Saqqara: Djoser’s Step Pyramid and Heb-Seb Court / Teti and Unas’ Pyramids: Pyramid Texts

Djoser’s Step Pyramid complex is amazing and a must see because of its uniqueness. (The following is more archaeological tid-bits than most of you want to know – but remember they are HUGE as far as Egyptology goes.  So, take them to cocktail parties to impress your friends.) Djoser’s complex was the only completed complex to have a Step Pyramid, Heb-Sed Court and Festival Temple, subsidiary mastaba instead of pyramid and serakh facade enclosure wall.  The only other time these features occurred was in the pyramid complex of Sekhemkhet, Djoser’s successor.  But Sekhemkhet died before his pyramid complex was finished.  So Djoser reigns supreme as the ONLY king to incorporate a Heb-Sed court into his funerary site.  Djoser’s Pyramid was the first large stone structure in the world and it was the first time in Ancient Egypt that the cult center was located next to the King’s burial site.

The entry colonade is a unique, unusual and slightly bizarre structure.  There are 40 columns that are reeded or thought to represent imitations of columns made of bound bunches of reeds.  The wall surrounding the entire pyramid complex was based on a funerary fort at Abydos. Inside the Step Pyramid are blue faience tiles representing reed matting.  They are gorgeous and are now in the Cairo Museum.

So why am I making such a big deal of the fact that Djoser created a Heb-Sed court in his Afterlife complex?  (Besides the fact that he was really the only one to do it.  Yes, it’s more significant than just him being a rebel.)  The Heb-Sed Court is the court in which the Pharaoh runs the Heb-Sed race during the royal jubilee festival.  During this ritual the king’s right to rule and his royal powers were renewed.  In this race, held thirty years into the Pharaohs rule, and sometimes sooner (especially with Pharaohs who had short reigns), the Pharaoh raced the Apis bull.

If the Pharaoh won, then he continued to be Pharaoh.  If not then well too bad for him, he was no longer virile enough to be king and it was the next guys turn to take a stab at it.  So, DID early Kings such as Den, Djer or Djoser ACTUALLY run this race?  Well, interestingly in the Heb-Sed court at Saqarra there are two boundary stones that would have been used as race markers.  Also, Djoser is depicted running the race on a false door relief.  Another odd point, a Pharaoh’s tomb is usually designed to help him bring to the Afterlife the things he loved in this life.  So, why would Djoser design his funerary complex as a Heb-Sed Court?  He would spend his Afterlife forever running the Heb-Sed race.  Sounds like something out of Homer.  Or maybe he just wanted to continually be reafirmed as King, forever.  Well, whatever floats your boat Djoser.

Not to be discounted at Saqqara are all the other fine burials and smaller 5th and 6th Dynasty Pyramids.  First stop is  Unas’ and Teti’s Pyramids and Causeways.  Unas’ and  Teti’s Pyramids were inscribed with Pyramid texts, the spells that the King used to successfully pass to the afterlife.  It was really cool to have studied the texts in my Heiroglyphics class and then be able to go to Teti’s Pyramid and read them!!  There are no pictures on the walls of either pyramid, just wall to ceilings inscriptions.  But, they are quite breathtaking, and definitely worth the visit.

How will we be remember by far-off archeologists and historians?

Ever wonder if the Romans or Ancient Egyptians thought about how they would be remembered?

Papyrus 66. Photo from Earlham University.

I’d be willing to bet the farm they did.  The Great Pyramid, the Colosseum, The Pantheon, Karnak.   The rulers were determined to make their stamp on history, to try and gain that illusive immortality (plus who wouldn’t want a giant stone edifice to themselves).  But, what about the everyday person just trying to make enough to scrape by each day?  These monuments gave them pride in their civilization and connected them to the gods, who in turn connected them to the ground they tilled, water they drank and food they ate.

The fact that hundreds upon hundreds of written documents survived from these civilizations is another reason we know so much about them and their legacy has carried on thousands of years after they ceased to exist.  Recently, Assyrian clay tablets were found in southeastern Turkey which give even greater insight into the nitty gritty of the inner workings and management of the Assyrian Empire.  And why is clay so great you ask?  Because clay lasts.  It lasts for a long, long time.   History helps us make a connection between our lives and our distant ancestors’ lives.  It helps us connect with where we came from way back in the day.  History is more relateable if you can relate to it in terms of your own life, which is where all these documents on day-to-day activities comes into play.

