Tag: Pyramids

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5 Articles on the State of the World This Week (1/1-1/7)

The battle over the Speaker of the House may cause us consternation, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. Democracy is tumultuous, and that is often its strength. Through hashing out ideas comes clarity. As Dominic Pino argues, “In the House, those arguments are supposed to be raucous.”

Where do you find the biggest pyramids in the world? In Central America, actually, including the largest, “La Danta”. Now, archeologists are using new technology to uncover our “American Egypt” that has lain buried under the jungle for centuries. Read about it here.

61% of Americans don’t get enough calcium. Part of that is it takes a lot of food rich in calcium to get what they need. Read here about some surprising ways to get and not get calcium, including coffee and alcohol!

Want to be encouraged? Read this list of 10 beautiful acts of kindness from 2022, including when famed chef Gordan Ramsey was substitute chef for a day at an English middle school.

Looking for some good movies that may be a bit different than what you are used to? Try this list of the top 5 movies from the writers of Mexico News Daily. Plus, in the same article, you can see five more places to visit in Mexico, one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world, with seemingly endless opportunities for culture, natural beauty, and food.

Photo by ElevenPhotographs on Unsplash

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The Wonders of Egypt: The Pyramids Are Just the Beginning

If you mention the pyramids, what comes to people’s minds? Egypt. Would you like to visit them? “Yes!” Almost everybody would. I have had the privilege of visiting the pyramids twice in less than two years, but what I have found is that the pyramids are just the tip of the iceberg in Egypt. Egypt is a place like no other. The almost tropical scenes of the Nile allowed an amazing civilization to flourish, but the desert a few meters away preserved it for us today. It is a Muslim culture, but it is the home of some of the oldest churches in the world, some of which the large Christian minority still use. You can also find Greek and Roman history as well as the history of Arabs, Turks, British, and French. But the best part of Egypt for me is the people. They are a people who know hospitality, who are ready to dance, who know how to cook, and are ready to be your friend. For all of these reasons, Egypt is a destination you do not want to miss.

In this post, I want to describe what it is like to travel through Egypt and introduce you to the places I visited in two trips. Our trips consisted of six parts: Cairo, Aswan, Abu Simbel, the Nile, Luxor, and Hurghada. That’s our route in this article.

Cairo
Cairo is huge and filled with people. About 30 million people, one fourth of the population of Egypt, lives in and around Cairo. Make sure you see it from the air as you come in to get an idea of its size. The traffic is unbelievable. It makes driving anywhere in the United States look orderly and easy in comparison.

On the edges of Cairo, you come to Giza, still very crowded. There, you find the pyramids. No matter how many pictures you’ve seen, there is simply no way to do justice to the size and wonder of these ancient structures. There are three great pyramids named after the kings who built them, Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure. You come first to the largest, the pyramid of Khufu. You can enter into this pyramid and ascend to the tomb deep within the pyramids. The second largest is that of Khafre, and the third is that of Menkaure.

Continue reading “The Wonders of Egypt: The Pyramids Are Just the Beginning”

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11 Fascinating Facts from the History of Egypt

In May, I will be travelling to Egypt for the first time. In order to profit from my trip, I’ve been studying the history of Egypt. It is fascinating. As Herodotus said, “I will speak at length about Egypt because there is no other country like it, nor any other that possesses as many wonders.” I recommend Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt, as an overview of the whole history. It keeps moving and doesn’t get bogged down yet covers every era in a helpful way. Here are 11 fascinating facts from the history of Egypt. These are the things that stuck out to me. I am curious to see if this list will change after I visit Egypt.

1. Djoser, the second king of the 3rd Dynasty, erected the Step Pyramid. It was the first great stone building in the world. “Described by one Egyptologist as a ‘subterranean palace,’ the underground dimension of the Step Pyramid was never equaled in subsequent pyramids” (22). There were many pyramids built subsequently, but it is interesting to note that there were twice as many pyramids were built in Nubia as in Egypt. You can see these today in North Sudan.

2. Hieroglyphs (not hieroglyphics), the writing of the Egyptians, began in the Old Kingdom. They considered it as a gift from the god of wisdom, Thoth. So, they wanted to keep using the same writing throughout their history. Even in ancient times, people were impressed with the appearance of this writing. It continued from the third millennium B.C. until the Byzantine Empire (around the 6th century A.D., when the last temple (Philae, near Aswan) was closed). Eventually, the knowledge of their meaning was lost. It was not rediscovered until they were deciphered in the 19th century after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.

3. The Old Kingdom (Ancient Egyptian history is commonly divided into Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms) had no slaves. They used the corvée, which was the drafting of individuals in the kingdom for a month of labor, to construct the great pyramids. The reason they could do this was “a widely shared ideology about the nature of society and how it should function” (34). “The pyramids were certainly designed as royal tombs. Doubts that any society would devote so much of its resources to such a purpose are based on misunderstandings of the Old Kingdom and its driving ideology” (36). Continue reading “11 Fascinating Facts from the History of Egypt”

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