I’ve just got back from a week long diving trip to the tourist haven of Sharm El Sheikh. I’m not really in to the whole package deal thing, I just wanted to dive. It was incredible! Will try and get some pictures up on Flickr soon but in the meantime here are some fascinating facts about Egypt courtesy of Longwood Holidays.

• The use of cosmetics dates from around 5,000 years ago in ancient Egypt. Their original use was to protect skin from sunlight, rather than for beauty care;
• In ancient Egypt, slaves are known to have been murdered to accompany their deceased owners to the afterlife;
• If you were to stand before every artifact in Cairo museum for one second, you would be there for 9 months;
• In order to deter flies from landing on him, Pepi II of Egypt always kept several naked slaves nearby whose bodies were smeared with honey;
• Cleopatra wasn’t Egyptian she was Greek;
• While the use of antibiotics did not begin in the 20th century, early folk medicine included the use of mouldy foods or soil for infections. In ancient Egypt, for example, infections were treated with mouldy bread;
• More damage has been done to Cleopatra’s Needle, a hieroglyphic-covered granite obelisk, in the 125 years it has stood in pollution-filled, weather-beaten New York City than in thousands of years in dry Egypt;
• The pyramids of Egypt, the oldest of the seven wonders of the ancient world, are the only one of those wonders to survive to the present day;
• In Cairo a child is born every nine seconds;
• Egyptians made the first sweets in the world: they came from dates picked from trees by trained baboons;
• Some people believe the young Tutankhamen was murdered by his uncle, Ay, who went on to take the throne. But in 2005 the mummy was given an x-ray and they found he had a broken leg, which probably led to his death;
• More than nine million tourists visited Egypt last year – up from 8.7 million the previous year;
• Egypt is probably the world’s oldest civilisation having emerged from the Nile Valley around 3,100 BC;
• Around four million people every day commute into the centre of Cairo;
• The ancient Egyptians believed that mummifying a person’s body after death was essential to ensure a safe passage to the afterlife.

Look out for my next installment on Egypt – Scammers, the Scammed and the Magic Circle.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Middle East and tagged as diving, egypt, holiday, red sea. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.