GEEO Egypt Google Earth Presentation

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USA

Today, I’d like to share with you a great experience I had while traveling to Egypt through a non-profit organization called GEEO. GEEO helps educators travel abroad so that they can learn more about different cultures to share with their students. I was joined on my trip by educators and retired teachers from all around the United States.

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Africa

Here you can see the continent of Africa. Africa is larger than the United States, China, India, Japan, and much of Europe combined! (See here.)

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Sahara

You can see that most of the land in Northern Africa is beige on this map.

The Sahara is as big as the United States and crosses the whole continent of Africa. In fact, if you went directly west from Cairo, you wouldn’t reach a significant town until you were on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, and you wouldn’t reach a city until you crossed the Atlantic Ocean and landed in Jacksonville, Florida.

By the way, it’s fine to call it the “Sahara Desert,” but that name is technically redundant. Sahara comes from the Arabic word for “desert,” so saying “Sahara Desert” is like calling it the “Desert Desert.”

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Egypt

I visited Egypt in the northeastern corner of Africa. Egypt is about one and a half times the size of Texas. To the north is the Mediterranean Sea and to the east is the Red Sea. Egypt shares borders with Israel and Palestine to the northeast, Sudan to the south, and Libya to the west.

Egypt is home to an ancient civilization called Kemet, meaning “black land,” a reference to the fertile black soil of the Nile’s floodplains. The ancient Egyptian word for desert, deshret, means “red land.” We call their civilization Ancient Egypt, but the ancient Egyptians wouldn’t have used that name.

In 2011, many countries in this region went through popular uprisings against their unelected governments, called the “Arab Spring.” In North Africa, three dictators were overthrown – first in Tunisia, then Egypt, then Libya. Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s dictator, had been in power for 30 years, preceded by two other dictators who ruled for 25 years. Mohamed Morsi was democratically elected to replace Mubarak, but in 2013 the military took over again with popular support. The current President is Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former head of the military.

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Cairo

We started our trip in Egypt’s capital, Cairo. Cairo is by far the largest city in Egypt and one of the most populated metropolitan areas in the world. It has over 10 million people, with another 10 million in the metropolitan area. (A metropolitan area is a major city plus its suburbs and nearby cities and towns. [Can you use your city or a nearby city as an example?])

Cairo sits just upstream from the Nile Delta, where the Nile spreads out and drains into the Mediterranean Sea, creating rich soil for agriculture. Here you can see the Nile cutting through central Cairo.

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Tahrir Square

This is Tahrir Square, a major public area in downtown Cairo. It is also known as Liberation Square and was the focal point of the protests that brought about the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak.

This square has actually been renamed after revolutions twice. It was originally called Ismailia Square, but after Egypt’s 1952 revolution, they changed the name to Tahrir—which means ‘liberation.’ That revolution transformed Egypt from a monarchy—where they had a king—into a republic.

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Grand Egyptian Museum

We got to visit the Grand Egyptian Museum, or the “GEM” for short. It is one of the newest and largest archaeology museums in the world, located near the Giza Pyramids. The museum has over 100,000 ancient Egyptian artifacts.

The Grand Egyptian Museum displays the complete collection of artifacts from King Tutankhamun’s tomb. This includes over 5,000 objects, many of which have never been publicly displayed before. The museum’s collection also features items from other pharaohs and ancient Egyptian dynasties, making it the most comprehensive collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts in the world.

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Pyramids View 1

One of the world’s most famous sights lies on the outskirts of Cairo in Giza, Egypt’s third-largest city. You can see part of the densely packed city on the right. This desert area is part of the vast uninhabited Sahara.

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Pyramids View 2

These are the Pyramids of Giza, also known as the Giza Necropolis. The Necropolis is made up of three major pyramids, the Great Sphinx, several cemeteries, a worker’s village, and an ancient industrial complex. The pyramids were used as tombs for pharaohs, who were the rulers of Ancient Egypt.

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The Great Pyramid of Giza

The Great Pyramid of Giza, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu or Cheops, is the oldest and largest of the three pyramids at Giza. It’s the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the only one still largely intact. It’s made of 2.3 million stone blocks and weighs about 6 million tons. This pyramid was the world’s tallest structure for more than 3,800 years until the Lincoln Cathedral in England surpassed it in 1300.

