Cairo, Egypt, is one of fourteen destinations featured on Waddles' World Tour, RestMap's free daily 5-letter word puzzle. Each week's puzzles are themed around a different city, and every solve unlocks an authored travel fact about the place. The Great Pyramids of Giza anchors the Cairo week. Below are five sourced facts that turn up across the Cairo puzzle set.
The workers who built the Great Pyramids were not slaves but paid laborers — a mix of 5,000 permanent salaried employees and up to 20,000 seasonal workers. Their daily wages included two to three gallons of beer per person, plus bread, meat, and vegetables.
Source: AERA (Ancient Egypt Research Associates), History.comThe Fatimid caliph Al-Mu'izz li-Din Allah demanded a pen that wouldn't stain his hands or clothes. His craftsmen produced a pen with an internal ink reservoir that could be held upside-down without leaking — essentially inventing the fountain pen over 900 years before it was 'invented' in Europe.
Source: Middle East Eye, Discovering EgyptAncient Egyptians developed the world's first pregnancy test: women would urinate on wheat and barley seeds, and if the seeds sprouted, the woman was pregnant. Modern research has shown this method was accurate about 70% of the time.
Source: Tom Henty's Travel, multiple sourcesAncient Egyptians had indoor toilets in every home — rich and poor alike — at a time when this was virtually unknown elsewhere in the ancient world. The Greek historian Herodotus was astonished by this practice, writing that having toilets inside homes was remarkable and unusual.
Source: Toiletology, Facts and Details Africa/MEWealthy ancient Egyptian homes had limestone toilet seats with a sand-filled container underneath that was regularly emptied — essentially the world's first cat-litter-style waste management system, predating modern septic systems by thousands of years.
Source: Toiletology, Royal Toiletry Global