Peace Kills by P. J. O'Rourke

Author:P. J. O'Rourke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2004-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

Peter and I went ten miles south to Memphis, the capital of Egypt during most of pharaonic times. For three and a half millennia Memphis was the most important city in the country. Then, in the tenth century, the Fatimid general Jauhar al Rumi pillaged its stones to build Cairo. The dikes were neglected. And now Memphis is gone beneath the silt of the Nile.

But the former capital’s necropolis, Saqqara, survives, marked by the Step Pyramid of Djoser. The Step Pyramid was completed about 2635 B.C. Peter said, “This was the world’s first stone building.”

I said, “In a country that’s nothing but stone, with not a tree for miles, surely somebody …”

“The ancient Egyptians,” Peter said, “built their houses out of mud and their tombs out of stone—to last for eternity.” Most of Saqqara has collapsed into rubble.

Nearby is the Bent Pyramid. “This was the first pyramid of the true smooth-sided type,” Peter said. To me it looked like a monument to middle-aged adultery—an affair begun with an aggressive angle of attack that couldn’t be maintained. Apparently, building a pyramid was less straightforwardly Herculean than one might think. Peter explained, though not in these words, that there was more to it than making the top pointy so that the ancient Egyptians would know when to stop. Peter said the craft of pyramid building required a hundred years to perfect, leaving five pharaohs under large but irregular piles of stuff.

We went into the tomb of Mereruka, son-in-law of Pharaoh Teti, who reigned from 2355 to 2343 B.C. This tomb was a mastaba, a flat-roofed stone building, with thirty-three rooms. Peter claimed that only royals were allowed to depict the gods in their burial chambers, so Mereruka decorated his with scenes from daily life. And what a life. Carved onto the walls is a nice-looking family with plenty of household help. Frequent gourmet meals are served. There’s surround-sound lute playing, many buff dancing girls, and goldsmiths coming up with something to placate the missus. Packs of happy naked kids—it must have been a progressive day-care center—play tug-of-war and Johnny-on-the-pony. Travel is as adventurous as anything in an Abercrombie & Kent brochure. Mereruka is shown spearing hippos (probably the bungee-jumping of his day). And one whole wall is devoted to a lively illustration of revenue enhancement. Serf personnel are—to put it in Enron terms—allowing their 401(k)s to be used to purchase the corporation’s own stock (at the urging of supervisors with sticks).

Mereruka did well for himself while his wife’s dad was running the show. I was looking at a recognizable yuppie paradise. Nothing here would have been strange to the Reagan merger-and-acquisition years or the dot-com boom. All it lacked was golf.

And yet I was also looking at thirty-three rooms of tomb, every one of which was to be filled with custom-made furniture, precious jewels, designer-label kilts and sandals, supermodel-endorsed eye kohl, vintage grand-cru palm-sap wine, and enough meals-to-go to last forever, not to mention archaeological treasures and priceless items of ancient Egyptian art.

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