The Continuing Adventures of Dr Dzoe

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.

There it is, across the Nile from the Tulip’s dock in Luxor, the hill that contains the Valley of the Kings. And there it is, our destination this morning. But first, a lesson in the funerary practices of ancient Egypt.

A pharaoh would not only have a tomb: he would also have a temple attached to that tomb.  The purpose of his temple would be to provide a place for people to make offerings to him so that he would intervene for them with the gods of the afterlife. In the early days, this temple would be attached to the tomb.

But later, the pharaohs of the New Kingdom (roughly 1500-1000 BC) decided that a pyramid was an open invitation to grave robbers and it was better to put their tombs in a hidden valley.  With the tombs hidden away, it no longer made sense to put the temple next to the tomb.  So the pharaohs had their tombs built a few miles away outside of the Valley of the Kings, where most of the New Kingdom pharaohs were buried.  Most of those temples are in ruins, as they were built on the flood plain.  But there’s still some impressive remains.

Such as the Colossi of Memnon.

These are twin seated statues of Amenhotep III, about the only thing remaining of his funerary temple.  (Their name is deceptive: it comes from later Greek visitors deciding that something so grand had to be associated with Agamemnon.)  I looked on these and said, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”  (Click here if you don’t recognize the line.)  Though strictly speaking, this was not Shelley’s inspiration for his poem: supposedly, that was another statue about a mile from the Colossi. The statues are rather impressive.  The Egyptians built on a monumental scale, and these monuments are 60 feet high.

Here’s another picture:

And after that quick photo stop, we all went back to the bus and drove the dusty road up to the Valley of the Kings.  The tombs looked like this:

Well, sorry.  I can’t show them to you.  They don’t allow cameras in the Valley.

Suffice to say, Julie and I went into five tombs including King Tut’s, which was by far the least impressive of the five.  But his mummy was on display, so I was able to pay my respects to the late lamented boy king.

The tombs were beautiful, with walls covered with art and hieroglyphs showing the pharaoh’s trip to the afterlife.  It’s amazing, the amount of work that went into these works of art, works that were not meant to be seen by anyone other than gods and dead kings.  But at least it kept artists employed: think of it as an ancient Egyptian stimulus package.

We were wandering up one part of the valley, looking for the chance to see the tomb of one particularly noteworthy pharaoh, Tutmose III, known due to his military prowess as the Napoleon of Ancient Egypt.  I knew it was closed for that day, but I wanted to get a good look at it.

One of the guards, a skinny man carrying a big rifle, offered to let us climb up to the tomb.  (Tutmose had his tomb built high up a defile, a vain attempt to discourage tomb robbers.)  The guard let us climb under a rope, up a narrow staircase, and down another staircase to the gated entry to the tomb.  Quite the strain, but pretty neat.  As we were on our way back, he smiled and held out his hand.

Secluded spot.  Man carrying big gun.  Lots of places designed to hold bodies.  Request for baksheesh.

Needless to say, I did not stint.

(I’ve heard that many men who offer you camel rides near the pyramids pull a similar stunt in which they take you out into the deep desert before asking for baksheesh.  Mark Twain wrote of a similar situation in which the guides who took him up the pyramids waited until they were near the treacherous, steep top before asking for payment.  I expect Herodotus suffered similar shakedowns when he visited these parts.)

A positive outcome: Julie was starting to fade due to the heat and lack of sleep, but after climbing up that rickety staircase she had an adrenaline rush and an accompanying second wind.

Anyway, here’s a couple of pictures from outside the gate.  You can get an idea of the conditions in the valley: hot, dusty, and very dry indeed.

 

After the Valley of the Kings, we went to the funerary temple of Hatshepsut.  Hatshepsut was an interesting figure.  The widow of King Tutmose II, she decided that she wasn’t ready to turn over power to the teenaged Tutmose III.  So she ruled Egypt as a female king.  (The Egyptians did not have a concept of queen.  The closest they came was the King’s Chief Wife, but you can’t really be a ruling Chief Wife.)

But because a female king wasn’t really kosher,  she had monuments made showing her as a man.  Further, she spread word around that her father was the god Amun, the chief god of Egypt.  (This kind of retroactive godly parenthood was common among pharaohs when there was any question of their legitimacy.)  Her funerary temple, framed by cliffs and with a pleasing symmetry, is regarded as possibly the finest piece of architecture from ancient Egypt.  I certainly liked it.

As part of her self-deification, Hatshepsut had told the story of how she was nursed by Hathor, the mother-goddess who often took the form of a cow.  Here’s a depiction from the wall of the temple.

After that, a hot and dusty morning, we returned to the boat for some rest.

And another example of the dustiness of the desert: I brought two identical pairs of shoes with me.  The shoe on the left is the one I wore to the Valley of the Kings.

*****

In our first hotel in Egypt, there was a model of a model found in Tutankhamun’s tomb of the boy king riding in a boat.  The model was titled, “King Tut in a Boat.”  The phrase stuck in my mind, and I decided that I had discovered my new epithet.

