08 Dec Egypt — Five Thousand Years of Pizza & Beer

Five thousand years ago Giza was a busy place. Architects and stonemasons, sculptors and painters and plasterers, overseers and freemen and slaves toiled away, doing their bits for immortality.

Menkaure’s pyramid showing the hole made when Malek Abd al-Aziz Othman ben Yusuf tried to tear it down

In a few generations the rules of immortality changed, pyramids fell out of fashion and Giza turned back into a lonely patch of desert on the west bank of the Nile.

On the other side of the river was nothing much. Cairo didn’t get started until Roman times, and then, just as a fort. The place sputtered along until the Twentieth Century before it began to take off, but take off it did. In recent years it has become one of the largest cities in the world, outgrown its portion of the east bank and pseudopoded modernness across the Nile to Giza.

Which means that when you go to Giza now, you can sit in a Pizza Hut and gaze out on all three pyramids and the sphinx as well. It’s a pretty good view from that window, although you can’t see everything. The hole in Menkaure’s pyramid modestly faces away from you. The hole dates back to the Twelfth Century when one Malek Abd al-Aziz Othman ben Yusuf set out to demolish the pyramids. Presumably, because they were searching for immortality in the wrong direction.

Divinely ordained as the project may have been, it didn’t go well. M. A. a-A. O. b. Yusuf started on Menkaure’s pyramid because it was the smallest, and kept a crew on the job for eight months. But the most they were able to work loose was two stones a day. When ben Yusuf gave up, he left a hole as empty as his religious sensibilities.

The Pizza Hut in Giza is just the kind of thing I imagine a modern-day ben Yusuf might want to dismantle, but I don’t believe he’d have an easy job of that, either. Pizza is a lot more durable than he might have supposed.

When you think about it, the people who heaved the stones up into the pyramids couldn’t just hop on a city bus and go home when it got too dark to work. They bedded down in workers’ villages right there on the Giza plateau. On the very spot the Pizza Hut is today. And, despite whatever history you may have gleaned from Cecile B DeMille epics, they ate pretty well, chowing down on, among a lot of other things, beef, onions, cheese, garlic and olives arrayed, I’m pretty sure, on rounds of the same flatbread you can still purchase in markets all over the Middle East. And washed down with good, Fourth-Dynasty beer.

Pizzawise, things haven’t changed much. Today, anybody with a few Egyptian pounds can go out to Giza and indulge in a Super Supreme topped with beef, onions, cheese, garlic and olives while looking out on some of the most remarkable handiwork of all time. Through a window marked with the words tuH azziP.

Out the window at the Pizza Hut. The sphinx is behind the z’s.

Despite the modern-day ben Yusuf’s who infest the Middle East, you can still get beer in Egypt. Lots of beer, just like in the old days. Pharaoh Lager sounds right to me but, this being a Pizza Hut, you’ll have to bring your own . Or, better yet, order take-out and enjoy your meal outdoors . . . in the shadow of the pyramids.