The Continuing Adventures of Dr Dzoe

Hello to everyone who has gotten here because of my Artomatic exhibit.  The pictures in the exhibit are photos that I took on a trip to Egypt in October, 2011.  If you scroll down through this blog, you’ll see several entries describing that trip, including the pictures that are up in the exhibit.  In several cases, there’s descriptions of how and where those pictures were taken.  Please feel free to leave a comment on any of these.  Or if you want to reach me, drop me an email at jdzik@aol.com.

And here’s my wife Julie’s page.  She has the wall across from mine.

http://gallerydz.com/

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, hello to all of my regular readers.  Artomatic is a huge and very cool art event in the Washington area that has run for several years now.  You can find details here: http://artomatic.org/.

Artomatic is always held in a large empty building somewhere in the Washington area.  This year it’s in an 11 story building in Crystal City, Virginia.  Anyone who wishes, for a nominal fee and a total of fifteen hours of volunteer labor, can get a stretch of wall or a small room to display art.  The show runs for a little over a month, tens of thousands of people visit, and over a thousand artists have work on display.

It’s a terrific event.  Because anyone can exhibit, the quality and type of art varies widely.  Along one wall you might find some terrific landscape paintings, while the next room contains a large abstract sculpture made of welded iron and neon lights, and the next wall over can have someone’s finger paintings or a conceptual piece that invites passersby to use sharpies to draw on a collaborative mural.  It’s tons of fun – kind of like a giant science fair of art.

Julie participated in the last one, held in 2009.  This year, she persuaded me to join and exhibit some of my photos.  I did an exhibit of 14 of my favorite pictures from Egypt called “Faces of Egypt,” using photos that have appeared in this blog, focusing on photos that show the faces of Egyptians that we encountered.  I painted the wall with a pyramid motif, hung the photos over my makeshift mural, and set up some lights to brighten it up.  I’ll post a picture of the installation sometime soon.

If you should find yourself in the DC area in the next month, I strongly recommend a visit to Artomatic.  It’s lots of fun for both adults and kids.  They even have several performing artists, though since the performers are all random sign-ups the quality there is widely varying also.

And if you do go, then by all means stop by and see my exhibit.  It’s on the fourth floor – go into the office space across the corridor from the men’s room, wander around a bit, and look for the pyramid and you’ll find me.  Julie’s work is hanging right across the hall, so you can get two Dzikiewicz’s for the price of one.  We’re planning on being there on Meet the Artist night on June 2, but if you’re there and we’re not, leave a note in my notebook near the exhibit.  I’ll try to take some photos of my favorite things at Artomatic to post here later on.

As the title says, it’s been a while since I’ve updated my reading list.  Lot of books on Egypt in here, books that I read in preparation for the trip.  Some other stuff too.  Here goes!

Audiobooks:

– Star Island, by Carl Hiaasen.  I like Hiaasen’s satires, all set in Florida, including a set of crazy characters.  This one centers around a Britney/Lindsey type of teen-star well on her way to meltdown.  Not one of his best, but still entertaining.

– Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis.  Time travel books about two future historians sent back in time to discover more about the London Blitz during WWII and what happens when their time machine fails.  At turns entertaining and annoying – the book spends way too long having our three intrepid heroes find each other, and when they are concentrating on their own troubles it gets rather tedious.  Still, when the characters start thinking beyond themselves, it’s entertaining.  And some of the scenes, such as the extended sequence the night that St Paul’s Cathedral almost burned down, can be riveting.

– The Curse of the Pharaohs and The Mummy Case by Elizabeth Peters.  These are two books from a series of mysteries about Amelia Peabody, an archaeologist working in Egypt from the 1880’s on.  Peabody is a delightful character: opinionated, strong willed, outspoken, and prone to encountering murders and other crimes during the digs that she and her husband Emerson carry out.  Definitely fun books, much enhanced by the fact that Peabody spends much time at sites that Julie and I visited in Egypt.

