Saqqara

We were up at 7 a.m. to prepare ourselves for our first sightseeing day trip with a driver and guide. We could hardly believe that we were going to see structures that we had only read about - the Egyptian pyramids!

Our hostel breakfast consisted of eggs, bread, a banana, a tomato and cheese salad and a bland instant Nescafé coffee. :( Tomorrow we will just ask for hot water as we brought some good coffee from home. Egyptians don’t usually eat breakfast until 2 p.m.!

At 8:30 am, our driver, Ahmed, arrived. He was excellent. No worries about driving with him in manic Cairo! We then picked up our guide who had a heavy duty day planned for us. We were going out to visit 4 different burial sites that were spread out in the desert on the Giza Plateau.

We started out by visiting the Saqqara site that only had a handful of tourists visiting it even though it is Egypts largest archaeological site. It was an active burial ground for Memphis, one of the greatest cities in the ancient world, for more than 3500 years. Actually, Netflix made a documentary called Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb.

Saqqara is best known for the Step Pyramid of Zoser that looks like a giant 6-layer wedding cake, but there are 10 other pyramids in the area.

We went into the Pyramid of Unas which doesn’t look like much on the outside but after going through tunnels, bent over as they were only 1 meter high, we ended up in a beautiful burial chamber. It’s ceiling was covered with stars and the white alabaster-lined walls were inscribed with beautiful blue hieroglyphs. These hieroglyphs are ‘spells’ to protect the soul of the deceased.

In this area there were also several very deep shaft tombs and a pyramid called Serapeum that was dedicated to the sacred Apis bull. When the bull died, it was mummified in Memphis, then carried in a procession to this pyramid and place in a huge sarcophagus.

These pyramids gave us a good introduction to how and why pyramids were built and what they looked like inside.

From Saqqara, we drove to pyramid site #2, Dashur.Read more