This was our first stop on our first day of touring. It was not very important, but it held some significance and insight for the trip ahead and for Egypt as a whole. Our tour guide told us that we were not allowed to take pictures inside the Tomb of Mereruka. I thought that I understood, so I left my camera on our bus. Our guide stopped me as I was getting off the bus and said “Where’s your camera – go get it, you must bring your camera with you!”

I was confused, being the hick that I am. What I learned is that if you don’t have your camera with you, then the tomb guards can’t solicit a bribe from you to take a picture which is evidently how they earn their living. I figured that I wasn’t using a flash anyway so I shouldn’t impair the reliefs, so I paid a few bribes and took a few pictures.

The first two photos are entering the Tomb of Mereruka and the area behind this tomb, where you can see that there are other tombs, though none that were too exciting.

My photos inside the tomb were not very good photos. It was dimly lit (from skylights) and a not-so-great tomb, but by golly, these are the first bribes that I’ve ever paid in my life and I want to get something out of them, so I hope that you people appreciate them. The inside of the tombs were usually limestone walls which were covered with plaster and then painted. Mereruka was from the Old Kingdom and the 6th Dynasty which went from 2345 – 2181 B.C. This tomb is thought to date to about 2240 B.C. It’s a large tomb with some 32-33 rooms. It’s inside a mustaba (mud-brick building) which was the forerunner to the pyramid. This tomb was first accessed in about 1892.

If you look at the reliefs for a while, you can see people, fish, boats, etc. The walls here were covered with reliefs, but they had large segments missing and these wall reliefs turned out to be not that good compared to many others that we saw during our trip. You can see Mereruka himself depicted in the last photo.