Egyptology 101

When the novelist Virginia Woolf sought truth about certain problems that plague mankind, she went to the British Museum. So do millions every year, though generally for less elevated reasons. They stream into the sprawling neo-Greek temple in London’s primly Victorian Bloomsbury district to see the Magna Carta, the Elgin Marbles and, above all, the mummies.

The mummies are the ever-popular centerpiece of the museum’s vast Egyptian collection, 100,000 objects strong. The museum got its first embalmed Egyptian in 1756, followed by troves of papyri (ancient paper documents); statues and stelae that left the country during the reign of an accommodating early 19th century pasha; and, in 1801, the Rosetta Stone, taken off a French ship in the harbor at Alexandria.

Together with the Louvre in Paris, Berlin’s Charlottenburg Palace Museum, the Egyptian Museum in Turin and the Met in New York, the British Museum is a mandatory destination for amateur and professional Egyptologists alike. Outside Egypt, of course. Happily, Egypt itself still possesses more relics than anyplace else of the astonishing civilization that sprang up along the Nile River 5,000 years ago. And I should know, because I went there last month on a tour led by Carol Andrews, assistant keeper of Egyptian antiquities for the British Museum.

Many museums--Washington’s Smithsonian and the Museum of Natural History among them--offer tours escorted by expert guides. But I chose a British Museum tour because, after I’d looked through other catalogs, the renowned English institution’s trips seemed most compelling. They range from fairly common crowd-pleasers such as a “Monet & Giverny” tour of France to more esoteric expeditions with such titles as “Crusaders: Istanbul to Jerusalem,” “The Birth of Monasticism” and “St. Paul in Anatolia.” My 10-day “Easter in Egypt” tour cost about $2,940 (including single supplement) and visited sites within driving distance of Cairo. (A three-day extension to Luxor was also offered for about $556, but I wasn’t able to join it.)

The price troubled me at first, because since the 1997 massacre of 58 foreign visitors at Luxor by Islamic extremists, tourism to Egypt has dried up, making it a prime spot for budget travelers. But it was my first trip to Egypt, and I wanted to do it right. I didn’t want to get a deep tan cruising up the Nile on a commercial tour boat, or learn about the pyramids from a guide with dubious credentials. So what better guide than the venerable British Museum?

It doesn’t just know Egypt; it’s got a lock on Western civilization. The British Museum is a shrine to mankind, a prototype for museums from St. Louis to Buenos Aires. And its curatorial staff is equally esteemed. Carol Andrews, our group’s leader, is the author of five books on Egyptological themes and one of about 50 scholars in the world conversant in an ancient Egyptian language known as demotic.

I felt fairly sure that most of the others in my tour group would be English--such a charming people. If the pyramids paled, we could talk about Prince Charles, cricket and treacle pudding. Then, too, this trip--designed by Andrews--included activities most tourists don’t get to do, like climbing into the first true pyramid (at Dahshur, about an hour’s drive southwest of Cairo), visiting Fort Rashid east of Alexandria (where the Rosetta Stone was found) and inspecting vivid tomb friezes at Saqqara (about a dozen miles south of Giza)--not to mention nightly lectures by Andrews.

These days, some people wouldn’t go to Egypt at all. When I left, the most recent communiques from both the U.S. State Department and England’s Foreign Office spoke in decidedly warning tones. But street crime in Cairo is extremely rare, and since 1997 the Egyptian government has gone out of its way to protect foreign visitors. Now visitors have started to return, even to some of the country’s diciest provinces, like Minya and Asyut. While I was there, I never felt in danger, partly because police convoys often escorted our group, occasionally with sirens blaring. The incessant changing of our police escort at provincial borders sometimes delayed us. Still, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way a young Egyptian police escort stood riveted one day, his rifle slack in his hand, as we toured the seldom-visited ruins of Bubastis, where ancient devotees interred mummified cats.

The tour price didn’t cover lunches and dinners (which seldom cost more than $10) or baksheesh, the little tips Egyptian toilet and tomb attendants seem to expect. But it did include eight nights at the comfortable Ramses Hilton, located at a chaotic intersection in central Cairo some call “spaghetti junction”; one night at the historic (but somewhat down-at-the-heels) Cecil Pullman Sofitel on the waterfront in Alexandria; and breakfasts, transportation in a 23-seat Toyota van, guides, entrance to most sites and round-trip air fare from London to Cairo.

I had to get to London on my own, but this gave me two days to get over my jet lag at my favorite Bloomsbury hotel, St. Margaret’s, and spend a day touring the British Museum, which is currently undergoing massive renovation.

