[travel] Leaving Egypt
Apr. 20th, 2009 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mattbellI left Egypt yesterday. I spent almost two weeks there, longer than any other country but Vietnam. While I had some amazing times there, it's one of the few places I would not return to for a while. What most kept me there was the glory and the splendor of the remnants of Ancient Egypt. There's a reason that there is a discipline called “Egyptology” but not “Greekology” or “Romanology”. The ancient Romans and Greeks, despite incredible achievements of their own, usually have to share a “Classics” department.
Ancient Egypt was obsessed with documenting their incredible achievements. Their ruling class was literate, and royal scribes were held in very high esteem. Their civilization's writings and pictures collectively leave excellent evidence of their technology, art, architecture, and social order. Their buildings and tombs were covered with lushly illustrated hieroglyphic manuscripts and diagrams that served as both description and decoration. Want to know what their gardens looked like? Go to the tomb of the Pharaoh's gardener... it's drawn there in precise detail on the wall. Want to know how their dancers moved? There's a series of dancers in different poses dancing for the pharaoh in his tomb. It turns out they danced a lot like belly dancers.
Part of their obsession with documentation stemmed from the fact that they believed that writings and sculptures held magical powers. For example, pharaoh's tombs often contained hundreds of small sculpted likenesses. These statues supposedly were able to perform arduous tasks in the afterlife that otherwise would have to have been performed by the pharaoh. The likenesses were sometimes made from plaster casts so that they would be perfectly accurate. Numerous possessions were also placed in the tombs for use by the pharaoh in the afterlife – Tuthankamen's tomb (when discovered intact around 1910) looked more like a crammed public storage locker than an austere burial place. Essentially, their religious beliefs did actually give them a kind of immortality... it encouraged them to do the exact sorts of things that would make them easy for future civilizations to study. For example, there's an incredible reconstruction of a 4500 year old boat next to the Great Pyramid. Archaeologists had an easy time putting it back together (the ropes had rotted) because there were detailed diagrams of that type of boat in nearby tombs.
In addition to stone and clay carvings, which were quite slow to make, the Egyptians pioneered the use of papyrus, which allowed them to record a great many things cheaply and quickly. Thanks to the arid climate, a lot of this papyrus has survived rather well. Thus, Egyptologists have the everyday paperwork of an ancient civilization for their study.
The Pyramids, which were constructed over 4600 years ago, remained the tallest man-made structures in the world until after the Renaissance. They were constructed shortly after Egypt's rise to power, and were actually abandoned in favor of more advanced and airy structures, including temples with 150ft-high columns.
Essentially, it was hard to get tired of seeing all this... here was a culture that had pioneered so much in terms of art, architecture, engineering, and literacy. Later civilizations such as the Greeks and Romans took all these areas to a greater level of finesse, but the Egyptians represented an enormous jump over what had come before.
I'm guessing that what drove Egypt's development in ther first place is the Nile. Without the Nile, Egypt would basically be Libya – a barren land with little to support any sizable population. However, the Nile provided a huge incentive for agriculture... any tribe that mastered the tricky art of irrigation could grow quickly and support a far larger population than one that hadn't. Thus, there was a strong evolutionary drive (at a societal level) for tribes who had the organizational, engineering, and scientific skills to get as much as possible from the river.
All of this makes it all that much more mystifying that modern Egypt can't drag itself out of its morass. What happened to their ingenuity and drive? Instead of building a modern economy, Egypt seems to cling to its ancient monuments like a life preserver, desperately trying to milk as much money out of passing tourists as possible.
The same people (genetically speaking) live in Egypt now as lived there 3000 years ago. It is true that they do not have a lot of natural resources, but that hasn't stopped other countries (eg Japan) from becoming global powers. The pharaohs did have certain habits (eg brother-sister marriage) that could have led to a decline in leaders' intelligence. It's possible that a dynasty worth of poor management could have weakened Egypt enough to have been conquered y a foreign power... with the wrong person at the top, a country can go bad very quickly. In any case, Egypt was occupied by various foreign powers and treated as a heavily taxed province for a very long time – from around 500BC until the 1800s. It's possible that this long occupation more or less permanently changed Egypt's culture for the worse, emphasizing just getting by over pushing for excellence, and now the culture's priorities are too misplaced to allow for a return to power. Cultures like China and India, which also had past periods of glory, have a thirst for education and productivity (despite their limited resources) that have caused their economies to grow at double-digit rates for many years.
