“He was born around 1303 BC and at age fourteen, Ramesses was appointed Prince Regent by his father Seti I. He is believed to have taken the throne in his early 20s and to have ruled Egypt for 66 years, from 1279 BC to 1213 BC. On his death, he was buried in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, his body was later moved to a royal cache . For the last decades of his life, Ramesses II was essentially crippled with arthritis and walked with a hunched back. His successors and later Egyptians called him the "Great Ancestor."”
The old man looked immersed in his own world, oblivious to the numerous faces that stared at him. He was visibly dead, but the skin tight over his sunken cheeks and the yellowing hair bore traces of life. I would have walked past him unimpressed. Then, there was a moment, when the years struck me. And I looked at the face through the three thousand years.
The Royal mummy room of the Egyptian museum of Cairo houses eleven pharaohs and queens from 1650 to 940 BCE. They lie there stripped off their grand lives, with their battle wounds and dental ailments laid bare for public scrutiny. One cannot but feel an unexplainable sadness. It could be for the folly of our times, for the casual manner in which we took them out of their eternal abodes; tombs that had sweated out (often out of their lives) thousands of labourers and architects and goldsmiths and sculptors.
The Train to Cairo…
Rajesh is my brother Mathew’s schoolmate. He is a chemical engineer and is in Alexandria on a project since the last three months. Strangely we seem to be the only malayalees in the city. We were to go the museum together. He had already seen it and thought I should not miss it.
The Masr train station has trains leaving to Cairo every hour. We were to catch the 8 o’ clock train. I was all ready when I was informed that from that day the clocks had turned an hour behind. It took me the hour I gained to comprehend why 8 o’clock was now 7 o’clock.
After his enquires after Amitabh Bachchan the cab driver dropped me off at the station. Masr and the other stations on the way to Cairo are strikingly similar to those in India. So much so, that I almost expected the ‘Railway Mazdoor Union slogans to appear on the walls at any moment. Once, these rails undoubtedly were conduits for the cotton factories of Alexandria once housed in the gray buildings with their dusty signboards that I see around.
The railway tracks and stations are one of the very few things that look similar in different parts of India. They look superimposed upon a jigsaw puzzle that was made all wrong. Now, if one of the trains from an Egyptian station take me all the way to Gwalior I would not be very surprised.
Unlike Delhi, the difference between the outskirts and the city of Cairo is not glaring. While there are indications of displacement, it does not look as if the city is forcibly pushing people to its fringes. The canals and branches of Nile have filled the distance from Alexandria to Cairo with patches of green. One either side of the tract fields of grain and vegetables can be seen.
La Museè
From Midan Ramses railway station, the Cairo Metro takes you directly to Midan Tahrir, the house of the Cairo museum since 1902.
From the outside, the red two floor building does not give a fair estimate of its collection. It has in its possession over 1, 00,000 items ranging from the Old Kingdom to the times of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately, the number is too large, that artifacts that are thousands of years old pile up without labels in obscure corners.
I cannot do justice if I try to describe all that I saw. The five hours I spend there was just enough to appreciate the sheer number of artifacts. An entire section is for mummified animals. They range from beetles to cows. One ‘mummy’ crocodile had a baby croc in her mouth! The beetles are not the flesh eating monsters of the ‘Mummy returns’. All they do is move around pushing a huge dung ball which the Egyptians thought was the solar disc… They obviously thought there was a huge beetle somewhere that was rolling the sun about for fun!!
The most celebrated finds are the collections from the tomb of Tutenkhamun. It will take quite a few visits to believe that the multiple gold sarcophagi, the gilded chambers, the ornate bed, well, a quarter of the space of the entire museum were all meant for the posterity of the boy- pharaoh. The time of Tutenkhamun, it is believed, was one of turbulence and his death was followed by a major regime change. Some are of the opinion that all that symbolized the authority of the earlier regime were buried with the young pharaoh. It is possible that he was assisted towards a speedy afterlife.
Museums have a closing time. It is all a jumble in my mind now- Nefretiti in a Venus attitude and Pharaohs with Greek curls falling on their foreheads…
But then, I have with me all those centuries
The old man looked immersed in his own world, oblivious to the numerous faces that stared at him. He was visibly dead, but the skin tight over his sunken cheeks and the yellowing hair bore traces of life. I would have walked past him unimpressed. Then, there was a moment, when the years struck me. And I looked at the face through the three thousand years.
