Egypt 2008: Sakkara revisited

October 11th.

More pictures from Sakkara, the ancient necropolis on the outskirts of Cairo. My first post on it is here - that was all my own pictures, and all the ones in this post are CH's. I still can't believe that we were lucky enough to have the place to ourselves. o_O

The necropolis is sheltered on the city side by date groves. We had a chance to look at them while we were waiting to get in ... we were there so early that the gates hadn't actually opened yet. Hatem told us a bit about the Egyptian date industry - it's one of their biggest exports - and that the plants we were looking at were red dates. As opposed to some other color that I, alas, can no longer remember.

Me in the hall of pillars. Just the fact that I was standing there was so amazing, I mean, those pillars are 4600 years old. I can hardly grasp it. Amazing.

This little dog was quite interested in us, as the only one of the ... about a dozen dogs that were lounging around the place. I guess it was hoping for treats. Alas, we had none. And we didn't quite dare to pet the little critter since who knows what kind of bugs wild dogs may have. It was kind of cute though.

A view out towards the desert and the pyramids of Dashur. The Bent Pyramid to the right.

Various ruins with ongoing excavations. It is so incredibly obvious what is sandstone and what is Aswan granite. This was very striking on a site we visited in Alexandria as well. Sandstone doesn't last long in the desert, but the granite shipped from Aswan is incredibly hard and endures almost everything. Again, those pillars are more than four and a half thousand years old ... but look at them.

Amazing. :-)

More pictures from Sakkara here. The pictures labelled with *** are by CH, the rest are mine.