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  • 2019-03-28 (xsd:date)
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  • Did a Zeppelin Fly over Giza in the 1930s? (en)
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  • A viral photograph supposedly showing a zeppelin airship flying above the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt is frequently circulated on social media: We have not been able to locate the original source of this image, but the story relayed in this tweet does reference an actual event that we could corroborate via news stories and genuine photographs. The image shown above likely depicts the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin, an airship built in Germany in 1928. That dirigible's most famous flight occurred in 1929, when it circumnavigated the globe in 21 days, and this representation probably depicts a flight from a few years later when the airship traveled across the Middle East in April 1931. Karl Henry von Wiegand, a journalist who was aboard the Graf Zeppelin during its flight over Egypt, described the journey in an article published by the San Francisco Examiner in June 1931. In addition to documenting the airship's journey, von Wiegand's article is of note because it argued that airships were steadily convincing a hard-headed and skeptical world of the practicability and safety of dirigibles as an outstanding factor in long-distance air transportation. While this sentiment may have been true at the time, airship travel was all but grounded a few years later after the infamous Hindenberg disaster of 1937. We've transcribed a few relevant portions of that 1931 news article below: The image popularized on social media might be a symbolic representation created by manipulating pictures after the fact rather than an actual photograph of the event, but even if so it's a reasonably accurate depiction. We located a number of real photographs showing the Graf Zeppelin over the pyramids in Egypt, along with one additional image of the airship specifically journeying over the Great Spinx of Giza. The following photograph, available via the Library of Congress and attributed to the Keystone View Company, shows three men watching the Graf Zeppelin as it approached the pyramids: The Giza Project at Harvard University has collected several additional photographs of the airship above the pyramids in Egypt, and a photograph showing an airship flying over the Sphinx of Giza is available via Getty Images: (en)
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