Egypt’s pyramids are the most famous in the world. Similar ancient pyramids can be found in Mexico, like Chichen Itza and Teotihuacan, and in West Africa and Southeast Asia. There are also modern pyramids at the Louvre Museum in Paris, in Las Vegas, and in Memphis, Tennessee.

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The Great Sphinx

This famous sculpture is the Great Sphinx, which is believed to have been built around 2500 BCE, making it the oldest monumental sculpture in Egypt. A sphinx is a mythical creature with a human head (often a pharaoh) and a lion’s body. The face of the Great Sphinx is said to be that of Pharaoh Khafre; the Sphinx was built for Khafre as a guardian to protect his tomb from evil spirits.

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The Citadel

This is the Citadel, a fortification high up on a hill in Cairo. It was started by Sultan Saladin in 1176 as a fortification against the Crusaders, and it was home to Egypt’s rulers for 700 years. The complex contains three very different mosques, several palaces, and a couple of terraces that offer beautiful views of the city.

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Coptic Cairo

Some of our group also visited Coptic Cairo, an area of the old city that includes sites like the Babylon Fortress (an Ancient Roman fortress), the Coptic Museum (which has Coptic Christian artifacts), and several Coptic churches and historical sites.

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Khan Khalili Bazaar

While in Cairo, we visited the Khan Khalili Bazaar. A bazaar is a marketplace where you can buy all kinds of different things, including clothing, handicrafts, and food and spices. With its narrow alleys, this bazaar is basically a medieval-style outdoor shopping mall. (Tell the students about the interesting things you saw in the bazaar.)

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Bazaar

Here is a view inside the bazaar. Let’s take a look around. What are some of the items that you see for sale? (Spin the image around to see more wares and vendors.) The vendors can be persistent but are friendly. (What are some funny things you heard the vendors say? E.g., “Hello, how can I take your money?”)

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Aswan

Next, we left Cairo and flew south to the city of Aswan, which has a beautiful setting along the Nile. It is small enough to walk around and feels far more relaxed than Cairo.

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Aswan High Dam

Aswan is a very important city for Egypt’s economy because of the dams built near the city, across the Nile. Before the dams were built, the Nile flooded annually during the late summer from heavy rains to the south. These floods brought nutrients and minerals that enriched the soil along the floodplain and delta, making the Nile Valley ideal for farming. But the extent of the flooding was unpredictable—during high-water years, entire crops could be wiped out, and in low-water years, there could be drought and famine.

Eventually, Egypt built massive dams to control the flooding. Two dams near Aswan protect the farmland and store water in reservoirs for when it’s needed. The dam you’re looking at here is called the High Dam. It also generates electricity – enough to power nearly half of Egypt!

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Elephantine Island

In Aswan, we boarded a felucca, a traditional Egyptian sailboat that’s been used on the Nile since ancient times. We stopped at Elephantine Island, where we learned about the Nubians, an ethnic group from Southern Egypt and Northern Sudan. In ancient times, they were famous for trading with Egypt and nearby civilizations. We enjoyed dinner in a local Nubian family’s home.

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Philae Island

Downstream from Elephantine and Aswan Dam is another island, Philae. There was once a large temple complex on the island built around 2,000 years ago. It was dedicated primarily to the Egyptian goddess Isis, but there are several smaller temples and shrines dedicated to various other deities.

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Agilkia Island

In the 1960s, due to frequent flooding in the area caused by the first dam built in Aswan, Aswan Low Dam, the entire complex was meticulously relocated to nearby Agilkia Island to preserve it. This effort was part of a larger UNESCO project to save Egypt’s historical monuments from the rising waters.

When we visited Philae Temple, the Egyptologist who was with us for the entire trip taught us about the history of the site and the culture of the people who live in this part of Egypt.

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Abu Simbel

The next morning, we traveled further south to explore two ancient temples at a place called Abu Simbel. There are two giant structures here that also had to be moved because the site where they were originally located was flooded by the lake created by the dam, called Lake Nasser.

