I know it's been over a month since I've posted!

DISCLAIMER: This post and the next were written during my trip in Egypt. Sorry they're so late. I'll explain in after the Egypt posts are up.

I’m going to combine days 1 and 2 of my Egypt trip, since our first day was just a 15 hour drive through Cairo. Also, these next few blog updates about my time in Egypt may be slightly different than my last posts. Our field studies for Physical Settings are mostly about geography and how the land affected the people in the bible. Egypt is much different. It’s more about just visiting the sites that we’ve talked about in our History of Ancient Egypt class. While I’ve been dreaming about visiting Egypt since I was in 5^th grade and discovered the History Channel, I find that I’m reflecting on worldview and culture and people groups more than anything else. I feel like I’m widening my views on people as a whole and that I’m on the brink of getting “it”, whatever “it” is. I’m not sure how to explain it any better than that. But, without any further ado, Egypt day one -

Like I previously stated, our first day to Egypt consisted of us leaving Jerusalem at 6 am and driving down to Eilath. Eilath is a site along the Red Sea where Solomon built a trade port, with the help of Pheonicia and Egypt. The possible place, where it was, is a tiny island just off the coast that now has a Crusader castle on it. But, it was really pretty. This is Egypt in December:

Beautiful weather, lots of wind, and lots of sun. Unfortunately, this was our last look upon beauty for miles to come. We spent the next six or so hours driving through the Sinai Wilderness. Yes, I mean the wilderness that Moses and the Isrealites spent 40 years walking through. I looked at it for a whole minute before my Dramamime kicked in and I fell asleep. That being said, I would not have wanted to spend 40 years there. It looked a lot like New Mexico. This is when my first “worldview” thought kicked in. We have it pretty good in America. I mean, we have everything. From sea to shining sea, we have mountains, canyons, deserts, and forests. We have all sorts of climate and weather. We have places for shepherding and cattle and diverse farming. We have places for trade. I don’t mean to sound ethnocentric. I just mean to say that we really do have everything all within our country. And yet, Americans are known for being loud, rude, and fat. What does that say about us as people? Where is the pride for our land? I don’t mean pride in our culture or heritage. Our heritage consists of us having stolen land from unassuming people and stripping of its resources for all it’s worth. And our culture hit an all time low when we made Lady Gaga famous. What I mean is that the Israelis cling to their land and protect it with their life because it’s all they have and they’re proud of it. Same for the Egyptians. They know how dependent they are on their land. We only use and abuse our land. We have no sense of permanence or thankfulness in America. We take what we want and move on as soon as it doesn’t suit us anymore. And that worldview has seeped into everything that we do. Don’t like your job? Move somewhere else. Don’t like the music at your church? Choose another one. How spoiled are we? I don’t know where I’m going with all this exactly. But it’s something that has been plaguing me since I arrived here.

We arrived in Cairo at about 8 pm. According to our tour guide (who’s really nice and actually knows his stuff), 8 pm is early for Egyptians. Since it’s so hot during the day, they mostly work at night. We stayed at the Saphir Hotel and it was pretty amazing. Look at all the pastries I had at dinner:

Some may call it excessive, but I say that I’m just broadening my pastry knowledge. Anyways, nice hotel, I slept really well, and was ready to go when I woke up in the morning.

Our first stop was a set of two pyramids in Giza, built for Sneferu during the 4^th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom (2613 BC-2494 BC). But Sneferu died during the building, so his son, Khufu, finished the project. The first pyramid built here was the Bent Pyramid. Half way through the building, they realized that they were building at the wrong angle and finished it in a different angle. So it looks really awkward:

Instead of killing the architect for being such an imbecile, they let him live and built a second pyramid in the right shape – the Red Pyramid:

We were able to crawl around inside the Red Pyramid, but the Bent Pyramid was too unsafe to go inside. Apparently the ceiling is very unstable. Something funny about the Pyramids is that they Ancient Egyptians didn’t want anyone robbing them, so they covered they Pyramids in sand hoping that they would just appear to be sand dunes. The problem with this is that Egypt is a very flat land. There aren’t sand dunes anywhere. So they kind of stick out awkwardly. Way to go, Egyptians. For such an advanced civilization, they really didn't think that one through. Anyways, first Pyramid experience! It was pretty exciting, but we didn’t get to crawl around into too many rooms. I’m sure the Valley of Kings will be much more exciting.