– To Sail Beyond the Sunset by Robert Heinlein.  Heinlein’s last book.  Alas, not one of his best.

E-books on the iPad:

– A Dance with Dragons by George RR Martin.  The latest book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, inspiration to the HBO series “Game of Thrones.”  Honestly, I thought this one was weak.  A whole lot of characters traveling around not doing much.  Nothing really resolved from the last book.  One character spent the whole book traveling across half the country, got where he was going, opened a door, and was brutally killed.  I’m not at the point yet of giving up on this series, but I’m getting close.

– Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi.  Back around 50 years ago, a science fiction writer named H. Beam Piper wrote a book called Little Fuzzy about what happens when a new intelligent race is discovered on a corporation-owned colony planet.  I read and enjoyed that book back in the 70’s.  Now Scalzi has done a reboot of it.  I enjoyed the book, though not as much as I did the original.  And everyone is a bit darker than in the original, up to and including the Fuzzies themselves.

– Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters.  The first of the Amelia Peabody books, referenced under audiobooks.  Lots of fun.

– Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs and Red Land, Black Land by Barbara Mertz.  You know Elizabeth Peters, author of the Amelia Peabody books?  Well, it turns out that she has a PhD in Egyptology.  Further, she’s written two books on the history of ancient Egypt under her real name, Barbara Mertz.  And here they are.  Both excellent reads, wonderfully entertaining, showing Mertz’s strong opinions (I have to think that she based Amelia Peabody on herself).  If you’re interested in learning something about Egyptian history, I recommend these strongly.  Temple, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs is a chronological history that covers the political events of Egypt from its unification down through the conquest by the Romans.  Red Land, Black Land is a social history that describes how Egyptians lived during ancient times.  Both are marvelous.

– Fort Freak, edited by George RR Martin.  The latest in the Wildcards series about people having superpowers in the real world.  A fun read, but nothing profound here.

– Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie.  One of Christie’s classics, a Hercule Poirot murder mystery that mostly takes place on a cruise down the Nile.  I found the crime, involving as it did no less than three different people who went into the victim’s stateroom for one reason or other, two of whom were spotted by others who did not reveal what they saw for various reasons, to be a bit contrived, put there only to make the mystery more of a puzzle.  Plus I didn’t solve the mystery before the big reveal, so I’ve got some sour grapes going on there as well.  Okay if you like this kind of stuff, but not really my thing.

– Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie.  In a hole in a tomb in Egypt they once found a series of papyrus letters from a father to his son.  The father was a minor official who often had to travel, and he sent directions to his son who managed the family homestead in the father’s absence.  The letters contained descriptions of the family, including three sons, the responsible one, his fiery-tempered younger brother, and the youngest, the apple of the father’s eye and a bit spoiled, a young widow daughter, an aunt who no one liked but the father, and others.  At one point, the father wrote that he had just acquired a young and beautiful concubine and he would be bringing her home soon.

Agatha Christie heard about these letters and decided to write a mystery about the family.  This is that mystery.  A murder takes place in a fictionalized version of this family, and complications ensue.  Still more of the Christie-style puzzle-book, but I enjoyed this one a lot more for the setting in ancient Egypt and the back-story related to the letters.  I figured out whodunnit in this one, though given that at one point or other I suspected more of the members of the family, that’s not much to brag about.

– Akhenaten by Naguib Mahfouz.  After studying Egypt, my favorite pharaoh was Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh, father of Tutankhamun and husband to Nefertiti, who founded the world’s first monotheist religion and who revolutionized Egypt’s art.  Of course, Akhenaten tends to be the favorite pharaoh of many.  One person who was intrigued by him was Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who wrote a fictionalized account of Akhenaten’s reign.  An interesting book, which tells the tale of Akhenaten from the point of view of many of the people who knew him.  A nice take on a fascinating story.