So now back to the original question – how will we be remembered?  How will those thousands of years from now connect to us?  We’ve surpassed the oral tradition, papyrus, clay, books and are now onto computers.  But are computers really superior in terms of preservation and achieving the immorality of being remembered?  Sure with today’s technology and being able to store information all sorts of places – computer, harddrive, the ether – it seems like nothing will get lost.  But this information is locked away, inaccessible unless one has our type of electricity, computer system, cords.  In some cases, the internet has to exist to access it.  And that’s all before you get to the challenge of deciphering a language that is no longer spoken or read.  Electricity can go out, the internet could crash forever wiping out all the data stored there, harddrives fail more often than we like to think. Yes, books can be burned, but they are instantly accessible to the information they contain hundreds or even thousands of years after they were written.  Are we placing too much reliance, faith, information in a system that archaeologists thousands of years from now my not be able to access?

Kindle. Photo from Wikipedia.

It’s not that the internet is a bad place to store information (I’m writing this blog after all and all you reading it are instantly reading it from all over the world).   It’s that hard copies of the materials are being phased out.  Look at the Kindle for instance.  I’ve met lots of people who have made their library completely digital, all of it store out in ether and in an 8 in x 6 in piece of plastic, wiring and chips.  Yes, there are people, like myself, who still love books.  But, there seems to be a paperless trend growing.  And paperless means inaccessibility unless you can still run the systems to access the data.

It’s hard to envision a time when the electronic systems we have in place won’t be accessible.  One could argue that whatever civilization follows ours will simply grow out of ours and the data and records of our civilization will get converted as this growth occurs into whatever format this new civilization is using.  Many would say that with globalization, airplanes, the internet; the world is too interconnected for one country to collapse and for all the information and records on that culture to be lost.  But I would argue that no one country in today’s world is it’s own civilization, rather all the cultures in our present world are one civilization.  Sure there are many distinctive difference’s, but with how interconnected the world has become we are one civilization.  As witnessed with the collapse of the US banks – if one fails, they all fail.

If you traveled back to Ancient Rome or Ancient Egypt and asked an aware, well-educated individual if they foresaw the complete and utter destruction of their civilization to the point where no part of it existed in the world today beyond magnificent piles of rubble, a dead language, and a few philosophical ideas and traditions that were adopted hundreds to thousands of years after its collapse, I’m sure they would think you were crazy.  Rome couldn’t fail, it had roads, a complex infrastructure, science and architecture and had conquered the known world.  But fall it did.  Ancient Egypt as one united civilization (as opposed to city states) lasted for 3,000 years, which is longer than Rome; longer than the United States, longer than Europe, longer than the Middle Ages, Rennaissance, Industrial Revolution and the modern age combined.  Yet it too collapsed; it’s language lots and it’s culture nothing but something to study and remember. The time from the computer age onward could easily become the Miocene Gap for Homo sapiens sapiens.  Instead, of a gap in knowledge caused by poor preservation conditions (not much is know about the hominids during this time, hence the gap) it’s caused by a lack of information and records saved in hardcopy.

It’s naive to believe we will always go on as we are now.  Or that the systems and technology we have created will last

Aged books. Photo from Carnegie Melon Library.

forever, will survive our collapse and will be passed on to future civilizations.  Maybe English or French or Chinese will be passed on to the next civilization, or maybe it won’t.  Even if it is passed on, will our technology be passed on in such a way that our records and information can still be accessed?  From studying ancient history, I can say it’s unlikely.  Our systems are too complex and require things that aren’t hardy enough to weather great catastrophe.  Think of trying to keep the internet running during the dark ages.

Future archaeologists wouldn’t be Dutch, Chinese, Somalian, Russian; they would be something completely different that grew out of the complete collapse of the countries, systems and structures in the world today.  Or maybe human colonists that come back to Earth from far away galaxies to discover that we finally did it – World War III with nukes.  And that all that’s left are a few sick humans and the steel shells of our once great civilization.