Afterwords, we went to an outdoor museum in Giza. There were some interesting things there. For instance, there were three statues of Ramses II. Apparently, there are hundreds of statues of the man. He was possibly the Pharaoh during the time of the Exodus, though that is widely disputed. Most scholars don’t even believe in the Exodus, but, for the ones that do, there is more evidence as Ramses II being the Pharaoh during that time. All of his statues depict him as a young man stepping with his left foot forward. This is because the Ancient Egyptians believed that you thought with your heart. So, you step forward with your left foot because that’s the same side as your heart. One of the statues of him, is 75 feet tall! And, it’s not even the tallest one of him. Here’s a picture:

The detail that went into this is incredible. One of the reasons for this, is that the Ancient Egyptians also believed that if you didn’t make a copy of something in this life, or if you weren’t buried with it, then it didn’t come with you into the next life. That’s why the Pharaohs were buried with food and possessions. Whatever happens in this life is relived in the next life and you’ll want all your favorite things with you. So, if there is a statue of you made and your fingernail is missing then you won’t have that fingernail in the afterlife. Everything is cyclical and recurring, which is so very different from Jewish or Christian worldview. It seems so… encroaching, to me. I don’t know if that’s the right word for it, but it’s the only one that comes to mind.

Also interesting to me, is how Egyptians believed that they were the “pure” race. Even when building the pyramids that we visited, priests had to come and plaster the land that the pyramid was going to be built on, pray over and anoint the plastered land, remove the plaster, and pray over it again. That way the land was made clean and reborn so that only Egyptians would ever step on it, from there on out. Even imported trees were taken to the priests to be cleansed before they could be used for anything. And this ideal still exists in Egypt today. Anyone know who Nasser is? I didn’t until today. I’m not even sure if I’m spelling his name right. But, apparently, he was a president of Egypt a while back. He was pretty close with the Coptic Church and supported it. But, he believed in a pure Egyptian race. So, he nationalized all businesses so that, if any Jews or foreigners owned businesses, they had to give their business to the state, forcing many of them to leave the country. A few years later, he decided to shut down the synagogues in Egypt so that the rest of the Jews had to leave. Before Nasser, there were 300,000 Jews living in Egypt. I’m not even talking about Israelis, I’m talking about Egyptian Jews. There was certainly a population of Jews in Egypt, because many Jews fled there during exile in ancient times and there has always been a group of them in Egypt since then. After Nasser died, a peace treaty was made and 1 out of the 10 synagogues was opened and is still functioning. There are about 200 Jews in Egypt today, but I’m surprised that there’s any at all with such a strong Muslim and Coptic Christian presence in the country.

After the museum, we went to the stepped pyramids and saw the site for the possible first writing for Semitic language. I would love to post pictures, but we weren’t allowed to take any. The most noteworthy thing there is how closely tied Ancient Egyptian language is to Ancient Semitic language. We also went into a tomb for a Pharaoh’s daughter and were able to look at all the inscriptions on the wall. It’s amazing what lengths these people went to in order to make sure that they had what they thought they would need in the afterlife. Things like food and sacrifices to the gods and their pets. They needed enough to last them a whole lifetime. Makes me glad that I’m a Christian and I never have to worry about that. We also went into a museum to Imhotep, the chief architect, high priest, and vizier to the Pharaoh. He was a pretty important guy. They had his mummy in there. He kind of looked like a midget. I don’t know if that’s due to the mummification process, or if he was just really tiny. I’ve heard that people used to be a lot shorter in ancient days. That’s why the doors on all the Crusader and Coptic Churches are so low.

Our last stop was at one of the synagogues that had been shut down, along with a Coptic Church that survived Roman persecution. The way it survived is that it was disguised as a house, in a village. A pretty clever disguise which seemed to have worked, as it is one of the only churches that survived that time. This is where I realized that the church was covered in Arabic writing. I instantly associated it with negative things because, in Israel, any time I see Arabic writing I know that it’s a mosque or something that the Muslims took from the Jews or Christians. And I had to completely change my thought process for Egypt because I just happened to be standing in a Christian church where the followers happen to be Arabic because their Egyptian. It’s not a negative thing here. It’s interesting to me how something so ingrained in one culture as a bad thing, can be a normal and good thing in another culture. I’m having to really reassess the way I see things, now. And I never thought that I was one to think in absolutes. I’m a military brat. I’m fairly well traveled, at least in the states. I didn’t even have a difficult time readjusting to Jerusalem, other than putting up with the men there. But then to go from Jerusalem to Egypt is weird for me because they both seem to be “Middle Eastern” cultures, but there are still important differences.