With scaffolds everywhere and a giant crane poised like an ibis above the building, the Egyptian collection was in considerable disarray. But I joined a tour of the handful of Egyptian galleries that remain open, stopping by a predynastic man buried in a sand pit around 3200 BC (nicknamed “Ginger” for his color), finding out that the ancient Egyptians actually loved life even though it seems as if they were obsessed with death, and learning that perhaps the greatest Egyptian relic of all, a stone tablet called the Narmer Palette, is in the Cairo Museum (which pleased me no end, since I had a ticket to Egypt in my purse).

I also saw the beautiful bronze Gayer-Anderson cat from about 600 BC and a fragment of the Sphinx’s beard from the royal necropolis at Giza, site of the Great Pyramids. The Egyptians have been trying to get back the ancient fragment as part of a 10-year renovation of the Sphinx completed last year. (A trade of the beard fragment for a relic in the Cairo Museum fell through, and to further complicate matters, the British Museum can only dispose of objects in its collection by an act of Parliament.)

To fully appreciate how old the Nile civilization is, consider the fact that the Sphinx was already more than 1,000 years old when Pharaoh Tuthmosis IV found it, buried in sand, around 1400 BC and embarked on its first restoration. Centuries passed, and the Sahara Desert engulfed it again; 30 dynasties of native-born kings wore the white and red crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, followed by Persians and Greeks; the Roman Empire put an end to Pharaonic Egypt in 30 BC, when Cleopatra VII, the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, committed suicide after the Battle of Actium.

Age upon age, dynasty upon dynasty. I thought Rome was an archeological layer cake until I went to Egypt.

As it turns out, British Museum tour groups have layers, too, as I discovered on the plane to Cairo. Sitting across the aisle from me was a fellow tour-taker, Dr. Anthony Hovenden, who was born in England but lives in Pittsburgh. Hovenden was one of the three other Americans, besides me, in the 14-member group, which also included three young women from Hong Kong. The rest were English, and included several surprisingly tough seniors who rarely flinched from climbing into pyramids and tombs; the Wickers, who could read hieroglyphics and had farmed in South Africa before retiring to Cornwall; and another couple from London, Bernard and Marie Starkmann, who did nice things for the group, like buying extra bottled water.

Our tour manager, Rosalind Phipps, was a delightful and extremely capable Englishwoman who lives in Cairo with her Egyptian husband, speaks Arabic and had war stories to tell about trips she’d led in the past (she once had to commit a woman on one of her tours to an asylum in Cairo). And then there was Carol Andrews, our very own expert, comedian and muse, with bouncy gray hair and a purposeful gait. Carol, as we all came to call her, has a passion for hockey, more opinions than the op-ed page, command of at least a dozen languages and the most colorful English vocabulary I’ve ever heard. (When boys bothered her, she told the “jackanapes” to get lost.) “Big Ram” was the way she referred to Ramses II, the 19th Dynasty pharaoh who left more monuments to himself around Egypt than anyone else. She didn’t like him very much, but she had a thing for his father, Sety I, by virtue of his mummy’s splendid profile and aquiline nose.

More importantly, though, her lectures were terrific, consistently attended even after long days of touring. They covered subjects such as Egyptian gods, the architecture of the pyramids, hieroglyphics and, on the final night, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Mummification But Were Afraid to Ask.” During the latter, we learned that ancient morticians put the stomach, lungs, liver and intestines of the deceased in canopic jars, and made prostheses for mummies when jackals stole limbs off embalming tables.

Interestingly, Carol wasn’t allowed to serve as our guide when we visited sites, because by law only Egyptians can do so. For this reason, we were joined by local guides, who were all attentive and helpful, but clearly intimidated by Carol’s presence and the fact that we were from the British Museum.

We all got to know each other during long van rides to sites. The schedule was rather hectic. Roz routinely left us 7:45 a.m. wake-up calls, giving us just enough time to get ready and hit the Hilton’s big breakfast buffet before departure. Often we didn’t stop at noon, lunching in the van on cheese sandwiches, pastries and fruit we’d swiped at breakfast. There was no time for shopping or venturing on our own into crazy, crumbling Cairo, though before the evening lecture I was occasionally able to take a dip in the Hilton’s pool. Afterward, we sometimes went to restaurants near the hotel as a group, and sometimes dispersed, exhausted, to eat room-service dinners while watching Egyptian TV (which one night featured “Citizen Kane” with Arabic subtitles).

Toward the end of the tour, some of us wearied of being so constantly on the go, and a few of the sites we spent hours to reach, like the 21st Dynasty capital at Tanis (in the Nile Delta north of Cairo), didn’t seem worth the trip. Though it has major historical significance, as Carol explained, there wasn’t much left to see. And before you make the thigh-tormenting effort to climb into a pyramid, doubled over at the waist to avoid banging your head on the ceiling, it’s worth knowing that you’re unlikely to see much once you get to an inner chamber: Tomb robbers and archeologists got there first.