So what’s all this getting to?  Next time you download your favorite book to Kindle and throw out or sell the hard copy stop for a moment and contemplate how we will be remembered by archaeologists.  How we will be remembered and through what medium?  Or better yet, what a future archaeologist would think of you tossing away that easily accessible hardcopy.  I bet somewhere in the future there’s an archaeologist pulling on his hair in furry because there no accessible data on how the Irish government was run or what sort of literary materials were read in 21st century Germany.  Or maybe not, maybe he or she is pouring over Catch-22 or Chaucer or Obama’s Inauguration Speech or a 12 year-old’s diary trying to piece together what life in our civilization was like and who we were as a very complex and diverse people.

“Himiko” – the Primordial Universe Blob…Or what a naked baby photo of the Universe would look like

I was using a Facebook application to look at my 2009 yeary in terms of all my facebook status updates and came across

Himiko the Primordial Space Blob. Photo from Sky and Telescope. Photo credit Masami Ouchi & others.

one that I found interesting so though I would post it here.  It’s Himiko, the Primordial Universe Blob.  Unlike his cousins the primordial blobs that were around on Earth when it was just a tiny, winy planet; Himiko formed when the Universe was 800 million years old.  It’s a primordial blob that was cruising around the vacuum of space when space was still a spry pre-teen. Basically it’s an oober-cool primordial space blob; it’s like a naked baby photo of the universe.

Here’s the link to the article: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/43975492.html

Alexandria: The City of Alexander the Great

Alexandria, one of the prettiest sites Mr. The Great founded and the only place in Egypt where it snows, is located on the Mediterranean and is a plethora of Greco-Roman goodies.  From crawling through the labyrinth of catacombs under the city in search of my buddy Alex’s lost soma (tomb), to admiring Pompey’s Pillar (which was really built by Diocletian), to climbing around the site of the Pharos Lighthouse (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) which has been replace by the Citadel of Qaitbey – Alexandria and I really hit it off.  The city has a different feel than the rest of Egypt.  It is usually a little bit cooler due to the fact that it is a port town.  It’s more laid back than Cairo and has more of a Mediterranean than Arab vibe.

And there is weather!  I know, who thought I would be so happy to feel wind, see clouds, experience rain, and be able to breath the air without inhaling a lungful of smog!  But, after spending months living in Cairo, where every day (but the 3 days a year it rains) it is sunny, 90 – 100 degrees F, not a cloud in the sky, no wind and a thick blanket of smog; Alexandria seemed like another world.

The Greco-Roman museum had some nice pieces and was definitely worth the visit (and this from a Egyptology snob who snoodes most of Greco-Roman things because they’re so “young”).   There are also a number of Greco-Roman necropoli that are not connected to the catacombs.  These are good representations of Greco-Roman tombs, but not as interestingly carved as the tombs in the catacombs.  The Greco-Roman era was a time when people combined gods from different civilizations – just in case.  For example, one carving in the catacombs depicts Anubis with a snake tail and wearing Roman armor.  It’s about covering all your bases in a fast changing and expanding world.

You can do Alexandria in one full day, but if you have the time two days is ideal.  If you happen to get the urge to crawl into some dark, dank hole, wiggle your way through into an underground chamber, and then happen to stumble upon Mr. The Great’s tomb; drop me a line.  I’m an ace at tombs, plus I have a date with Alexander’s mummified remains.

Memphis: One of the Old Capitals of Ancient Egypt

There isn’t much left to see at Memphis since most of it, including the old Ancient Egyptian palace, is located under Cairo.  That’s the problem with continuing to build on the same spot for 5,000 years.  Memphis is located just beyond Abu Sir and across from Saqqara.  The small museum has rather nice pieces for its size.  There is a 26ft long alabaster sphinx of Amenhotep III, an ENORMOUS fallen collossus of Ramesses II (of course, Rameses couldn’t leave Memphis without atleast one collossus), stelae of Apris (Dyn 26 – uck, not my favorite) and a sarcophagus of Amenhotep I (Dyn 19).  Memphis is a great place, full of tremendous historic significance.  If you want a place seldom visited by tourists, off the beaten path, or this isn’t your first visit to Egypt, or you’re an Egyptology nut, then definitely visit Memphis.  But, if it isn’t, then your time would be better spent at all the other really cool stuff right around Cairo.  It is really easy though to lump Memphis in with Saqqara, Abu Sir (if it’s open – big ?), and Dahshur.