Pyramids Lite
If you have visited your favourite search engine recently - you know, the one that takes your private information and does dreadful things with it - you may have noticed the enticing invitation: "New! Explore the Pyramids of Giza in Google Maps." I feel the executives at Google missed a trick there: surely there should be at least one, if not two or more, exclamation marks instead of that tame final full stop.
Full of anticipation I clicked on the link, expecting that at the very least Google had taken its Street View cars inside the Great Pyramid, if not all of them. Indeed, I hoped that they might have accessed the parts of the pyramids not normally open to tourists, such as the underground chamber in the Great Pyramid or the unused upper passageway in the pyramid of Chephren.
Alas, I was to be disappointed. After considerable time loading - and I am supposed to have a fairly fast broadband connection - I was presented with a pretty picture of the pyramids over which you could hover your mouse and scroll with the scroll-wheel to reveal more pretty pictures and a moderate degree of misinformation. For example, the twenty years confidently asserted as the time it took to build the Great Pyramid is, in fact, the uppermost of the estimates given by Egyptologists. Some have suggested that the pyramid took as little as ten years to erect.
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| This is as close as you can get to the entrance to the pyramid of Menkaure. |
Part way down that page you are taken into Street View where you can follow two men as they stroll towards the pyramids, dodging tour coaches along the way. The process of clicking on the map is, probably, faster than actually walking the distance, but not by much. I will grant that it is probably cooler than being there in real life, for the day is sunny and any sunny day in Egypt is guaranteed to be hot.
Eventually you reach a point where the arrows on the road change and you can click sideways, which causes Khafre's pyramid to tilt alarmingly. Don't be misled into clicking on one of the white arrows in a black square on the sides of the screen, however. That will not take you sideways but transport you into an entirely different part of Street View. If you want to look sideways you have to drag the mouse left or right.
With the righ combination of clicking and dragging you can find the start of the paved path leading to the smallest of the three pyramids, but that is as far as you can go. You cannot even "walk" to the base of the pyramid, let alone climb the wooden staircase to enter it.
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| The pyramids of Khafre and Khufu viewed from outside Menkaure's Pyramid Temple. |
Things are slightly better with the second pyramid and you can indeed "walk" up to within twenty or thirty feet of the base, close enough to find yourself among the litter of stones that have fallen over the years. You can walk round - or part way round - three sides of the pyramid, but you cannot go beyond the wooden walk-way, for frowning, white uniformed policemen bar the way. Again, that is fine for tourists and no doubt the Egyptian Antiquities Department is trying to preserve the pyramid or stop the ground being eroded or something, but I expected that Google would have negotiated special privileges to enable them to take their cameras into the places that normal tourists cannot reach.
The situation is little better with the Great Pyramid, which not only wobbles disconcertingly as you walk past it, but in places is reduced to a round-topped mound by the exigencies of wide-angle photography. Here you can walk round three sides of the pyramid, but curiously, you cannot walk along the fourth side, which would take you to the boat museum where one of Khufu's funerary boats is preserved. You can see the museum in the distance, but you cannot actually walk up to it.
There is one good thing, however, and that is that you can enter the Valley Temple of Khafre and push your way through crowds of people, all with their faces carefully blurred, to emerge onto the causeway that leads up to the pyramid. Scroll around and you can find yourself gazing at the hindquarters of the Sphinx, but then you find yourself halted at the fence which bisects the causeway.
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| The fence which stops you walking all the way up the causeway to the pyramid of Chephren, with one of the ubiquitous policemen coming into picture on the right.. |
The reason for the fence is that the Tourist Authorities charge a separate admission ticket for the Valley Temple and not unnaturally wish to prevent tourists sneaking in the back way. I am surprised, however, to find that Google is restricted by these nonsensical regulations. For the benefit of any Google executives who read this far, let me tell you how it is done: you wheel your camera right up to the fence from once direction, then you wheel your camera up to the fence from the other direction, and then you insert a little bit of code so that the user of your site can click beyond the fence - from either direction - and magically pass through it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Google's exploration of Gizeh is a disappointment. You are restricted in where you can go and cannot wander at will over the site; the person pushing the trolley or carrying the backpack was clearly a gawping tourist instead of a knowledgeable Egyptologist who seems to miss out on some of the more interesting locations; there are random bits of blurring where Google's not-so-smart software thinks it has detected a face or a licence plate and tried to prevent you catching the guilty party. Above all, you cannot go inside any of the pyramids and given how difficult it is to do so in reality, I do think Google might have made more of an effort in this direction.
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| So near and yet so far: this is as close as you can get to the entrance of the Great Pyramid. |
Having said all that, if you have never been to Egypt and have no prospect of going there, then I can recommend this as a poor second. You do get to see the pyramids as they have never been seen before, you can wander round most of the tourist routes and get some idea of the size and lay-out of the mortuary complex. You have the advantage of missing out on the heat and flies and dirt, you are not pestered by men urging you to buy camel rides, worry beads or dubious water at vastly inflated prices, even the tourist police in their white uniforms do no more than glare at you instead of rushing up to forbid something entirely innocuous in the hope that you will bribe them to permit what was never prohibited in the first place.
Just in case you miss out on Google's invitation, here is the URL. Copy it into your browser and enjoy.
http://www.google.com/intl/en-GB/maps/about/behind-the-scenes/streetview/treks/pyramids-of-giza/
© Kendall K. Down 2014
