Guide: “Welcome to Egypt. I am so pleased that you could join us on this trip! Everyone get on board. Are you ready? 
Girl: Oops
Guide: Mind your step! All right, let’s begin our tour! Everyone knows of course that this is the Nile. Right? Did you know that it’s the longest river in the world? It’s over 6,600 km long!
Tourist A: Wow! Look over there! What is that enormous statue with the head of a human and the body of a lion?
Guide: That’s the Great Sphinx. In ancient Egypt the pharaoh was like the Sphinx: he ruled as a man and he was as powerful as a lion.
Tourist B: And look over there, near the Sphinx. Those are the Pyramids, aren’t  they? Which is the biggest one?
Guide: The one built by Cheops or Khufu as he was usually called. You know, it took thousands of men 23 years to build it and they used more than 2 million heavy stone blocks. Some of them weighed 15 tons!
Tourist A: Wow! Why were the Pyramids built?
Guide: They were the sacred tombs of most of the Pharaohs.
Tourist C: Why did the Egyptians go to all that trouble just to bury someone?
Guide: For the ancient Egyptians, what was important was how the pharaoh lived after he died. The Egyptians believed that their spirits kept on living. The bodies had to be well-preserved, because the body was the spirit’s home after death. Priests prepared the bodies of dead pharaohs in a special way. They washed and cleaned the body with fragrant spices and rubbed it with special oils. Then, they wrapped it in rolls of white cloth to make a mummy.
Tourist B: So a mummy was a home for the pharaoh’s spirit.
Guide: Yes, if a mummy was damaged, the spirit could not live. So the mummy had to be kept safe. That’s why the pyramids were built. They were safe places to protect the mummy.
Tourist A: And why did the pyramids have to be so big?
Guide: Oh, there was more in the pyramid than just the mummy. The spirit of the pharaoh needed everything he had used in his earthly life – food, furniture, jewellery, personal items, make-up, toys, even statues that represented servants! One of the most well-known pharaohs was King Tutankhamen who died when he was only 18 years old! He wasn’t buried in a pyramid.
Tourist C: Why wasn’t he buried in a pyramid?
Guide: Well, the pharaohs weren’t using pyramids anymore because robbers used to break into them and steal all the treasures. So King Tutankhamen was buried in a tomb hidden underground in a place called the Valley of the Kings. His tomb was discovered after thousands of years in 1922 by the British archaeologist Howard Carter. Carter had been searching for it for many years …