The Royal mummy room of the Egyptian museum of Cairo houses eleven pharaohs and queens from 1650 to 940 BCE. They lie there stripped off their grand lives, with their battle wounds and dental ailments laid bare for public scrutiny. One cannot but feel an unexplainable sadness. It could be for the folly of our times, for the casual manner in which we took them out of their eternal abodes; tombs that had sweated out (often out of their lives) thousands of labourers and architects and goldsmiths and sculptors.
The Train to Cairo…
Rajesh is my brother Mathew’s schoolmate. He is a chemical engineer and is in Alexandria on a project since the last three months. Strangely we seem to be the only malayalees in the city. We were to go the museum together. He had already seen it and thought I should not miss it.
The Masr train station has trains leaving to Cairo every hour. We were to catch the 8 o’ clock train. I was all ready when I was informed that from that day the clocks had turned an hour behind. It took me the hour I gained to comprehend why 8 o’clock was now 7 o’clock.
After his enquires after Amitabh Bachchan the cab driver dropped me off at the station. Masr and the other stations on the way to Cairo are strikingly similar to those in India. So much so, that I almost expected the ‘Railway Mazdoor Union slogans to appear on the walls at any moment. Once, these rails undoubtedly were conduits for the cotton factories of Alexandria once housed in the gray buildings with their dusty signboards that I see around.
The railway tracks and stations are one of the very few things that look similar in different parts of India. They look superimposed upon a jigsaw puzzle that was made all wrong. Now, if one of the trains from an Egyptian station take me all the way to Gwalior I would not be very surprised.
Unlike Delhi, the difference between the outskirts and the city of Cairo is not glaring. While there are indications of displacement, it does not look as if the city is forcibly pushing people to its fringes. The canals and branches of Nile have filled the distance from Alexandria to Cairo with patches of green. One either side of the tract fields of grain and vegetables can be seen.
La Museè
From Midan Ramses railway station, the Cairo Metro takes you directly to Midan Tahrir, the house of the Cairo museum since 1902.
From the outside, the red two floor building does not give a fair estimate of its collection. It has in its possession over 1, 00,000 items ranging from the Old Kingdom to the times of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately, the number is too large, that artifacts that are thousands of years old pile up without labels in obscure corners.
I cannot do justice if I try to describe all that I saw. The five hours I spend there was just enough to appreciate the sheer number of artifacts. An entire section is for mummified animals. They range from beetles to cows. One ‘mummy’ crocodile had a baby croc in her mouth! The beetles are not the flesh eating monsters of the ‘Mummy returns’. All they do is move around pushing a huge dung ball which the Egyptians thought was the solar disc… They obviously thought there was a huge beetle somewhere that was rolling the sun about for fun!!
The most celebrated finds are the collections from the tomb of Tutenkhamun. It will take quite a few visits to believe that the multiple gold sarcophagi, the gilded chambers, the ornate bed, well, a quarter of the space of the entire museum were all meant for the posterity of the boy- pharaoh. The time of Tutenkhamun, it is believed, was one of turbulence and his death was followed by a major regime change. Some are of the opinion that all that symbolized the authority of the earlier regime were buried with the young pharaoh. It is possible that he was assisted towards a speedy afterlife.
Museums have a closing time. It is all a jumble in my mind now- Nefretiti in a Venus attitude and Pharaohs with Greek curls falling on their foreheads…
But then, I have with me all those centuries
Alexandria has this culture of coffee shops that open in the night. These are roadside shops. At night they set out chairs all over the roadside and here you could have black tea/ coffee and smoke Sheesha. People sit there playing board games or chat for long idle hours. It is amazing, (except that its mostly a male place. But you see tourists or women accompanied with men. However once you are there people don’t bother whether you are a foreigner.) The sheesha is like hooka. There is water in the base and tobacco with embers on the top. It smells amazingly sweet. Even me, the non-smoker could not resist it. And will not in the future too!! When you are sitting there you feel like you have all the time in the world to do nothing.