– Reamde by Neal Stephenson.  I like Neal Stephenson: his Cryptonomicon was one of my most entertaining reads of the last decade. With Reamde he gets back to his roots: hackers and world girdling action-adventure full of outlandish characters and great action sequences.  A lot of fun.

And last but not least: paper books.

– The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt by Ian Shaw.  A history of Egypt, focusing largely on the archaeological evidence.  Rather dry, I’m afraid.  Lots of detail, if you can keep awake, but if you’re looking for an entertaining history, stick to Mertz.

– How to Read Egyptian by Mark Collier and Bill Manley.  Early in the summer, I had visions of learning to read hieroglyphs for the Egypt trip.  This was the book that cured me of that delusion.  While I learned my way around hieroglyphs and can recognize a few phrases and the names of pharaohs, I doubt I’ll ever learn the entire language.  Still, this was a nice book to work through, if you want a little education in the language.

– A Brief History of Egypt by Arthur Goldschmidt Jr.  A survey of the entire history of Egypt, from the days of the pharaohs through Mubarak’s rule.  I read this one to get a view of more recent Egyptian history, where “more recent” means the last two millennia.  This book gave me what I was looking for, and was a quick read.

– Look I Made a Hat by Stephen Sondheim.  I’m a huge fan of Sondheim’s musicals.  So when he came out last year with a collected lyrics of his shows through 1980, complete with his stories of how those shows were produced, comments on how to write lyrics, and his views of the top lyricists from Broadway history, I was thrilled.  I loved that book, and I loved this one, the sequel that covers the work he’s done since 1980.  Not to be missed, if you’re as much of a Sondheim fan as I am.

– Various other books on Egypt.  I skimmed parts of a number of books on Egyptian history in preparation for the trip, but didn’t finish any of them.

Egypt is serious about their tourism.  As they probably should be – it’s been a tourist destination for a very long time.  After all, Herodotus wrote what might have been the first tourism book about Egypt many many years ago.

Nowadays, they have a special police force that handles tourist issues.  Here’s one of their cars, as seen at Saqqara.

We even had a guard traveling with us whenever we were in Cairo.  Each day a man would be on the bus wearing a suit with a suspicious firearm-shaped bulge.  You can see a rather serious gun peeking out from under this guy’s jacket.

(Almost universally, the Egyptians that I met seemed to like having their picture taken.  You can see this by all the smiles in all the pictures you’ve seen in these past few posts.)

They even have a special emergency phone number for the Tourism Police.  It’s 122 for the normal police, 126 if you happen to be a tourist.

I’m not sure if all that protection makes me feel safer or more at risk!

I’ve been meaning to put this up for a while, but life has been busy.  I’ve gone from a summer with no job to a fall with three.  That said, here’s a picture-only post: faces of people that I encountered in various ways in Egypt, some of which have been posted here previously.  Plus some towel animals, because I like them and this is my blog.

When I first arranged this tour, there was one thing missing from the itinerary that I really wanted to do.  I wanted to go into the Great Pyramid.  I knew that it was possible, but the tour company told me that the only way I could do it was to skip Khufu’s boat, and I didn’t want to miss that.

As it happens, there was another way I could arrange it: by staying an extra day.  So I persuaded Julie to extend our trip one day past the scheduled tour end, something that the tour company was happy to arrange, found a couple other things worth doing to fill out the day, and was happy to know that I would get to visit Khufu’s burial chamber.

Today was that last day.  Everyone else on the tour departed for the airport early this morning, and Julie and I had at our sole disposal the most excellent Karima, a car, and a driver.

There were only two problems: we were told that going into the Great Pyramid wasn’t a big deal, and there were too many things at the Egyptian Museum to see in the two and a half hours we had yesterday.  So I didn’t end up going into the Great Pyramid after all.  Good thing there was plenty of other good stuff to do, including another pyramid to enter.