I believe that this cultural focus on education and achievement is one reason that the Jews have done so well despite centuries of oppression (The museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv points out the central role of education in Jewish cultures across the world).
A final rant on the sorry state of the tourist industry...
Basically, the tourist industry appears to be divided into three sections. The first section is more or less entirely foreign-run, at foreign prices. The tourists stay in their four-star hotels, travel in air-conditioned buses, and eat from restaurants serving mediocre international fare. Although I'm sure that there's plenty of baksheesh (bribery) toward local groups to make things run smoothly, most of the money goes right back out of the country into foreign coffers. The second section of the tourist industry is run by locals, and most of them are shady characters trying to trick, badger, intimidate, or fleece the tourists. One case stands out to me – I spent over an hour chatting with a nice woman I had met (a real Egyptian, I thought) only to realize that she was leading up to a big pushy sales pitch. With good knowledge of the system, it's possible to spend $25/day here, but it involves knowing where to go, what scams are common, and extensive haggling. (Taxis, for example, never use meters, so you have to guess at the prices for everything. By experimenting, I found I could get prices of around 20-40 cents / kilometer without too much trouble.) The third section of the tourist industry is government-run, and it consists of admission charges to all the monuments. It's shocking that $15 can get you admission to a top-notch museum in New York, but in Egypt it gets you admission to a run-down building filled with artifacts that are likely degrading because they aren't being properly cared for. I'm curious where the money goes, as the government probably pulls in $30 million a day from monument admissions alone. The money isn't funding more archaeological digs... those are all financed by foreign governments. One wing of the Egyptian Museum was financed by Spain, and it's far nicer and better-organized than the rest of the museum. Government-paid employees in these monuments are constantly trying to scam tourists and will sometimes deliberately break things (such as signs) so that they can charge tourists for the information. I don't want to adopt the elitist attitude of a colonialist, who would take action to save these people from themselves, but it's tempting. I feel bad for the honest Egyptians who are working hard for the betterment of their country, for their tourist-milking brethren are all most travelers ever meet.
I'm happy I met the teacher in Luxor. He's the only Egyptian I met who got the importance of education. His class loved him, and they all were eager to learn from him.
Ancient Egypt was obsessed with documenting their incredible achievements. Their ruling class was literate, and royal scribes were held in very high esteem. Their civilization's writings and pictures collectively leave excellent evidence of their technology, art, architecture, and social order. Their buildings and tombs were covered with lushly illustrated hieroglyphic manuscripts and diagrams that served as both description and decoration. Want to know what their gardens looked like? Go to the tomb of the Pharaoh's gardener... it's drawn there in precise detail on the wall. Want to know how their dancers moved? There's a series of dancers in different poses dancing for the pharaoh in his tomb. It turns out they danced a lot like belly dancers.
Part of their obsession with documentation stemmed from the fact that they believed that writings and sculptures held magical powers. For example, pharaoh's tombs often contained hundreds of small sculpted likenesses. These statues supposedly were able to perform arduous tasks in the afterlife that otherwise would have to have been performed by the pharaoh. The likenesses were sometimes made from plaster casts so that they would be perfectly accurate. Numerous possessions were also placed in the tombs for use by the pharaoh in the afterlife – Tuthankamen's tomb (when discovered intact around 1910) looked more like a crammed public storage locker than an austere burial place. Essentially, their religious beliefs did actually give them a kind of immortality... it encouraged them to do the exact sorts of things that would make them easy for future civilizations to study. For example, there's an incredible reconstruction of a 4500 year old boat next to the Great Pyramid. Archaeologists had an easy time putting it back together (the ropes had rotted) because there were detailed diagrams of that type of boat in nearby tombs.
In addition to stone and clay carvings, which were quite slow to make, the Egyptians pioneered the use of papyrus, which allowed them to record a great many things cheaply and quickly. Thanks to the arid climate, a lot of this papyrus has survived rather well. Thus, Egyptologists have the everyday paperwork of an ancient civilization for their study.
The Pyramids, which were constructed over 4600 years ago, remained the tallest man-made structures in the world until after the Renaissance. They were constructed shortly after Egypt's rise to power, and were actually abandoned in favor of more advanced and airy structures, including temples with 150ft-high columns.
Essentially, it was hard to get tired of seeing all this... here was a culture that had pioneered so much in terms of art, architecture, engineering, and literacy. Later civilizations such as the Greeks and Romans took all these areas to a greater level of finesse, but the Egyptians represented an enormous jump over what had come before.
