A year ago an amazing man from our Fox&Badge community came to a meetup & explained that he had a deep passion for Ancient Egypt, led monthly tours round the Egyptian collection at the British Museum, & offered to take us on one.

Thus Isis & Osiris was born, our much anticipated event on May 26th at HEAVEN in London, summoned and inspired by the genius of Igor Selivanov.

We’d been asking our resident Egyptologist tons of questions about our upcoming event, and learning so much, but never as much as after that moment when he suggested - why don’t we all go on a mini research trip?

And so a few weekends ago in March we found ourselves touring Cairo, Giza and Saqqara, in hunt of myths and magic.

On Day 1 we began with the blockbuster (of 2.3 million blocks), the Great Pyramid of Khufu, clawing past the crowds into the King’s Chamber, pondering those leftfield theories of it being a sound-healing chamber than tomb.

A long day of tombs & pyramids closed with a late-night tour of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), a dizzyingly massive landscape of a building which isn’t yet open & appears to have almost no artefacts. What it does have is glorious, centreing around the gorgeous 83-tonne figure of Ramesses II, rescued from a traffic island. The Sensuality of the massive sculptures was astonishing; almost libidinous.

Such vastness, yet such tenderness...

Still on Day1, we descended from Giza to the Necropolis of Saqqara - whose Pyramid of Djoser is the oldest stone building complex in history.

You taste eternity in Egypt.

In London the winds blow East & thus the Romans buried their dead out here, where I live; in Cairo it’s the opposite, and all the Necropolises are on the West of the Nile. As Igor pointed out, jackals used to roam there because their digestion prefers rotting meat - and thus they became seen as guardians to the Underworld.

Back in 2011 an excavation team discovered a stash of eight million animal mummies - mostly dogs - next to the Temple of Anubis (can you imagine the logistics?...).

Some of the crenulated building were so much more interesting and elaborate than anything we build these days. The carving had miraculously endured all these thousands of years. In places the lotus-leaf capitals were still immaculate.

The walls were fresh with gorgeous bodies, so gently engraved as if the stone was butter that had been lightly dished.

The walls told endless stories of everyday life, humans tussling with their animals.

Occasionally pen1ses poked out beneath their host skirts, or ran amok across the walls.

Our Egyptian guide claimed the tomb with two well-carved brothers depicted only fraternity; others claim it depicts the oldest gay couple in history. Their intimacy was sensual and palpable, and deeply touching.

The Serapeum is the underground labyrinth where they buried their sacred Apis bulls, and is deeply confusing - it appears to be excavated from the local stone, yet also contains dozens of unbelievably enormous, perfectly carved and resplendently polished basalt tombs that could neither have been carved there, nor somehow inserted. Some weigh 70 tonnes. A few years ago a modern, highly-equipped team couldn’t even manage to move one…

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Our research tour continued to Saqqara, site of the oldest stone complexes in the world, and the greatest mysteries - how did they move all those vast 70-tonne Apis-bull tombs underground? Were those 2 intimate men really just brothers? How did they manage to curate 8 million mummified dogs in just 1 place?...

On our 2nd and 3rd days, we stayed in the city. With Giza, it’s the largest metropolitan area in Africa and the Arab world. Larger than Lagos? That is truly epic; a modern feat of scale to rival the pyramids in its own way...

We spent almost our entire last day inside the immense Egyptian Museum, the oldest archaeological museum in the Middle East, though it was only built last century. It has the largest collection of Pharaonic antiquities in the world. Despite so much having been relocated to the G.E.M. in Giza, the collection is still vast.That day wasn’t remotely enough.

The museum is a true trove, arranged in a rectangle on 2 floors around a central courtyard, with a few rooms, like tombs, almost sealed off and rarely visited.

The stories are so wild; all the figures both so refined and so imaginative. Some of them look contemporary. Some of them are unbelievably monumental; Amenhotep III & Tiye almost burst through the roof.