Our last morning before departure started with me taking pictures from our balcony.  Here’s one of my favorites:

Then we were off.  We passed through lovely fields of date palms ready for harvest.

Then we reached Dahshur.  Which means it’s time for another history lesson.

A century or so after Imhotep invented the Step Pyramid, King Snefru came to the throne.  He too wanted something different for a tomb, so his architects came up with the idea of taking the Step Pyramid model, smoothing out the sides, and facing the whole thing with high quality limestone.  The result was the first true pyramid, which stands now at Dahshur, about a half-hour drive from Giza.

Except, you may note, there’s something wrong with that picture.  It doesn’t have the constant slope that one expects of a pyramid.  In fact, that pyramid looks rather bent.  Which is why it’s now called the Bent Pyramid.

Snefru’s engineers were clearly not up to Imhotep’s standard.  It’s believed that they started working on the pyramid and then discovered that they couldn’t continue at the same slope, so they had to change the angle.  Leaving Snefru with a substandard tomb.   Chalk it up as one of the perils of being an early adopter.

Imagine having to be the guy who comes to the king to tell him of the mistake that was made.  It’s a good thing that Snefru was, according to legend, an awfully pleasant king, because telling something like that to Rameses would probably have involved some serious head bashing.

But even a nice king has limits.  So Snefru ordered up another pyramid built, call it Pyramid 2.0, the Red Pyramid, so-called because it’s made of a reddish granite.  It’s not far from the Bent Pyramid.

This is actually the second-tallest pyramid in Egypt, after the Great Pyramid.  Finally, the builders had produced an ideal pyramid.  It only remained for Snefru’s son, Khufu, to perfect the design with the Great Pyramid, or what I think of as version 3.0.

Our visit to Dahshur was marvelous.  Unlike Giza, there’s precious few tourists, and no vendors at all.  Which made our walk around the Bent Pyramid rather like it must have been back in the day: a walk in the desert, all alone, with only pyramids for company.

It was interesting to see the differences between these pyramids and the Great Pyramid.  The most obvious difference is the angle.  But the Bent Pyramid also retains more of its smooth limestone facing than any other pyramid.  Which means that most of it has a smooth surface.

Further, the Bent Pyramid was made out of smaller stones, something that’s obvious in the areas that have lost their facing.

It was a rather windy day, though, as Julie discovered when her hat blew away.

(That strange looking structure in the distance is another of the decayed mud-brick pyramids built by later generations.)

I’m happy to report that Julie caught her hat in time to have a pleasant conversation with Karima.

After that, we drove to the Red Pyramid where we had an opportunity to enter the burial chamber.  This required going down a 200-foot-long steeply angled corridor that was around four foot high, something that I found a bit challenging.

(Great, now there’s a picture of my underwear on the Internet.  Oh well, I suppose that hardly makes me unique.)

Down at the bottom, there’s a series of rooms joined by short corridors.  And by short, I refer to both height and distance.

Then you get to the burial chamber, which I’m happy to report has a much higher ceiling.

So I got to go into a pyramid after all!

After Dahshour, we visited a papyrus factory to see how papyrus is made and make a few purchases.  Then it was an excellent lunch, and then we went back to the Egyptian Museum and saw many of the things we missed yesterday, a visit improved by the small afternoon crowds.

Here’s a picture of the outside of the museum that shows where ancient and modern history almost collided in a disastrous way:

The building in the foreground is the Egyptian Museum.  The burnt-out building in the backgrounds is the former headquarters of the National Democratic Party, or NDP, Mubarak’s political party.  During the revolution, police snipers were firing on the crowd from the upper stories of the NDP building.  So the revolutionaries lit it on fire.  Happily, the fire did not spread to the Egyptian Museum, which stands next door.

After that, we headed back to the Giza Pyramids for a light show.  The Pyramids look good under the light, even though the lasers can have a distinctly cheesy effect.

The green pharaoh’s face is projected onto the Sphinx, by the way.

