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Day 2~ March 2nd~ Egypt

The great pyramids at Giza

I went to Egypt with hundreds of questions and came back with thousands.

Egypt lives in children’s imaginations as the world of fantasy, of pharaohs, of mummies, of pyramids, of kings, of power, of ankhs, and I am yet to meet a child who hears about Egypt without falling prey to its enchantment.

Ancient Egypt is big, it is massive, it is impressive, and it can make you feel so small if you let it. Everything natural and human has a way of returning to the earth, our bodies do, our waters circle up to the skies and return, our seeds grow only to wither again and nourish the soil. Not Egypt. Egypt was always looking beyond the planet’s cozy atmosphere and towards the heavens. The pyramids are gigantic, pointy, sharp, were covered with shiny limestone that reflected and could be seen from space, the stars were charted in Egypt on every sarcophagus, on every tomb, and bodies were mummified to withstand time and to defy the laws of nature here on Earth. Was it  because Egypt had other plans?

There are about 138 pyramids discovered in Egypt, the largest is Giza’s Khufu pyramid photographed above at sunrise, and is the only wonder of the ancient worlds that remains standing.

 

By ~mimo~

Photographer, Art searcher, Motion Designer, traveler.

33 replies on “Day 2~ March 2nd~ Egypt”

Just a side note to offer if I may? As a scholar of ancient Greece and Rome, I marvel at the fact that the great Pyramids were already well and truly ancient by the time of people like Herodotus, and later Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. I point out to my students that more time separates Cleopatra from the Pyramids than separates us from her. Incidentally, while we think of Cleopatra as Egyptian her name is Greek approximately meaning ‘glory of the fathers’, it is the reverse of Patroklos, Achilles’ cousin and friend in the Iliad. She was from a Hellenistic Greek dynasty left over from Alexander the Great’s conquest.

Thank you for that. Yes, it boggles the mind how ancient these structures may in fact be and how little we really know about the ancient Egyptians, their culture and their technology.

Nice shot – I like the different shades of the 3 bigger pyramids. Egypt is somewhere I have always wanted to go. My grandma was born in Egypt and moved to England at the age of 8. I have heard quite a few stories about it and it would be nice to see where she spent the first few years of her life.

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