Some of them are so deeply charged and sensual; those polished black bodies are simply sublime, as if glossy basalt was their equivalent of taut latex ;)....

You can actually tour part of the museum virtually at https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=85n8j312Ur4, which starts with their piece de resistance, the 10kg gold mask of Tutankhamun.

It was extraordinary being in Cairo for Ramadan & experiencing an entire city fasting (from bad thoughts as much as food and water) - and the generosity of hordes of neighbourhoods putting out fields of tables and inviting endless strangers to dinner. We were treated like pharaohs…
More at https://egymonuments.gov.eg/en/museums/egyptian-museum

My final snapshot of our brief foray into the remains of Ancient Egypt ends in more modern times, at the Gayer-Anderson Museum, made famous in pop culture for that scene in the Bond Film “The Spy who Loved Me”.

It’s housed in the Bayt-al-Kritliyya - one of the most outstanding examples of Muslim domestic architecture in Cairo - a seventeenth century pair of gorgeously ornate buildings next to the Mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun, onto which the house gazes fondly..

Our glimpse of one of the oldest world religions would be through a manifestation of one of its newest, built a millennium after the birth of Islam..

Last night we went to a talk where sex and relationship therapist Lyndsey Dukes wryly observed how the mainstream engages in exactly the same kind of behaviour as kinksters, just in slightly different forms (fetishism; role play; power play; voyeurism; pain & ecstasy…). It got me thinking on the similarities not between Ancient Egypt and Christianity, but Islam - and how the child always bears the imprint of its ancestors. How religion is so central to each culture, even in government and everyday life; how each followed divine law (the 10 commandments; the 42 Negative Confessions) & had major culinary prohibitions (pork/catfish & offerings to the gods), pilgrimage sites, a clergy class, prayers inscribed on tablets, the centrality of a triumvirate, etc.
Senegalese and Sudanese Sufis still wear the same beads with the same symbols as Kemetic priests and rulers.

Many parallels have been made between Prophet Muhammad (600AD) and Pharaoh Akhenaten (1400 BC), who swerved Egypt into monotheism: both were raised as polytheists, worshipping hundreds of gods; both converted to a single god in adulthood; both were influenced by other monotheistic faiths (Christians/Jews); both chose a lesser deity to elevate (Allah/Aten), adorned them with sun/moon symbolism, and banned worship of others, yet retained pagan practices of worship; both elevated themselves as the supreme representative of their god, yet neither performed miracles….

The rise of Pharaonism in the 20s & 30s, and now Neo-Pharaonism in the last few years, both stressed the importance of Ancient Egypt in the modern state’s national Islamic identity.

The Irish-both Gayer Anderson left his life, family and a thriving medical practice to join the army in Egypt. 5 years later he chanced across this house, so notable for its fine lattice network of mashrabiya screens overlooked public spaces, allowing hidden women to spy on the world outside. A beautiful woman leaned out to greet him, but he cautiously declined her entreaty to enter; 2 decades later he would revisit it, and eventually enter it as owner, lavishing it with his exquisite art collection. Now it us & our film crews that spy on him, and all the pasts that preceded him.

The museum houses a wide history of antiquities, illicit love affairs, and other tender memories, with a few choice remnants of the Kemetic dynasties, and a strong whiff of mystery. One of the British Museum’s prize possessions is a Bastet cat that Gayer-Anderson donated; he retained a copy in this museum (more at https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/animals/gayer-anderson-cat; NB cats were deified and worshipped because they granaries and homes clear of mice. In Europe we burned their owners (“witches”) at the stake, whilst Ancient Egyptians held annual orgies in their honour. Hmmm…).

Downstairs in “the birthing room” they had lots of midwifery implements, including some creepy hessian dolls that looked just like shrivelled mummies; how keenly the very young simulate the very old…

This GAM, like the EM, can also be majestically toured online via https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=LCyv1zFUxiq&mpu=497&minimap=1

More at https://egymonuments.gov.eg/museums/gayer-anderson-museum/ & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gayer-Anderson_Museum