And so ended our last day in Egypt.  This has been an amazing trip.  Look here in a few days for a series of wrap-up posts, posts that shall be written back in cooler, wetter Virginia.

The Egyptian Museum.  Home to the greatest collection of Egyptian antiquities in the world.  Akhenaten’s statues.  The Narmer Palate.  A dozen royal mummies.  All of that amazing King Tut stuff.  No photos allowed.

Today we went there.  But, well, you read the last line.  It was a truly amazing collection, and I have no pictures to share.  Sorry.

But I do have one anecdote.   Back around 1880, a cache of mummies was found in the Valley of the Kings, a cache believed hidden by priests who feared that tomb robbers would find their late charges.  Upon examination, it turned out that the mummies included a number of pharaohs from the New Kingdom, including many of the ones that have featured prominently in this blog.  Tutmose III, the Napoleon of Egypt.  Hatshepsut, the female king.  Rameses the Great, who ruled Egypt for 63 years and left statues of himself up and down the Nile valley.  All dead for over 3000 years.  Today I looked them all in the eye.

Well, I looked them in the face: while the heads included many teeth, some in surprisingly good shape given that the Nile was not fluoridated, there really weren’t any eyes to speak of.

Rameses the Great is particularly worth noting.  Some believe that he was the Pharaoh of Exodus.  If that’s the case, Rameses is the only figure mentioned in the Bible who you can look at face to face, at least this side of judgment day.

Operating on the assumption that this was the case, I positioned my face above the glass case enclosing Rameses.  Giving him my best glare, I said, “Let my people go!”  And what do you know, my people are no longer in slavery in Egypt.  Me and Moses, huh?

After that, we had two of the more interesting events of our trip.  At lunch we met two of the men who led the Egyptian Arab Spring Revolution of last January.  At dinner we met another two, these young women.

I’m going to have a lot more to say about these meetings and about the effect of the Revolution on this country in a future blog post.  It deserves an entry of its own.  The Egyptian people, their idealism and energy, are inspiring.  But deciding what to say is going to take some thought.

Anyway, it seems just wrong to finish a post without any pictures, so I leave you with this, a scene from Julie’s lunch.

After the glories of yesterday, today was bit less dramatic.  We saw some nice sights, but they were from relatively recent times.

The important word in that last sentence is “relatively.”  When we were in London last summer and spotted a fragment of the wall built by the Romans around Londinium, we were amazed at such an ancient structure.  Today, when Julie and I saw a wall built by the Romans in Cairo, we thought, “That’s nice, but it’s awfully new.”

That’s what Egypt can do to you.

Other than Roman wall fragments, we visited Coptic Cairo.  The Coptic, or Egyptian, Church is probably the oldest Christian denomination in the world.  Christians make up around 15% of the Egyptian population, most members of the Coptic Church.  In addition to the Coptic Museum, we visited two churches, the Hanging Church, which dates back to Roman times, and a church set on land where Jesus, Mary, and Joseph supposedly stopped while they were in Egypt hiding from Herod’s wrath.

After that, we visited an old synagogue.  Then it was the Saladin’s citadel and the mosque of Mohammed Ali.  Not the boxer, but the adventurer who became ruler of Egypt in the early 1800’s, cementing his rule by inviting the ruling Mameluk tribes to dinner one evening and having them all slaughtered.  Mohammed Ali is credited with bringing Egypt into the modern world, and the dynasty he founded ruled Egypt until the revolution of 1952.

After that, we visited the Khan el-Khalili market, a wild collection of shops where you can buy any kind of tourist trinket you want, but where you’d better be ready to dicker over prices.  Which is, if you’re of a certain mind, a lot of fun: it’s like stepping into the Arabian Nights, complete with a couple hundred Ali Babas.  Or would, if Ali Baba sold t-shirts and statues of Egyptian gods that were largely made in China.

