For now, let’s set aside the magical fact that the crescent moon was directly above the pyramids on my first night in Giza; that the place I booked has a roof deck with a view of the pyramids; and the surreality of the pyramids being right there before my eyes the whole time…
Set that aside and raise your hands if, like me, one of the things you looked forward to at the height of the pandemic was the premiere of Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb on Netflix!
Lugging overweight eyebags with me from a restless night on a bus from Luxor to Giza, I booked a day tour to Saqqara, Memphis, and the Pyramids of Giza.
Saqqara is a treasure trove! Until now they continue to unearth new findings from the site. If not for limited time, I would prefer to spend at least three days exploring Saqqara alone!
What seems to be a pixelated image of a building is the entrance to the complex, followed by a colonnade made of limestone that pre-dates Doric columns by thousands of years and believed to be its predecessor. The end of the colonnade opens to the Pyramid of Djoser, the oldest pyramid in the world, designed by Djoser’s architect, Imhotep, circa 2630 BCE. By stacking six “mastabas” of diminishing size on top of each other, he created the first step pyramid.
Entombed in Saqqara are kings and noblemen from the first dynasty up to the Ptolemaic period. What differentiates the bas reliefs here from those in the previous tombs I’ve seen are the daily life depictions: There is one of a butcher, a birthing scene, and even a circumcision scene! Details abound! I could hardly believe that I was walking into the documentary that had provided me with so much wonder during the darkest times of the lockdown.
A podcast episode that I listened to around the same time I watched the documentary pointed out that Cleopatra’s era is closer to the invention of the iPhone than it is to the construction of the pyramids of Giza. It still blows my mind. When dates are mere numbers written on a page, the breadth of history’s timeline cannot be fully grasped until such a comparison is made. The novelists made those epochs come alive for me, but to be here… to be here is entirely something else.
The Book-Butterfly 