150 | EDUCATION ASIA | THRIVE | Travel Far
C airo, where it begins seen them a thousand times in books and on screens, and still, standing at the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza, you find yourself completely mesmerised. More than two million blocks, many weighing several tonnes, raised with ramps, rope and human will around 4,500 years ago. Nothing prepares you for the pyramids. You have That sense of wonder followed us into the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square. The newer Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza is magnificent, with space and light to match its collection, but it was the old museum that stole my heart. Its crowded halls and creaking wooden cabinets feel less like a gallery and more like an archaeologist's storeroom, where every corner hides something extraordinary. It was there that the hieroglyphs first truly spoke to me. These were not decorations. They were a deliberate act of preservation by a civilisation determined that its knowledge, its prayers and its names would outlive it. And they did. We closed our time in Cairo at Khan el-Khalili, the great bazaar that has traded since the fourteenth century. Brass lanterns, spice sacks, perfume bottles and the endless, good- humoured art of bargaining. Luxor, the world's greatest open-air museum If Cairo introduces you to ancient Egypt, Luxor lets you live inside it. The city sits on the site of ancient Thebes, and the scale of what remains is staggering. At the Karnak Temple Complex, built and
The Pyramid of Khafre, still crowned with its original limestone casing.
Beneath the colossal statue of Ramses II at the Grand Egyptian Museum.
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