It’s now the end of a long day, and I’m feeling a bit disorganized.  So here, with little rhyme or reason, are pictures taken from this collection of adventures.  It’s up to you to figure out which site is which.

The last picture requires a bit of explanation.  It’s the view through our bus’s windshield as we drove out of the market.  Somehow, the driver managed to avoid killing any pedestrians or knocking down any wares, an act of automotive brilliance on a par with inventing the pyramid.

You know what’s great?  This is great.

You know what’s awfully nice, but not quite great?  This.

You know what Julie and I visited today?

Doesn’t look so big, does it?  But then you look at the buildings in the background of the first picture, or the bus in the foreground of the second one.  Or you look at the number of layers of stone in all of them and take a closer look at the scale and you see this:

And then you’re forced to admit that the Great Pyramid is, well, great.  I’ll even grant that Khafre’s Pyramid, the slightly-shorter one, is great too.

Here’s a few more pictures of us with pyramids:

That last one is of the people in our tour group.

Here’s our staff: Karima, guide supreme; Hussein, tour organizer and fixer; and Heba, lecturer and knower of interesting things.

Aside from the pyramids, the Giza plateau is chock full of things that are worth seeing.  There’s the funeral boat found in a pit near the Great Pyramid where it has been waiting for 4500 years:

There’s camels, which are strange looking beasts:

but fun to ride:

And, of course, there’s the Sphinx.

From the time we started planning this trip, I imagined taking a picture of the Sphinx looking over Julie’s shoulder.  Alas, we were not allowed close enough for the shot that I wanted, but this will do.

My own experience with the Sphinx was a bit more personal.  Who knew that the Sphinx is a minx?

But I’ve got to say, one of my favorite things on the Giza Plateau is the people you find there.  Like the vendors selling souvenir trinkets.

My favorite encounter was with a class of kids on a field trip.  They were swarming past our slower moving group when I asked one boy if I could take his picture.  He said yes.

Before we were done exchanging names, his friend popped up and insisted that I take his picture too.

The next thing I knew, I was surrounded by the entire class, introducing themselves and insisting on having their picture taken with me:

What a terrific group!

After lunch, we visited the necropolis of Saqqara.  But first, a little history of pyramids.

The first kings of Egypt were buried in mastaba tombs.  A mastaba tomb is a stone building that encloses a burial shaft.  We visited one belonging to a nobleman which contained marvelous reliefs on the walls.  These were scenes of day-to-day life, including one showing boating on the Nile, including a hippo biting a crocodile’s head, and a line of dancers doing what looked like an acrobatic can-can.  (No pictures allowed in the tombs, alas.)

But a mastaba tomb is not much to look at from the outside.  So when it came time to build a tomb for King Djoser in around 2700 BC, his architect decided to try something new.

Imhotep, it should be noted, was quite a guy.  In addition to being an expert architect and engineer, he was also a pioneer of medicine.  All these talents were enough that the Egyptians later worshipped him as a god.  Speaking as an engineer, I have only positive views of deifying engineers.

Imhotep got the idea of building a structure consisting of layers of what look like mastaba tombs.  Taken together, it resembles a large stone wedding cake with five layers.  This is the Step Pyramid, and in addition to being the great granddaddy of all the pyramids, it’s also the first monumental building made of stone.  Anywhere.  It’s in Saqqara, and we visited it.

Take a look at this column, found in the funerary complex of the Step Pyramid.

It’s not much to look at, a fairly simple column that is not even free standing.  But it’s one of a set of the oldest stone columns in Egypt, which means it’s possibly the oldest stone column in the world.  Which makes it a lot more impressive.

That’s another one of Imhotep’s inventions.  No wonder they deified the guy.

After the Step Pyramid, the architects of King Snefru invented the first true pyramids.  We’re visiting those on Sunday, so more on them anon.  Then came the Great Pyramid and the others on the Giza plateau.