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Abu Simbel 2

The larger monument is the Temple of Ramses II, one of Egypt’s most famous and iconic monuments. It has an amazing façade with four colossal seated statues of Ramses II. The smaller temple is the Temple of Nefertari, named after Ramses’ favorite wife (he had eight) and dedicated to the goddess Hathor. The temples were carved directly from the rock, so they were originally one giant monument. To relocate them, workers cut the temples into massive blocks and moved them to higher ground.

The temples were built to impress Egypt’s southern neighbors in Nubia and reinforce Egyptian religion in the region. Ramses ruled Egypt for 67 years, which is why so many ancient buildings and monuments can be attributed to him.

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Nile Cruise

The southern part of Egypt is ironically called Upper Egypt. Does anyone know why? It is because the Nile flows from south to north, so “upriver” is in the south. After our time in Upper Egypt, we boarded a boat and spent the next two days floating northwards on the Nile.

The Nile is the longest river in the world and passes through eleven different countries. The river has two major tributaries, the White Nile and Blue Nile, that merge in Sudan. The river then flows all the way through Egypt ending in the Mediterranean Sea. Do you notice how beige Egypt looks on the map? That is because most of the country is part of the Sahara. The vast majority of people in Egypt live near the banks of the Nile. On average, the river is 1.75 miles wide from the west bank to the east.

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Kom Ombo

During the Nile River cruise, we stopped at the Kom Ombo temple. Kom Ombo was an important crossroad for trading caravans from Nubia and the gold mines in Egypt’s eastern deserts. It’s located on a bend in the Nile that crocodiles used to bask in the sun, so part of the temple was dedicated to Sobek, the Egyptian crocodile god (a human with a crocodile head). Ancient Egyptians worshiped Sobek hoping he would protect them as fiercely as a crocodile protects its young. The other part of the temple was dedicated to Horus, a falcon god of the sky who represented the Pharaoh. The temple is unique because everything is perfectly symmetrical, focused on Sobek on the right and Horus on the left.

The temple has a great example of an Egyptian calendar, and a unique representation of ancient medical instruments used by the Egyptians, like scissors, scalpels, and medicine bottles. There is also a museum that with some incredible crocodile mummies!

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Luxor

Our Nile cruise ended in the city of Luxor, the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Waset, known to the Greeks as Thebes. Luxor is often called the world’s greatest open-air museum. The city served for long periods as Egypt’s capital and became one of its largest urban centers.

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Valley of the Kings

In ancient times, Luxor (or Waset) was known as home to the god Amun, a deity who became associated with Egyptian royalty. During Egypt’s “New Kingdom” period between roughly 1550-1050 BCE, most of Egypt’s rulers chose to be buried close to the city in the nearby Valley of the Kings instead of in large monuments like the pyramids. There are at least 63 known tombs in the Valley of the Kings, all dug directly into the surrounding hills.

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Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut

This is the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut was a pharaoh in the 18th dynasty of ancient Egypt, and she is known to many as the “first feminist.” She ruled Egypt for 22 years and was the longest-reigning female pharaoh.

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Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut 2

The temple is located close to the Valley of Kings and is dedicated to Amon-Ra, the sun god.

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Colossi of Memnon

The Colossi of Memnon are two huge stone statues of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, who ruled over Egypt during the 14th century BCE. For the past 3,400 years, they have stood here in the Theban Necropolis. A necropolis is a large cemetery with elaborate tombs and monuments.

30. Karnak

This is Karnak, a complex filled with ruined temples, chapels, and other buildings. One ancient name for the site was Ipetsut, meaning “most sacred of all places.” It was built and expanded over about 1,500 years. Like the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, Karnak is dedicated to the sun god, Amun-Ra. The sun god’s shrine was built so light focuses on it during the winter solstice each year (see here).

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Karnak Temple

Today, Karnak is a huge open-air museum, with the Temple of Amun’s main complex accessible to visitors. You can see incredible examples of Egyptian hieroglyphs carved into the temple columns.

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Sphinx Avenue

Another major temple in the city was Luxor Temple, which is connected to Karnak Temple by an ancient 1.7-mile-long avenue lined with hundreds of sphinxes. Every year, during a religious celebration known as the Opet Festival, the statues of the gods Amun, Mut, and Khonsu were ceremoniously carried from Karnak to Luxor and back, reinforcing the spiritual connection between the two sites.

