need to save for a second trip.
After the museum, Abdul took me to the “old quarter” of Cairo. This was a warren of passages leading this way and that. One gets overload after a while. We visited a papyrus paper factory and a synagogue. Until the creation of Israel, Cairo had a large population of Jews. Abdul said that there were now only about 150 now living here. The government takes care of the synagogue as part of their support of Egypt’s cultural heritage.
We also stopped in at a Coptic church. Christians generally think of Palestine as being “the holy land.” In this part of the world, the Coptic Church thinks of Egypt as being part of that area. Because of “the Slaughter of the Innocents,” Mary and Joseph did not return to Nazareth but moved on to Egypt where the story goes they stayed until it was safe to return to the Galilee. The Christians here believe they’ve discovered where the sacred family lived…right here in Cairo! You can google the date of Cairo’s founding, which is much later than the time of Christ but the local belief is that there was some kind of settlement that could support a carpenter and that it housed the Family. Of course the Coptic Church built a church over the site.
At the church, we talked theology. The Copts use icons as does all the Eastern Church. I found an Annunciation and explained that Gabriel was telling Mary that she would become “the Mother of God.” Abdul was generally quiet and collected. He jumped as if someone had stuck an ice cube in his ear. As with Tauheed I forget that there is little distance between Belief and Knowledge. So I stopped and told him that I was not trying to proselytize but merely explaining what several million people believe. He calmed down and said that he understood. Another icon showed Christ working the miracle of the loaves and fishes. I got that story confused with the wedding feast story where Jesus turned water into wine. “Jesus drank wine?!” I knew Moslems recognized the historical Jesus but have never gotten the particulars on the subject. When you are talking to a True Believer, whose faith prohibits alcohol, such a story as a prophet drinking is a jolt. Imagine if someone told a Jew that he could forget the manna, Moses was heavily into grass. It doesn’t fit with the traditional view.
As I remember there was a rather understated iconostas and behind that were three chapels. Abdul showed me into the one on the left from the congregations point of view. I didn’t expect to step behind the iconostas. It was time for me to be surprised. He pointed down a set of stairs which was said to the Holy Family's quarters during the years in Egypt.
After lunch we went to one of Cairo’s oldest mosques. Not surprising, the courtyard was enormous. Abdul showed me the indention in the wall which represented Mecca. We sat in the shade of the cloister and he told me that in Islam, Jesus was believed to be a major prophet on par with Moses. But that there is one God and Mohammad is his prophet. He said that Mary was a virgin but that God had created Jesus just as he had Adam, not necessarily out of dust but by willing Mary’s pregnancy. And in no way did Allah claim parentage of Jesus. Allah just made it happen.
The Cairo part of the tour was over and I needed to get ready for the train journey to Aswan in “Upper Egypt” but near the south border of the country. In America with the exception of the Yukon, the rivers run down hill which is south. To be “sold down the river” means among other things that you are going south. Upper and Lower Egypt divide at about Cairo. Anyhow I needed to pack to get ready. I needed some cash for “walking around money” as well.
A story thrives on conflict and adversity and what would I have to tell you if it weren’t for the invention of the ATM? All I had to do was draw a couple hundred dollars worth of Egyptian pounds, have a quiet supper prepared by the pleasant lady who worked the roof-top at the hotel, and meet my driver at the appointed hour in late evening. Life was good until I found a functional ATM.
Assuming this story lives until another generation of readers comes along, they might be interested in know how these machines behaved and misbehaved at an earlier time. There are two sets of controls on this particular machine. You punch the screen to get it to do some things as to select English as its operating language and for other matters, “Cancel,” “Enter,” and something else, you punch keys on a board below the screens. I tried to punch “Enter” on the screen and on the third try, the machine decided that I had dallied too long and swallowed my card. To be certain, the bank had closed fifteen minutes earlier. So here I was in downtown Cairo, having had my pocket picked again by the arrogance of the world banking institution! As my former wife used to say when angered, “I’m going to write to the government!”
Back at the hotel, I called Mr. Mattie. “No problem!” I shook. Isn’t that what the guillotine operator answered to Marie Antoinette when she accidentally stepped on his foot and said, “Excuse me!” But Mr. Mattie was as good as his word. He canceled the pick up and ticket for tonight’s train and told hotel manager not to charge me for another night. What had been depressing one moment had turned out to be a rest of twenty-four hours in another minute. “No problem.” I got a good night’s sleep and in the morning Ahmed came to get me to do battle with the bank. The Egyptians don’t screw around. I was out of the office with my card in hand and off to find another ATM that would not decide that I had taken too much time deciding which of the buttons to punch next. Ahmed, who spoke pretty good English, was a comer and I hope he goes far…as well as the bank employee who cut the nonsense and gave back my property.
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