Buried in Cairo
MS
Walking through one of the many cemeteries to the south and east of Cairo, I came across the above scene. As with the rest of historic Cairo, there’s not always too much left from the past.. as everything has been overrun by the demands of the present. But here was an open grave with a cupola over it. It’s the sort of thing I remembered seeing in the Description de l’Egypte:
Desc. de l'Egypte
Looking at representations such as this, one gets the idea that there once existed many more of this style of tomb. With their wooden superstructure, they were clearly vulnerable to time and abuse. But I’ve at least seen one now!
This kind of wooden standing monument should be seen as a poor man’s version of the great stone monuments put up by the elite. These were composed entirely of stone, and they are sprinkled throughout the old cemeteries of Cairo:
MS
These stone tombs have some obvious advantages in terms of staying power. They stick around, but the person who is buried within them is apt to be forgotten. There are lots of these stone tombs that have lost any identifying inscriptions. Their interior is filled with smelly trash.. and the ground water is leeching into the lower levels of stone. In other words, if the goal was to make a memorial for a name, then stone did not succeed any more than wood.
One of the sites I was looking for today was the Sultaniyya complex, which is a large Mamluk burial complex (c. 1350 AD):
MS
You can see the two large minarets and then two large domes in the background. Unfortunately the actual building that once connected these individual elements has disappeared and nobody knows for whom this was built. It’s something to think about when it comes to building a grand memorial!
These grand mortuary monuments turned out to be a boon for European artists, who loved their dilapidated and mysterious qualities. David Roberts, whose 19th century work on Cairo is pretty much canonical, made the following image of this same complex:
MS
Roberts had the advantage of a lot more open ground than exists now. This view could not be duplicated today. These are the kinds of images for which Cairo is famous. That funeral procession in the middle ground of the painting reminds us that this landscape is culturally generated.. and not here by some accident of Orientalism. Roberts made his trip through Egypt, Nubia, and the Holy Land in 1838-9, and I often suspect that he had Edward William Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians in front of him because that book works as a key to so many of his details. In this case here is Lane on the funeral procession:
The passage is too lengthy to set here in its entirety (see chapter 15 of Lane’s book). But after reading the chapter you know something of the sound of a funeral procession as well as the passages from the Qur’an that are commonly read.