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Alexandria

After our Nile cruise, we flew to Cairo, then drove to Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast. With more than 6 million people, Alexandria is Egypt’s second-largest city and an important seaport.

Alexandria was founded in 331 BCE by Alexander the Great. It was Egypt’s capital for nearly a thousand years until the Muslim conquest in the 7th century, when the capital moved to Fustat. (Fustat was later absorbed into Cairo.) Alexandria was famous for its lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, its library, the largest in the ancient world, and the Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa, one of the Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages.

Maritime archaeologists have been exploring Alexandria’s harbor since 1994. Using underwater cameras and diving, they’ve found remains of the ancient Lighthouse and other artifacts from the ancient city.

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Qaitbay Citadel

This is where the Lighthouse of Alexandria once stood. The Qaitbay Citadel was built in the 15th century on the foundations of the lighthouse after it collapsed in the 1300s following multiple destructive earthquakes. The citadel was once one of the most important defensive strongholds, not only in Egypt but also along the entire Mediterranean coast.

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Bibliotheca Alexandrina

The Great Library of Alexandria was the largest and most important library of the ancient world. It was a major center of scholarship from its construction in the 3rd century BCE until at least the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE, and likely for centuries after. Famous scholars like Archimedes and Euclid visited here.

During a battle between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra’s brother, Ptolemy XIV, Caesar’s soldiers set fire to ships in the harbor. They didn’t have enough forces to protect the ships and didn’t want Ptolemy to capture them. The fire spread to the library and burned at least part of it.

A beautiful new library, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, opened in 2002 near the site of the old library. It has a massive reading room with 11 levels of bookshelves, tables, chairs, desks, and artifacts.

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Serapeum and Pompey’s Pillar

The Serapeum of Alexandria was a temple built by Ptolemy III (who was the pharaoh of Egypt from 246–222 BCE) and dedicated to Serapis (pronunciation), the patron god of Alexandria. The Serapeum was the largest and most magnificent of all of the temples in ancient Alexandria.

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The Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa

The Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa are one of the Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages (alongside sites like the Colosseum, Stonehenge, and the Great Wall of China). The catacombs contain tombs and statues in a series of tunnels built in the 2nd century for a wealthy family that still practiced ancient Egypt’s polytheistic religion (meaning the worship of many gods). The catacombs were the last major construction project related to the ancient Egyptian religion.

38. Memphis

About an hour south of Cairo are the ruins of an ancient capital of Egypt, Memphis. The city was founded around 3100 BCE by the legendary Pharaoh Menes, who united Upper and Lower Egypt. It was a huge city and a center of commerce, religion, and culture for centuries, with grand temples and royal palaces. Today, all that remains is a small open-air museum, which houses this colossal statue of Ramses II.

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Saqqara

Just a short distance from Memphis is Saqqara, one of the most extensive and significant archaeological sites in Egypt. Saqqara served as the necropolis for Memphis. The vast burial ground spans a period of more than 3,000 years and contains many tombs and pyramids.

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Pyramid of Djoser

This is the Step Pyramid, built for Pharaoh Djoser by his architect Imhotep around 2630 BCE. It’s the earliest colossal stone building in Egypt and came before the more famous pyramids at Giza. Unlike smooth-sided pyramids, this one has six tiers. It’s actually several smaller rectangular monuments, called mastabas, stacked on top of each other.

The Step Pyramid shows how Egyptian architecture evolved. Mastabas were the earliest tombs in ancient Egypt – the name comes from the Arabic word for “bench” because of their flat-roofed rectangular shape. They were made from mud bricks or stone. Imhotep stacked six mastabas on top of each other, each one smaller than the one below. This was a major leap from single-level tombs to multi-tiered monuments, and reflected the growing importance of the afterlife and the pharaoh’s divine status.

The next step was smooth-sided pyramids, like the Great Pyramid of Khufu. These pyramids have smooth sides that meet at a point at the top, requiring careful planning and precise construction.

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The Bent Pyramid

Another fascinating structure near Saqqara is the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur. Built for Pharaoh Sneferu around 2600 BCE, this unusually shaped pyramid appears to be bent. The builders likely realized the pyramid would be too steep and had to change the angle halfway through construction. It is an architectural experimentation that eventually led to the Pyramids of Giza.