Pissing on the Pyramids

  If you venture deep inside the pyramids (as I did the day after the fun at the zoo) you find that the inner chamber smells very strongly of piss. It’s a predictable act of desecration, I guess. But it does tend to encourage a speedy visitor turn-around.

In general, though, the pyramids sprang lots of surprises. And they offered the possibility of pleasures (or transgressions) that would be decidedly off limits back home.

Let me say to begin with, unlike so many “Wonders of the World,” they do not disappoint.  They are absolutely vast and, at least if you view them one direction, they give every impression of being isolated in the trackless desert.

Visitors are not encouraged to look the other way, where the huge silhouettes appear not against the background of the camel-dotted sands, but against the suburbs of Cairo – and, in particular, against the distinctive colours of the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (Pyramids branch). It doubles with Pizza Hut if you go upstairs.

But, smell apart, the best bit was climbing inside, right into the burial chamber of the Great Pyramid. This is what British Health and Safety regulations would long ago have put a stop to. The climb is steep, with just a handrail and ridged wooden planking to help you. It’s fantastically hot, even in December. And for a good stretch of the way you have to crouch down and almost crawl along a low passage to reach the heart of the monument.

Heaven knows what would happen if you didn’t make it. There wasn’t a defebrilator, alarm, or any other of the paraphernalia of the nanny state in sight. It makes it all seem faintly ridiculous that some governmental Risk Assessment doesn’t allow the average visitor even to touch the stones of Stonehenge (might they fall down?), but insist that we gawp from a safe but boring distance.

Not that the Egyptian Antiquities Service makes a visit to the pyramids any easier than one to Stonehenge. You have to buy a ticket to get into the main area, pass through the metal detector and by the tourist police with their guns (Egypt gives a very plausible impression of being a relatively cheery police state, “for your protection, Sir” as they say). It’s only when you’ve climbed up to the entrance way on the pyramid itself that they tell you that you have to buy another ticket, from somewhere completely different, if you want to go inside. And it’s only when you have got back one more time, that they tell you that you can’t take your camera inside. It would clearly be asking for it to leave your precious digital on the little shelf suggested (when we went, it was the resting place for just one “throw-away” camera); so you have to climb down again to leave it in the car – or, as we did, disguise it in a make-up bag.

And all this has to be done, while avoiding the pushiest touts (plus camels) anywhere in the world. Exactly what scams they were trying to pull off wasn’t clear; but scams they certainly were. Our driver insisted, like an anxious parent of thoughtless adolescents, that we spoke to no-one, that we didn’t wander round the back of the monument (where presumably even worse scammers lay in wait) and that we didn’t hire the first camel from the first Bedouin we saw.

Still it was probably the most memorable sight I’ve ever seen. And December was the perfect time to visit. Apart from a handful of intrepid Europeans, most of the visitors were local school parties. The little girls sweated through the passages in their veils and headscarves. But (much to the annoyance of their teachers) found us rather more exotic and photogenic a sight than the antiquities.

Comments

[ajm]

The overpowering smell of urea/ammonia is caused more by bat droppings than by human piss, I think.

[john mason]

I don't remember the pyramid being hot inside--there were some passageways in the stone that admitted outside air. It is a strange experience to stand next to the granite sarcophagus, (or the small walled space where the sarcophagus was supposed to lie), and think that Napoleon, and how many others, were in the same place, doing the same thing, musing about eternity, thinking abouut tons of granite whose message you can feel but that defies understanding.

[Joel Shimberg]

I just stumbled (happily) upon "Pissing on the Pyramids", and it made me think of credible stories I've heard about lads who, leaving the pub at closing time, make a practice of pissing on the Blarney Stone, knowing that tourists the next day will be kissing it.

[sam]

I lve the coments and i am going to post me self on it

[Not a pyramidiot]

As an egyptologist I am not sure I recognise LT's image of ancient Egypt (presumably as 'aristocratic and intellectual' as the academics he thinks constructed it). Egypt has certainly been given a rather strange and inaccurate image in the popular mind, but based on 'popular' media (and I include Herodotus' Histories, Book II, in that vague group), not the view of academics and students...

