Islamic Cairo and Saqqara

A major mosque (oops can't remember which) in Islamic Cairo

Ahmed Ibn Tulun mosque

We had the opportunity to go out again with the American group, once to Islamic Cairo and today to Saqqara. You'd think that all Cairo, and perhaps Egypt, is one big Islamic area, but in reality there is an area of Cairo that is the oldest and contains the most important mosques in Cairo called "Islamic Cairo". To the southeast of the city centre, there are many huge mosques dating from around the year 800 to the 19th century. We first visited the Ahmed Ibn Tulun mosque (868) which is apparently the oldest Islamic mosque still in use in the world. Tourists can visit most mosques without any problem, and take photos, other than when prayer times are on. We women had scarves to wear but were not required to as it turned out.

We also visited the Madrassa of Sultan Hussan, a huge school and mosque complex built around 1356. At the time it was the largest building in all of Eurasia. Lastly we visited the Citadel, which is a fortified complex built to defend the city in 1830. The Albanian Mohammed Ali ruled Egypt then (fairly well by what we hear), and was responsible for a lot of modernisation, building of infrastructure and social initiatives.

The Pyramid of Zoser

4500 year old hieroglyphs

Today we went out to Saqqara. This is an area to the south of the Giza pyramids, and there are many more pyramids here that are not so tourist-infested. They're built in a different style (much older, from around 2500 BC), and are called "step pyramids". They are like a layer cake that gets narrower, but the result is a stepped structure rather than a triangle. Some of these pyramids have chambers you can go down into, with the (now empty) sarcophagii of the dead guy who had had it built. Apparently tourism has been alive and well virtually since the pyramids were built, so the very earliest visitors were busy robbing the graves of anything valuable for thousands of years. The pyramids are built with granite, which only occurs in Upper Egypt, so it was all barged down the Nile to get here. the granite blocks have shifted over the millenia, and inside you can see where the joints have slipped - in the chamber we went into there was a slippage of about 20cm, so we all hoped the next earthquake wasn't scheduled for today!

There are also burial chambers dotted all around the pyramids, and inside these are hieroglyphics depicting the activities and pasttimes of whoever was to be buried here. The one we saw was obviously keen on fishing, hunting and drinking beer. It just slightly blew my mind to think that I was looking at hieroglypics chiselled out about 4500 years ago! The only reason they are so well preserved is that until last century, most of the chambers were buried in sand. Who knows what will happen over the next few hundred years?

We also visited Wisss Wassef, an art centre where locals have congregated to make woven rugs, batik and pottery. The rugs are works of art and sell for thousands of dollars, so needless to say we did not add one to our souvenir collection!

They are really fond of their camels!

On the computing front, we are making slow progress, because everything here is slow. We will probably not achieve a great deal, but everyone seems to appreciate our willingness and just being here, so hopefully in the next two weeks we’ll achieve something. Everyone is super friendly and there is a constant throughput of people at the guest house from all over the world, which is very interesting. Tomorrow we will go to church across the way (the Anglican Cathedral).