I'm guessing that what drove Egypt's development in ther first place is the Nile. Without the Nile, Egypt would basically be Libya – a barren land with little to support any sizable population. However, the Nile provided a huge incentive for agriculture... any tribe that mastered the tricky art of irrigation could grow quickly and support a far larger population than one that hadn't. Thus, there was a strong evolutionary drive (at a societal level) for tribes who had the organizational, engineering, and scientific skills to get as much as possible from the river.
All of this makes it all that much more mystifying that modern Egypt can't drag itself out of its morass. What happened to their ingenuity and drive? Instead of building a modern economy, Egypt seems to cling to its ancient monuments like a life preserver, desperately trying to milk as much money out of passing tourists as possible.
The same people (genetically speaking) live in Egypt now as lived there 3000 years ago. It is true that they do not have a lot of natural resources, but that hasn't stopped other countries (eg Japan) from becoming global powers. The pharaohs did have certain habits (eg brother-sister marriage) that could have led to a decline in leaders' intelligence. It's possible that a dynasty worth of poor management could have weakened Egypt enough to have been conquered y a foreign power... with the wrong person at the top, a country can go bad very quickly. In any case, Egypt was occupied by various foreign powers and treated as a heavily taxed province for a very long time – from around 500BC until the 1800s. It's possible that this long occupation more or less permanently changed Egypt's culture for the worse, emphasizing just getting by over pushing for excellence, and now the culture's priorities are too misplaced to allow for a return to power. Cultures like China and India, which also had past periods of glory, have a thirst for education and productivity (despite their limited resources) that have caused their economies to grow at double-digit rates for many years.
I believe that this cultural focus on education and achievement is one reason that the Jews have done so well despite centuries of oppression (The museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv points out the central role of education in Jewish cultures across the world).
A final rant on the sorry state of the tourist industry...
Basically, the tourist industry appears to be divided into three sections. The first section is more or less entirely foreign-run, at foreign prices. The tourists stay in their four-star hotels, travel in air-conditioned buses, and eat from restaurants serving mediocre international fare. Although I'm sure that there's plenty of baksheesh (bribery) toward local groups to make things run smoothly, most of the money goes right back out of the country into foreign coffers. The second section of the tourist industry is run by locals, and most of them are shady characters trying to trick, badger, intimidate, or fleece the tourists. One case stands out to me – I spent over an hour chatting with a nice woman I had met (a real Egyptian, I thought) only to realize that she was leading up to a big pushy sales pitch. With good knowledge of the system, it's possible to spend $25/day here, but it involves knowing where to go, what scams are common, and extensive haggling. (Taxis, for example, never use meters, so you have to guess at the prices for everything. By experimenting, I found I could get prices of around 20-40 cents / kilometer without too much trouble.) The third section of the tourist industry is government-run, and it consists of admission charges to all the monuments. It's shocking that $15 can get you admission to a top-notch museum in New York, but in Egypt it gets you admission to a run-down building filled with artifacts that are likely degrading because they aren't being properly cared for. I'm curious where the money goes, as the government probably pulls in $30 million a day from monument admissions alone. The money isn't funding more archaeological digs... those are all financed by foreign governments. One wing of the Egyptian Museum was financed by Spain, and it's far nicer and better-organized than the rest of the museum. Government-paid employees in these monuments are constantly trying to scam tourists and will sometimes deliberately break things (such as signs) so that they can charge tourists for the information. I don't want to adopt the elitist attitude of a colonialist, who would take action to save these people from themselves, but it's tempting. I feel bad for the honest Egyptians who are working hard for the betterment of their country, for their tourist-milking brethren are all most travelers ever meet.
I'm happy I met the teacher in Luxor. He's the only Egyptian I met who got the importance of education. His class loved him, and they all were eager to learn from him.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-04-20 10:09 pm (UTC)As for the stagnation of Egypt, I believe it was conquered by foreign powers for several centuries at a few points during its millenia of pre-Greco-Roman existence, and that didn't do much to alter its success. Is it possible that something in the development of Greek and Roman technology made agricultural power (which is what I understand Egypt's success was mostly based on) much less important?
no subject
Date: 2009-04-21 09:19 pm (UTC)It's true that ancient Egypt had its ups and downs, but I think perhaps what helped them recover is that the downs were never so long that they forgot what they were capable of, culturally speaking. I do think agricultural power lessened in importance over time, but I don't know if that was the cause or what necessarily took its place. Perhaps it was trade and/or naval power.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-22 04:47 pm (UTC)