The Pyramids at Abusir

We talked to an old friend on the phone a few days ago and suggested that we could buy him tea or pizza to continue the visit.  He said he knew of a place near us and would pick us up yesterday around 1:00.

Linda has taught me to be prepared when anyone takes you out.  Eat some in case it is a long stay.  Don't eat too much in case you end up going for a large feast.  Always bring the camera.

After being picked up, we drove about six miles south and ended up on a small horse farm on the edge of the desert at Abusir.   We were served freshly picked mandarines and tea while we visited.  Is that a pyramid just beyond the palm trees in back of the horse stable, I wondered?



There are over 130 pyramids discovered so far in Egypt.  We were sitting just a few hundred yards from the Abusir pyramids which date from about 2500 B.C. 



One of the nearby attractions is the sun temple of Nyuserra, and we headed over to visit it.  Here I got a brief explanation of the hiroglyphics on one of the stones



This is another of the less visited pyramid sites that is enjoyable to visit without the presence of the souvenir sellers, etc., at the great pyramids of Giza.  We were the only visitors at the sun temple.



This site was explored by Czechoslovakian archeologists and we had the good fortune to have access to a copy of Unearthing Ancient Egypt: Fifty years of the Czech Archaeological Exploration in Egypt.  The Czechs also explored a number of sites in the south in Nubia and this line in the book caught my eye.


60 degrees Centigrade corresponds to 140 degrees Fahrenheit and exceeds the hottest known temperature ever recorded.   This is why we recommend coming to visit Egypt in the winter and not the summer, especially if you are planning to go visit the monuments in the south.

To visit the Abusir pyramids from your own computer, just plug these coordinates into your Google search field and click on the resulting map. 29.896755,31.20352