You hurt your toe.  “King Tut in a boat,” you shout, and feel a bit better.

You are surprised.  “King Tut in a boat,” you exclaim.

It’s a good all-purpose phrase, and I intend to use it where once I might have been tempted to use harsher language.

*******

Monday evening we visited Luxor Temple as the sunset and the lights came on.

King Tut in a boat!

Imagine a road lined by sphinxes.  It leads to a vast edifice with entrance flanked by an obelisk and a pair of seated statues in various states of decay.  You pass through the entrance and find yourself surrounded by a row of columns of enormous girth and height.  Past that is another set of columns, slightly smaller than the first but of more delicate design.  All around is statuary, some vast, and bas reliefs, many of extraordinary beauty.

King Tut in a boat!

It was amazing. These photos don’t really do it justice.  But they’re the best I have, so I share them with you.

Our guide Karima said, “Luxor took only a short time to build.  It only took about 200 years.”

200 years.  A short time.  What a country!

One of the results of the shift in our schedule is that our tour itinerary is way out of whack.  The original itinerary started us at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the greatest museum of Egyptian antiquities in the world.  A strong start, followed by a few more days in Cairo.  Then we would fly to Luxor, see some more spectacular sites.  Then, when we had been going strong for several days, it would be the Nile cruise, a chance to relax in the middle of the vacation.  Finally, we fly back to Cairo and see the Pyramids, a grand finale for our trip.

But with our new itinerary, here it is just the third day of the trip and we’re already in the slow day.  We had a grand total of one planned site seeing trip today, and that was first thing in the morning.  After that, the day is all about relaxing.  Which is nice, but I’m sure would have been much more welcome after six days of touring instead of after two.

Our first stop was the Edfu Temple.  This is another temple built during the era when the Greeks ruled Egypt.  It’s also the best preserved temple in Egypt.

We took horse buggies to the temple.  They looked like this:

The drivers all call them “Feraris.”  “Would you like a ride in my Ferari?” they shout, causing me some confusion at first.

Before leaving, one of the local shopkeepers came up to me and wrote “Joe” in Arabic on my hand.  At least, my tour guides said it says “Joe.”  So as long as they are not in on the joke, he didn’t write “Idiot.”  (And if you happen to read Arabic and know otherwise, please don’t disillusion me.)

Then it was the temple.  A marvelous design.  Two things stood out for me at this temple.

First, there was the mix of Greek and Egyptian styles.  The figures are still in Egyptian stances, but the bodies are bit more anatomically correct, reflecting the Greek interest in the beauty of the human figure.

Another more amusing example: the Greeks insisted on adding these rain spouts to the temple, because that’s what they do back in Greece.  In spite of the fact that if there’s one thing you don’t need in Egypt, it’s a rain spout.

The second thing that really stood out to me was the beauty of the hieroglyphs.  Each one is a small work of art.  It reminds me of a medieval illuminated manuscript in stone, which rather makes sense because, like the illuminated manuscripts, the Egyptian carvings are holy writings.

Note in the above example the beauty of the letters.  Note also that the letters stand out of the stone, which means that the carver had to carve away the stone to leave only the letters.  This is clearly more difficult than carving the letters directly in the stone (which is done in many cases).

Here’s a couple of random pictures from Edfu.

After that, it was back to the boat.  We were back by 10, and, other than another lecture by Heba, we were pretty much done for the day.

But we did get to cruise the Nile.  Which was marvelous, and which left me many opportunities to photograph scenes from the river.

Remember that the Nile was historically the highway of Egypt.  Boats of all sorts have traveled the river for over five thousand years.  You still see a wide variety of boats engaged in various pursuits, cruising, fishing (which they do by spreading out a net, then repeatedly hitting the water with an oar, then pulling in the net), carrying cargo, or just ferrying people across the river.

One amusing stop was the locks at Esna.  These are huge canal-style locks that we passed through.  While we were delayed there, vendors in small boats came next to our vessel to sell various items to the tourists.  They would throw the items in plastic bags up onto the boat three decks high and start negotiations.  If a price was agreed to, the tourist would toss down the money in a bag.  If not, you toss back down the item, and the boatman hopes that you have a good arm, or his wares are now floating in the river (which happened often).

I proudly bought two woolen shawls for 120 Egyptian pounds (roughly $24), only to be chagrinned when, near the end of our time, the vendors were desperately selling the same items for 40 pounds each.  Oh well, that’s 80 pounds for the shawls, 40 for a unique commercial experience.

Here’s one of my favorite things that I saw on the river.  A man was washing his goat in the Nile.  After I got my shot, I noticed that he actually had a small herd of goats, and he was bringing them one by one to the river to wash them.

Our guide Karima told us later that there’s a Muslim tradition where the well-to-do will buy a goat to give to the poor during a certain religious festival, and that this is a good time for goat herders.  My guess is that this man was cleaning his flock in preparation for market.

