Cairo, Egypt (Special) -- In this country, the 6th of October 1973 is celebrated as the beginning of an era. A major bridge in this city is named for it. A large monument on the eastern side of the Suez Canal testifies to it. A major museum documents it. 

Our guide, Maged Shenouda, returned again and again to it on a bus tour from Port Said, where our cruise ship the MV Island Princess was docked, to the Giza section on Cairo's outskirts, where the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx are located. October 6, 1973 was the Yom Kippur day that then President Anwar Sadat ordered Egyptian forces to launch a surprise attack against the Israeli military who had been facing them across the Suez Canal since the conclusion of the Six Day War in 1967. The surprise attack, which a few days later was met by an Israeli counter-offensive, "did not really achieve a great and fabulous military victory, but it was a psychological victory," said Shenouda, a government-licensed guide.

The Sphinx in Cairo's Giza District

"Although it did not lead all the way across the Sinai," he added in his narrative, "it destroyed the strongest defense line in the history of the area -- the Bar-Lev line."

Shenouda's version of the 1973 war varies considerably from that known to us Jews and to historians. Whereas we might recall that the Israeli counter-attack was so successful that it crossed onto the western side of the canal, threatening Cairo itself, Shenouda gives a different reason for why Sadat, who started the war, suddenly wanted to end it.

In the guide's version, it was the decision by U.S. President Richard Nixon to replace destroyed Israeli armaments that was crucial. 

"All of a sudden the Egyptian army encountered all the reinforcements of the American war machine in the Sinai, so Sadat knew for sure he shouldn't lead the Egyptian army into another big loss in Sinai," Shenouda told the cruise ship passengers in between descriptions of the scenery that the air-conditioned tour bus was passing. "That is why he (Sadat) started the negotiations about stopping the war, and then began the negotiations for peace with Israel," the guide said. He noted that the Egyptian military "liberated" only a few kilometers of Sinai Desert from Israel in war, but was able through the peace negotiations between Sadat and then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to regain the rest of Sinai. "Egypt," the guide noted with a measure of pride, "was the first country to sign a peace treaty--in 1979 with (U.S. President) Jimmy Carter, Prime Minister Begin and President Sadat."

Monument on Suez Canal marks point where Egypt- ians crossed into Sinai in suprise attack Oct. 6, 1973

While we Jews may think of Israel's wars with Egypt as dating back to even before Israel's independence in 1948, Shenouda's account began with the revolution in 1952 by the Egyptian military which ousted King Farouk from power, installing first a general and later Col. Gamal Abd-el Nasser as the ruler of Egypt.

We Jews tend to remember Nasser as a threatening bully who vowed to push Israel into the sea, but by Shenouda--and one assumes the rest of the Egyptian people, who have named the big lake behind the Aswan Dam for him--Nasser is remembered as an anti-imperialist whose high stake gambles helped to secure Egypt's economic future.

After Nasser took power in 1953, the guide said, he "wanted to industrialize the country, and not be totally dependent on agriculture" which followed the rhythms of the Nile River. "He wanted to build factories, but needed a source of power. He wanted a great dam at Aswan. He asked the World Bank to finance the project (but) the western world refused to give him the money to finance the high dam project."

Shenouda suggested that the western decision not to help Nasser finance his project grew out of anger at him for helping to start the Non-Alligned Movement among Third World Countries which wanted to avoid alliances with either the United States or the Soviet Union.

Whatever the reason for the refusal, the "only other possible source of money was the Suez Canal revenues," Shenouda said.

The canal was controlled by a French-British consortium, but in 1956 "Nasser decided to nationalize it, and Egypt was attacked by England, France and Israel," Shenouda related. 

"England and France sent their airplanes to bomb the cities of the Suez Cana--Port Said, Port Suez and Ishmaelia, and the Israeli army started to penetrate the Sinai. Then there was a big intervention by the two major powers--the United States and the Soviet Union--who told the British and French to withdraw."

Shenouda suggested that whatever the Soviet Union and the United States under President Dwight D. Eisenhower may have then thought of each other, neither wanted to see the old colonial powers of Great Britain and France reassert themselves.

