Camels did not exist in Egypt prior to 641BC. All of the travelling they did was by boat via the Nile and then through the red sea prior to that time. Camels came from Saudi Arabia at a much later point.

Hetshupsut was the only female pharoah. She wore (or was depicted wearing) a false beard and was crowned king. She had no sons of her own so she helped her stepson become the next pharoah. He somehow later decided that she sucked so he defaced and wiped out every image of her but one in her temple. If I understood correctly, he did not wipe out the one because it showed her standing between two gods. But he destroyed her cartouche on that image which is the same as destroying her.

Since I got here, I'd wondered when they started to make the tombs for the pharoahs. It seems like a lot of work to happen after they die. As it turns out, as soon as someone became pharoah, work started on his tomb. The longer that pharoah reigned, the fancier the tomb. Since Tutenkhamen only ruled for a very short period of time, the riches found in his tomb suggest that grave robbers got away with unbelievable stashes of things from other pharoanic tombs.

Sayid took me to the City of the Dead. (Shown on right. Each doorway is an entrance to a mausoleum.) This is a huge cemetary on the Eastern side of Cairo that has housed both the living and the dead since the 6th century A.D. Sayid kept asking me why I wanted to go and what I expected to see. I sheepishly confessed that I expected to see lepers and skulls and cripples. Sayid thought this was hilarious and said it cleared up a mystery for him, since tourists often said they wanted to see the City of the Dead.

The area is decrepit and run down. Some of Egypt's poorest people live among the above ground crypts. When the tombs were built, they were always designed with an extra room to allow someone to watch over the buried remains. As Cairo's population grew, more of the city's poor moved into these rooms. Nearly half a million people now live in this 4 mile area.

I believe I am heading back to Cairo tonight and will return on 12/20 as planned. I'm tired (perhaps because Luxor is the most draining city I've visited.)

p.s. I forgot to mention that dinner at the 1886 restaurant included a guitar player with one of those auto-muzak boxes playing such Egyptian hits as "Feelings", "Fernando" (Abba), and the Bee Gees "How Deep is your love". Perfect, eh?

ma-salaam
Kayla (ana mesh sayir rebbe = I'm not a stupid idiot!)