On the subject of tomb robberies, as a historical phenomenon this is present in all periods of Egyptian history, but relevant evidence in relation to royal or elite tombs is particularly abundant in the New Kingdom (so more than 1000 years after the pyramids). Nobody knows exactly when the pyramids were robbed - it probably happened several times - nor do we know what the funerary equipment of an Old Kingdom pharaoh would have consisted of (no intact pyramids have ever been found). However, the famous "tomb robbery papyri" from the 20th Dynasty include court transcripts from a case against a group of tomb robbers, with lots of details regarding the distribution of illicit material. One tomb mentioned in these sources is that of a king who died 600 years earlier, implying that the tomb had survived relatively intact up until this point. So yes, plenty of Egyptians would have shrugged their shoulders in the face of curses (which can be found on some, but not many, tomb walls) and taken the risk when the potential gain was wealth of enormous proportions. As an interesting aside, there is a clear statistical increase in intact tombs found by modern archaeologists that date to periods in which it was not common to deposit valuable artefacts in tombs: the ancient Egyptians knew very well which tombs to rob and which were simply not worth the effort. It may also indirectly suggest that some (perhaps most) tombs would have been robbed shortly after they were dug, when the location, burial practices, and the status of the individual was fresh in everyone's memory.

[Mary]

I find the tomb robbing a bit puzzling too...but despite Lord T's generous assumption that I might be relatively expert on the subject, we classicists don't really count ancient Egypt as our home turf.
My hunch is that the trouble is the dating of any of these interventions...that's certainly the case in Pompeii, where it isnt clear if some of the skeletons are a) people killed at the time of the eruption (sometimes those trying to loot their next door neighbours before trying to get out -- unsuccessfully; b) Romans digging into the rubble shortly after the eruption when the lava and rubble was still soft-ish; or c) eighteenth century tunneling in when the location of the site was rediscovered.
But I guess that doesn't answer Lord T's question.

[Lord Truth]

You are right about the smell but my first visit -in the eighties-was nearly ruined because we accepted the "offer" of an elderly guide who once safely inside and climbing -up the long planked slope mentioned -began stopping every few steps to gasp for breath-indeed appeared to be dying -it was genuinely distracting and frightening-a scam of course.
On another occasion years ago I made a hasty late visit(before all these security regulations) to see the smallest pyramid.
The old gate keeper was "locking up " and not very happy with me-the place was deserted.Finally I entered-Unlike the others you have to go DOWN deep and then crawl through a smooth walled horizontal passage about four feet by four feet lit by bulbs along the floor.After going about fifty yards I stopped and alone in the silence suddenly the thought of a million tons of stone pushing aginst my head and the old man locking up,switching off the lights and wandering off ,for once made my nerves fail-and I scampered out!
I have however a more serious question for Ms Beard which has possibly been answered elsewhere....
I have always been puzzled by the "grave robber business"
The pyramids when built were sheathed in dazzling white stone-they would have looked amazingly magical to a people already deeply religious-they held the sacred remains-protected by every kind of curse ,of the god-king ...Insult him even by looking at him probably meant a most unpleasant death...And where in a highly bureaucratic society like Egypt could you dispose of the loot -which would have been instantly identifiable?
Yet within a mere twenty years teams of grave robbers each with surely at least a hundred men) had broken in and looted them!
Now this doesnt fit together-unless one imagines the leader of the robbers as a kind of Sid James character...
Them curses? -a load of cobblers -just to keep decent people like me from making a livin....The Pharaoh..?Oo could respect a bloke oo marries is sister? Getting rid of the stuff ?-I know a dozen little dancing girls oo would give their ....etc etc
I have a suspicion that my Sid James image may well be the right one-that the entire Ancient Egypt image created from the surviving artifacts by usually very aristocratic or intellectual professors-(and which of course adds to their own dignity and position)-is in fact false and the general Egyptian atmosphere was possibly about as uptight as Newcastle on a saturday night ..possibly.
There is something wrong here....Please enlighten me...

[ResoluteReader]

My visit to Cairo, and to the Giza pyramid plateau marked the culmination of a childhood ambition, and nothing can prepare the visitor for such a visit. Yes the touts are pushy, yes the security annoying, yes it's got a backdrop of some of the worst of modern day capitalism's fast food emporiums..... but you are at the Pyramids. Ancient Roman's wandered around here and marvelled at them, and they were as remote from the Egyptian's who built them as we are from the Romans themselves.

I remember standing there and scanning the horizon with my binoculars..... seeing the Bent and Red Pyramids on the horizon made me almost cry - suddenly writ large, was all the history, all the myths, all the archaelogy that I'd dreamed of. The next day I went to Saqqara and it was even better!!!

[postblogger]

Nothing to do with the pyramids, but thanks for the reading this year and Happy Christmas, both to you and to my fellow commenters!

Hope you have a good rest of stay in Egypt as well and eat just the right amount of pastries...