I’m not complaining, though. Generally I don’t like tours, but I loved this one. I loved my big room in the Ramses Hilton overlooking the Nile, and the way it seemed as if we’d all dropped off the face of the earth for 10 days into an ancient Egyptian afterlife. On the first day out, at Dahshur, we saw the Bent Pyramid of Snefru, who, for no reason anyone has yet fathomed, built himself three pyramids. And we climbed into the belly of another Snefru pyramid just to the north. There, in an airless chamber beneath tons of stone, Carol explained that ancient Egyptian architects never cracked the secret of the keystoned arch, which explains why they used a technique called corbeling in the ceilings.

On other days we toured mosques, Coptic churches and the imposing Citadel of Cairo (built in 1176), and visited the extraordinary Cairo Museum. There I saw the Narmer Palette, which bears witness to the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3000 BC, and finally put to rest my concerns about whether foreign museums ought to start sending back Egyptian antiquities. Beneath the Cairo Museum’s crowded galleries there are two entire floors of unexhibited objects. Our local guide, who once worked there, said he needed a map to get to his desk.

One day it was off to Alexandria, a three-hour drive along the Desert Highway, where homesteaders are trying to make the sands of the Sahara yield dates. I thought Alexandria a bit of a letdown except for the catacombs, where you can see how the naturalistic style of the Greeks transformed Egyptian funerary art.

On our return to Cairo the next day, there were more wonders, like the extraordinarily well preserved mortuary temple at Abusir (just south of Giza, open for touring by special permission only). Here archeologists made a major find last year: the tomb of a 26th Dynasty nobleman, completely intact. We also saw the Meidum pyramid at Lisht, south of Cairo, and Mastaba 17, a nobleman’s tomb nearby where you had to squeeze through a rabbit hole to reach the looted sarcophagus below. I went down fearing that big Mr. Wicker in front of me would get stuck like a cork in the shaft.

He lived to see the Great Pyramids at Giza another day, and the evocative friezes in the private tombs of two noblemen at Saqqara showing commoners and kings going about their daily lives: mothers breast-feeding babies, fishermen sauteing catfish. The paintings, so vivid that they could be Kodak snaps, offer proof of the ancient Egyptians’ zest for life, which they took with them to the grave, hoping that the afterlife could be just as good as the here and now.

I still have no solutions to the great problems that plague mankind. But thanks to the British Museum, I learned how Egyptians lived and thought about their world 5,000 years ago, which seems a fine thing to know as yet another millennium approaches.

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GUIDEBOOK: Ye Olde Egypt

Touring with the British Museum: The British Museum Traveller, 46 Bloomsbury St., London WC1B 3QQ, telephone 011-44-171-323-8895, fax 011- 44-171-580-8677, is the museum’s tour company and offers 50 tours a year to various locations. This year the museum will offer two Egypt trips: a seven-day “Discover Egypt” tour Nov. 2 to 8 (about $1,700 per person), and a 10-day tour of northern Egypt Nov. 8 to 17, pegged to the 200th anniversary of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone (about $2,290 per person). (Prices exclude air fare to London.) The British Museum is located on Great Russell St., tel. 011-44-171-636- 1555, Internet https://www.british-museum.ac.uk.

Getting to London: United, American, British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Air New Zealand have nonstop flights between LAX and London’s Heathrow Airport; round-trip fares begin at $668. Transportation to London is available on Airbus or the London Underground subway; the new Heathrow Express train links the airport to Paddington Station ($17, or $34 first class).

Where to stay near the British Museum: St. Margaret’s Hotel, 26 Bedford Place, tel. 011-44-171-636-4277, fax 011- 44-171-323-3066, has double rooms with and without private bath for about $91 to $116. Other good choices are the Morgan Hotel, 24 Bloomsbury St., tel. 011-44-171- 636-3735, fax 011-44-171-636- 3045, doubles about $126; Blooms Hotel, 7 Montague St., tel. 011-44-171-323-1717, fax 011-44-171-636-6498, about $298; and the Marlborough Radisson, 9-13 Bloomsbury St., tel. (800) 333-3333 or 011-44- 171-636-5601, fax 011-44-171- 753-0101, about $272 to $346.

For more information: U.S. citizens must have a visa to visit Egypt, obtainable from the Egyptian Consulate, 3001 Pacific Ave., San Francisco, CA 94115; tel. (415) 346-9700, fax (415) 346-9480. The Egyptian Tourist Authority is at 8383 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 215, Beverly Hills, CA 90211, tel. (323) 653-8815, fax (323) 653-8961, Internet https://www.touregypt.net.