After Giza, the Egyptians started getting a bit lazy.  They decided that, given that they were facing the pyramids with limestone, there wasn’t much point building it out of stone.  So they switched to using cheaper mud bricks for the body of the pyramid.

But there’s a problem with this.  Over the years, the limestone facing falls away, or people strip it to use the stone in other projects.  This isn’t a problem when you have a stone building beneath the facing.  But if you have built the substructure out of mud brick, you have problems.  It may only rain three inches a year in Cairo, but that can really add up over 4000 years.  So those mud brick pyramids have largely decayed into piles of dirt.  Here’s one:

That’s the pyramid of Teti.  We went into it, a low crawl to see a stone chamber decorated with hieroglyphs.

After that, it was back to the hotel.  There was nothing scheduled for the evening, so Julie and I went off on a dinner cruise on the Nile.

There was also a show.  The belly dancer was good, but the whirling dervish was amazing.

The dervish, wearing a long skirt, spins around with a beatific expression, and the skirt raises and makes him look like a top.  Then the lights go out, his skirt lights up, and he starts to resemble an amusement park ride at night.  Good stuff.

And so ended what has been my favorite day in Egypt.

Then it must be the Pyramids.

Well, almost.  First, I started the morning with a short walk near the hotel:

Then we went to the Luxor Museum.  No pictures, alas, as no cameras are allowed inside.  But the works of ancient Egyptian art were amazing.

My favorite was a room set aside for the Amarna period art done under Akhenaten.  Akhenaten was a fascinating figure, probably my favorite pharaoh.  He started his kingship as Amenhotep IV.  But soon after he came to the throne, he decided to abandon worship of Amun and the other Egyptian gods.  Instead, he worshipped a minor Egyptian deity called Aten, or the sun disc.  He ordered traces of Amun removed from the temples, changed his name to Akhenaten, and became the first monotheist in history.

But that wasn’t all.  He had a new capital city built.  And he initiated an entirely new art style that looks surprisingly like the modern art of Mondrian.  Those pieces also included a high level of realistic depiction of day-to-day life, including the first pictures of a king being romantic with his wife and playing with his children.

I find that style to be astonishingly beautiful, and found myself surprisingly moved by the art at the Luxor Museum.  There’s one large piece put together from found fragments that shows an entire town of workers, brewing beer, planting grain, making pots, cooking bread.  A group of bearers take this work and carry it to the king.  He raises it to the sky as an offering to Aten, who is always represented as a sun disc with the rays as arms reaching down hands to accept the offerings.  In the next scene, Aten gives to the king symbols of life and prosperity, which the king presumably shares with his people.

It’s an astonishing work of art for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that the king is depicted on the same scale as many of the workers.  (Pharaohs are usually depicted as far larger than anyone other than gods.)  Also, the king is not depicted as an ideal, as is the case with other Egyptian art, but rather as a recognizably flawed human, complete with pot belly.

If you’re interested, I recommend looking on the net for pictures of art from the Amarna period (named after Akhenaten’s capital).

Alas, Akhenaten’s religion and artistic style died with him.  In the reign of his son, originally named Tutankhaten but, after his father’s death, renamed Tutankhamen, the Amun worshippers made a comeback, later destroying traces that the Amarna period ever occurred.  Happily, though, some pieces survived, because they are beautiful.

But I have no pictures, alas.  Here, however, is a picture of a girl who was begging outside of the museum.  Interestingly, she looks a little like something with the Amarna style, which showed the king and his family with elongated faces.

Then it was off to the airport for the flight back to Cairo.

I spent the flight with my eyes glued to the window.  First to watch the desert flying by.  Here’s a picture that shows just how sharp the line between red and black lands can be:

(Sorry for the photo quality.  Airplane windows do not make good lenses.)

Then, as we neared the end of the flight, I looked down and had my first pyramid sighting:

Those are actually the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid.  I’ll be talking more about these later: we’re scheduled to visit them on our last day in Egypt.

