Saqqara & Memphis

We arrive back in Cairo on the night train from Luxor.  It is almost the end of our stay in Egypt so we are determined to make use of our last day in Cairo.  We start a new trip on the following day and say goodbye to Lucy, Dan & Verna as well as Sam & Tim.   We will have a few new travellers join us for the next leg through Jordan, Syria and Turkey.

After a brief rest we engage the services of two cabbies to take us to Saqqara and Memphis.  Our driver is a delightful Egyptian man who keeps us entertained with titbits about the places we are driving through.  It is an important feast day so the streets our deserted and we reach our destination in record time. 

Our first stop is at Saqqara to visit the Step Pyramid of Zoser.  This is the world’s first stone monument and the first attempt at making a pyramid that worked.  It appears to be crumbling in parts but renovation work is underway. 

 

Saqqara is strewn with temples, pyramids, and tombs and would have been a hive of activity in days gone by. 

Today, it looks rather desolate in the harsh desert sun but we are still able to appreciate the historic significance of the place we are in.

 

 

 

 

We also visit the Pyramid of Teti where we go inside a pyramid for the first time.  We are bent in two as we walk down the steep shaft to the interior of the tomb.  Beautiful hieroglyphics adorn the walls and a massive sarcophagus lies at the bottom. 

Our next stop is the ancient capital of Memphis.  Not much is left here to indicate what it must have been like in its heyday. 

I was initially disappointed with the open air museum compared to what we have seen at Luxor and Aswan till we found the gigantic statue of Ramses II in the indoor museum.  It was very impressive and made this visit worthwhile. 

The remnants of tombs and pyramids indicate that Memphis must have been a very impressive city once upon a time.  Today, we can only imagine what this city once must have been like...  

“Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” - Freya Stark