Here’s another picture that captures an important aspect of Egypt:

The ancients called Egypt the Red Land and the Black Land.  The Red Land is the desert that is most of the country.  The Black Land is the narrow strip of fertile land that surrounds the Nile.  Watered by the Nile and, before the building of the Aswan Dam, fertilized by the river debris during the annual floods, the extreme fertility of this part of Egypt is why a great and wealthy civilization formed here.  Where the red and the black lands meet there is a sharp divide: you can cross from farmland to desert in a step.

The boat docked at Luxor near the end of the day.  I went for a small walk and found a village nearby.  A man gave me a small tour, where I found myself and my camera the object of delight for a cute group of children.

Then it was dinner and a costume party.

Then I wrote this entry (though I’m only posting it two days later), and to bed.  Monday was going to be a big day, and it was only six hours away.

When I first read the itinerary of this tour, there were a few key items.  The Pyramids!  Karnak!  Valley of the Kings!  All that neat King Tut stuff!

Then there were the lesser items.  All those temples from the Greek era.  Edfu.  Philae.  How boring.  I mean, those things aren’t even 3000 years old – how interesting can they be?  (Yeah, I know.  At home, a 200-year-old house gets a big fancy plaque.  Here I’m not impressed by ten times that long.  But you know, this is a really old place.)

But it turns out that a two thousand year old temple can be pretty neat.  And two of them in one day is double the fun!

First stop, the Philiae Temple.  This is a temple to Isis that is in an island near Aswan.  An island, of course, means a boat ride.  And so on the river we go, on a boat much like this:

The temple is marvelous.  There’s a colonnade leading to a large edifice carved with gods.  Then comes an inner courtyard where worshippers could bring offerings, and finally an inner sanctum where only the priests would go.  Everywhere you look there are carvings of the king making gifts to the gods, surrounded by hieroglyphs saying stuff that I would describe had I actually learned to read them this past year.

In the deepest sanctum, there was a relief of the baby god Horus standing next to Isis, his mother.  Much of the iconography of these two are similar to later Christian art showing Mary and the baby Jesus.

One of the interesting things about this temple is the way that later people marked it up.  First, the Christians who lived in Egypt defaced a number of the pictures of gods.  In several cases, the carved the Coptic Cross in critical areas.  Here’s an example.

But there were many later examples as well.  Here’s a piece of graffiti that got me excited.  This was written by one of Napoleon’s soldiers who came to Egypt when the French invaded in 1796.  At that time, France still used the calendar put in place during the Revolution.  Which is why the text reads that it is 13 Messidor on the sixth year of the Republic.

We also managed two entertaining interactions with Egyptians.  First, a rather grizzled fellow insisted on having his picture taken with us (for baksheesh, of course).  As he stood close to us, he leered and said, “Two husbands, one wife.”  Julie did not seem amused.

Second, as we were leaving, I was thirsty.  So when I heard one of the local shopkeepers shouting “Water!  Water!”, I shouted right back.  I bought a bottle of water, we had a laugh together, and he gave me a free pack of gum and a picture.

After that, we went to the Nubian museum, a lovely museum that includes artifacts from Nubia, many of which were found in the mad rush of archaeology that preceded the flooding by Aswan Dam.  We saw several lovely pieces.  And who knew that Nubians were so handsome?

We then got back to the boat where we discovered that they like making towel animals.  I’m a big fan of that particular artistic medium.

Then we were off, floating down the river to reach the temple of Kom Ombo near evening.  This was another temple from the Greek period.  In this case, it was to Hathor and to Sobek.  Sobek is a crocodile-headed god: as our guide, the superb Karima told us, the Egyptians had gods that represented their greatest wishes and their greatest fears.  One of their fears is crocodiles.  Thus, a crocodile-headed god who specializes in keeping away the crocs.  Apparently it worked, though it took a while: ever since the building of the Aswan Dam, there are no more crocodiles in the lower Nile.

One thing that I enjoyed was the cartouches.  These are oval-shaped badges in which the names of the king were written.  There were marvelous examples at Kom Ombo that still held much of the original pigment.  (The Egyptians originally painted their temples.  Whenever you see a picture of an Egyptian temple, imagine it not of bare stone, but painted in garish colors as they originally were.)

I learned enough hieroglyphs that I’m able to recognize a few cartouches.  Ptolemy is one of the, which is good because there were about 20 Ptolemies and they all use the same basic cartouche.  But this set seemed strange to me – there were three different cartouches, which is strange as any king typically used only two different ones.  (The Egyptian kings had as many as five names, but only two that they put in cartouches.)  I pointed this out to Heba and Karima, and they cleared up the mystery: two of the cartouches belonged to Ptolemy, the third to his wife, Cleopatra.  (Not necessarily the Cleopatra: they had seven different ones.)

(Yeah, I’m a geek.  Does that surprise you?)

Here’s a few more pictures from Kom Ombo.  Note that the sun set while we were there, thus the lovely light.