Soon, I spotted the famous three:

We landed, then got in the bus for our hotel.  After about 40 minutes driving on the Cairo beltway, we started seeing the Pyramids in the distance.

Soon they were getting closer:

Imagine driving home from work each evening and looking back and seeing a pyramid in your rearview mirror!

We finally reach the hotel and rushed out to our balcony to see these scenes:

Then we went for a walk around the hotel.  Within sight of the pool we found, you guessed it…

Tomorrow we get to visit.  I can’t wait!

When I first saw the movie “The Fellowship of the Ring,” I had some issues with the way they presented the great hall in Moria.  The gigantic columns stretching out in all directions were nice to look at, but I found it hard to believe that such a thing could be built.

That was because I had never been to Karnak.

Karnak is the largest temple in Egypt.  During Egypt’s golden age, it was the most important temple in the most important city to the most important god, Amun.  Every pharaoh for a thousand years wanted to make his mark on Karnak, so he added a statue here, a line of sphinxes there, a chamber of columns in the middle of things, a couple of obelisks over in that corner.  In some ways, it’s a bit of a mess.  But it’s also overwhelmingly awesome.

Perhaps the most amazing part of the temple is the hypostyle, a hall full of columns laid out in a grid.  134 columns, 50-70 feet tall and perhaps ten feet in diameter.  All it needed was orcs and a balrog and it would have been the great hall in Moria.

But the columns are not the only thing worth seeing at Karnak.  Here’s a couple of scenes of Julie, one against the entrance to the temple, the other sitting in an odd stone niche.

Here’s a couple of scenes of obelisks.  The first one is an obelisk to Tutmose III.  It was originally one of a set of four.  One of the others is in Central Park in New York; one is in London on the banks of the Thames.  Those obelisks really get around.

That second one was built on the command of Hatshepsut, the female king.  She apparently enjoyed erecting obelisks when she wasn’t presenting herself as a man.  I’m thinking that Freud would have had a field day with this woman.

As I mentioned yesterday, Hatshepsut seized power from her husband’s male heir when he was but a boy.  That boy grew up to be Tutmose III, the Napoleon of Egypt, a rather forceful character, and one who didn’t much like having his throne usurped.  So after a twenty year reign, Hatshepsut disappeared from the scene.  We don’t know how it happened.  We do know that in the late years of Tutmose, her traces were erased across Egypt.  Here’s an example of a relief that once featured her:

Note how the gods Horus and Thoth are showering a scratched out figure with ankhs (which represent life).  That figure was once Hatshepsut.

Here’s some more miscellaneous statuary, some lovely hieroglyphs (which I’m starting to recognize: the bee and the plant with the semi-circles below mean “king of Upper and Lower Egypt”),  and the holy pool used by the priests for ritual cleansing.

Here’s a bas relief of Rameses II.  This is a traditional scene used to depict many kings smashing the skulls of their enemies.  Rameses is frequently depicted in this manner: one starts to suspect that the man rather enjoyed bashing in heads.

In the funerary art in the kings’ tombs, they are often depicted as fighting demonic enemies on their trip through the underworld.  Those enemies are often depicted as having no heads.  Personally, if a king had bashed in my head, I would do my best to destroy him in the afterlife.  No wonder they all have so many headless enemies when bashing in heads was apparently the royal sport of the pharaohs.

After the morning at Karnak, we didn’t have much scheduled for the rest of the day.  We moved from the boat to a hotel and Julie and I wandered about Luxor a bit and watched sunset over the Nile.

But because we liked Karnak so much, Julie and I arranged to go to the light show that they have there.  It was entertaining, informative, and cheesy: a lovely way to spend the evening.  Here’s some pictures from under the lights.

Note that the above sphinxes, while possessing the traditional body of a lion, have the heads of rams.  This is because they are at Karnak: Amun’s animal totem is the ram.