This was an unscheduled stop that we made. It wasn’t supposed to be very exciting, but we sure had a good time. This was a visit to an ancient City of the Dead (local name for a cemetery). This was originally somewhere on the outskirts of Cairo, but today, it’s more like in the middle of Cairo. Cairo has long since enveloped this cemetery. It’s a little different than our cemeteries in that each family had a plot, but it was a large piece of ground, like the size of a house or bigger. And it wasn’t just empty land. Even many non-pharaohs had nice mausoleums and tombs. The family might have had a large building which might have included many different types of facilities within it. They might have buried family members in their plot for hundreds of years. Some were quite large and nice and today, many of these mausoleums/tombs/plots have homeless people living in them.

The first picture will give you a better idea of what I’m talking about. It almost looks like some sort of dense housing project, but it is, in fact, the city of the dead.

We made an unscheduled stop to look around. It wasn’t a tour stop, just a stop. As we were looking at one of the fancier mausoleums, the caretakers (we presume anyway) came by and asked us if we wanted to take a tour of it. We knew it would cost us a tip, but what the heck. It turned out to be the mausoleum of a very rich 15th century prince. It had a cistern that they used for their own water and also to give water to the poorer neighbors. It also had a mosque inside it with a minaret, many rooms, stairways, etc. It was very nice. You can see it in the next five photos. The first one was taken from the outside as we stood on the sidewalk.

The next photo is inside and I am standing with a fellow traveler who was on our tour with us – a couple of adventurous looking fellows.

The next three photos are also inside this mausoleum. It will give you a better idea of what one of them was like. Again, this belonged to a 15th century prince.