This was a political victory for Nasser, said Shenouda. "He then accepted an offer from the Russians to start the high dam.Work began in 1960 and lasted about 11 years." Shenouda gave short shrift in his narrative to the Six Day War of 1967, except to say that the Suez Canal once again was bombed by the occupying Israelis, and that the international waterway had to be closed for six years.  Nasser died and was succeeded in 1970 by Sadat, whom Shenouda described as a "very surprising political man," not only because he was willing to attack Israel in 1973 but also because he was willing to travel to Israel four years later to make a speech to the Israeli Knesset. Under Nasser, who invited the Russians into Egypt, communists made big inroads as a force in domestic Egyptian politics. Sadat wanted to lessen the communist influence, and "unfortunately started the Islamic movement in Egypt -- to get rid of the influence of the socialists and communists left over from the previous regimes," Shenouda said.

Mena House, in shadow of pyramid was site of negotiations between  Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin over return of Sinai to Egypt.

"He (Sadat) was the first one to get hurt when he was killed by the militants," the guide said. Sadat was murdered, ironically, while attending a parade in 1981 commemorating his "great psychological victory," the 6th of October. 

Today another pyramid stands in Cairo, made not from the sandstone and limestone of the Egyptian desert, but from modern building materials. Sadat is buried below the pyramid.

For Sadat's successor, President Hosni Mubarek, two major projects have been preoccupations in the years since peace with Israel made military expenditures less necessary for Egypt. One is to create a second fertile delta area in southern Egypt, which can attract some of Egypt's population away from the Nile Delta area. More than 90 percent of Egypt's 61 million inhabitants live within 10 miles of the Nile River today. The congestion is so phenomenal that about one half

Sadat's modern pyramid tomb in Cairo

million people live alongside the dead in Cairo's sprawling cemeteries. 

Another project is to pump fresh Nile River water under the Suez Canal to the Sinai Desert in the expectation that with water the equivalent of 30 towns can be created, drawing another 2.5 million Egyptians from the overcrowding of Cairo.

Shenouda, whose principal narration was about ancient Egyptian history, said the written record stretches back to 3,200 BCE when a king of Upper Egypt, in the south of the country, defeated a king in Lower Egypt, in the north, and unified the two kingdoms. That was approximately 1,200 years before the biblical patriarch Abraham arrived on the scene, he said.

Asked to tell about the place of Moses in Egyptian history, Shenouda chose his words very carefully. "We don't have any archeological Egyptian records for that time," he said. "We know nothing about the time of Moses."

However, he said, the name "Moses" probably was derived from the Egyptian name "Mes" which means "born of." The pharaoh Tutmoses was "born of Tut," an Egyptian god, while Ram-mes, was "born of Ram," another Egyptian god, Shenouda said.

"Moses, we know from the Old Testament, was raised by Egyptians, and brought up in the palace," Shenouda said. "So he was given an Egyptian name, probably something "-Mes."

"Of course, the editor of the Old Testament had to delete the first part of the name because it was the name of a pagan God, but he left 'Mes' which became 'Moses,'" the guide said.

One point Shenouda said he especially would like to clarify was that the Pharaoh with whom Moses contested was not Ramses, notwithstanding the way the story was told in the American movie The Ten Commandments.

"They were of two different periods," Shenouda said. "It would be like talking about the Civil War and George Washington." Whereas biblical chronologies puts Moses at approximately 1500 BCE, the 60-year-rule of Ramses was not until approximately 300 years later. Shenouda said Hollywood probably picked Ramses because his name was the best known of the Pharaohs.

Where was the land of Goshen, where the Israelites were supposed to have dwelled? the guide was asked.

"In the northeastern portion of the country," he replied, "the same place where over many centuries many people entered Egypt from the east. There are many universites doing research on this."

At the pyramids, we learned that Yiddish culture has penetrated even to Egypt. A guide spread out a hand full of souvenir items. "I'll sell you the whole schmeer for $10," he said.