TRAVEL | EGYPT

The Sign of Tutankhamun

And the changing face of Egypt

It’s a sign that I’ve aged. As a resident and a traveler, my interaction with Egypt spans over 40 years. In that time, some things changed for both of us, and others did not.

Two years before the above photo was taken, I went to live in Egypt. A year later, President Anwar Sadat was assassinated while reviewing a military parade in Cairo. By chance, my family and I were in Cyprus for the Eid al-Fitr holiday. For days, we thought maybe we would never be able to go home, such is the volatility of Middle Eastern politics. When we did get confirmation that the vice president had taken over without any violence and the military would back him (a key requisite), we knew we were safe to return.

I still remember going through customs in Cairo airport soon after. Everyone’s bag was disemboweled on tables, and any magazine or newspaper was removed and thrown into a huge pile. I guess that they wanted to eliminate any references to the assassination from foreign media. In the days before the internet, this crude level of information control was still possible.

The Valley of the Kings, where the opening photo was taken, was only one of the many archaeological sites in Egypt that entranced me as a teenager. At the time, nearly all of the archaeological work was being done by foreign-led teams. Methods involved a lot of ‘dig and see’ operations and scouring historical records to narrow down the target area. Because modern archaeology had been going on for so many years, the mounds of artifacts found were already far more than the cavernous Egyptian Museum in Cairo could hold. Though it was frowned upon, I made my own little excavations during weekend trips to the desert, digging up and keeping artifacts from Paleolithic times onward.

Nearly the entire population of Egypt was confined to a narrow, vegetated strip of land along the Nile River, a condition that existed since the earliest historical records. This compressed living space was a part of daily life, but there was a dichotomy: in twenty minutes, I could bicycle from where I lived into an uninhabited and silent expanse.

Many things about traveling and living in Egypt 40 years ago seem rustic now. I never used a landline telephone (they were expensive and complicated to acquire), and we never had a television in the house because there was nothing to watch anyway. The only traffic stoplights in Cairo were outside the US embassy. The city was a polluted mess, overcrowded, yet hypnotic with its vibrancy of movement and complexity. I never tired of strolling through the Khan al-Khalili market or the Corniche, a shaded walkway along the Nile.

Fast forward to 2022.

Politically, it feels like Egypt hasn’t changed. President Sadat’s successor was ousted after a needlessly bloody crackdown on protests and died in prison. So did his successor, for similar reasons. Now, a military strongman rules the roost. He plays the typical game of remaining in power as long as possible and steering elections his way. The matters of power projection and manipulation of public opinion are no different from the leaders before him.

But archaeology has blossomed in ways I could only see hints of so long ago. Many digs are sponsored by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities and staffed entirely by Egyptian nationals. A new, far larger archaeological museum is set to open soon, one that can do justice to the thousands of unique artifacts now gathering dust in warehouses due to lack of display space. Field study objectives cast a much wider net than in previous times, not as restricted to the headline-grabbing discoveries of pharaonic tombs. New geophysical methods allow precise targeting of old buried structures and voids without all the speculative excavation. Now, items and sites relating to the Roman, Ptolemaic, and later periods are getting their time in the sun (sorry for the pun). Towns where ordinary people lived are being unearthed, so we can now learn how the other 99% fared in ancient times. These are all welcome and enriching developments.

The country’s population has increased alarmingly, so much that now it overflows into the desert. The road from Giza to Alexandria, formerly remote and empty, is now lined with housing developments and factories. A new capital city, New Cairo, is being constructed, all at once, over an immense swath of desert to the east of the current capital. Its future is unknown, given that it has already nearly bankrupted the country and is far from complete.

Cairo is still an overcrowded mess and still a spectacle of fascinating, beautiful chaos. There are now thousands of traffic lights, but that hasn’t made it feel much safer. The general population leapfrogged from no phones to smartphones (I’ve seen this happen in other developing economies as well). And I guess there is a lot more to watch on television.

In my visits over the many years, I’ve been both encouraged and frustrated with the signs of change, both positive and negative, in a country that holds so much memory for me. Being essentially a glorified visitor, my opinion on what should be done is meaningless. I can only observe it, cheer the improvements, and enjoy all the sights, sounds, and smells that have not changed and probably won’t for many years.

Part of me never left during the many years I physically moved on to other regions of the world. Every time I go back, I remember that a version of me still lives there, unfazed by time and happy to experience the world with eternally young eyes.

I take it as a sign that I am still getting what I should out of life.

This story has been submitted for the Globetrotters Monthly Challenge, “Signs”:

Thank you for reading! And thank you, Globetrotters editors JoAnn Ryan, Anne Bonfert, Michele Maize, and Adrienne Beaumont. Please check my profile for other travel-related articles at Brad Yonaka.

Some other entries into the monthly challenge that I enjoyed are this one by Jillian Amatt - Artistic Voyages:

And this one by Scott-Ryan Abt, including signs from Southern Africa, Sri Lanka, and Canada:

I wish I had captured more images of strange, sometimes randomly rude signs I’ve seen on the road, as Kenny Minker has done in this article: