Egypt: Day Seven, Part Two

Temple of Karnak

Symbol of Amon(Ra

 Our first visit is to the Temple of Karnak.  Once the biggest temple in the ancient world, it took 1,800 years to complete, with work stretching from 2000 BCE to 200 BCE, under Ptolemy.  It’s dedicated to Amon-Ra, the chief god represented by the ram, and to his wife Mut and son Khonsu.

  Our bus drops us off at the temple, then takes our luggage to the boat which will be our home for almost a week.  Ahmed gives us a crash course on Egyptian temples and their architecture.  First comes the pylon, a monumental gate at the entrance to the temple.  Through that you reach an open courtyard, the only place commoners were allowed to enter.  Then comes a second gate to the hypostyle, where only temple officials could enter; it’s decorated with sandstone columns with carvings representing trees from the Nile delta.  After that come three sets of antichambers with gates between each one.  The floor of each chamber is higher than the last and the ceiling is lower, so they get progressively darker.  They all lead you to the sanctuary, where only two people could enter:  the high priest and the pharaoh.

  The entire temple was once enclosed in a mud brick wall built to mimic the undulations of the sacred Nile.  It also protected the site from the Nile flooding, and there’s a mark to show where the waters reached in 1887.  It’s hard to imagine, now that the Aswan Dam prevents any such flooding.
  The temple within the wall (or temenos) runs north and south, with other wings running east and west.  One section led south to the two-mile-long causeway - The Way of the Rams - that connects Karnak to Luxor Temple.  Now you can get an idea what it must have looked like in its heyday, but only a few years ago, the causeway was used by traffic and there were houses and shops along it, all demolished in 2010 to restore the site.
  To get an idea of how important this temple and the Luxor Temple nearby were, one figure:  25,000 people out of a total population of two million served the pharaoh.
  Hidden among the miles of wall inscriptions, I spot one I’ve heard of before.  Let’s call it The Obama.  It’s really the ideogram for face - logical!  It can also be the preposition “on” or “upon”, and is pronounced “hr”.  When Obama came here during his presidency, he spotted one in a tomb and said “Hey!  That’s me!”  And actually it kind of is.  Brings a smile to my face, and that of others when I point it out.

  Another one I like is the bee, which was evidently very important in Ancient Egypt.  It’s the symbol for the King of the North (i.e. Lower Egypt).  When linked with the sedge hieroglyph (King of the South), it represents the king of both Egypts after their unification.  And so you see it a lot.

Egypt: Day Seven, Part One

An hour after our wake-up call, we’re in the bus to go to the airport for our flight to Luxor.  Everyone’s tired, but in a good mood, which speaks well for us as a group, and individually.  With his commute home and back, Ahmed is even more tired than we are.
       There isn’t a lot of traffic, but more than one would expect at 4 am.  And amazingly, a lot of businesses are open.  Not just the belly-dance joints (where no women ever go, dixit Ahmed), but also American fast food joints such as KFC and Buffalo Burger (made with camel meat instead of bison?) and countless small corner grocery stores, not to mention the streetcart vendors.  This is truly a country where people have recourse to The Early Morning Munchies. 
       The white minivans are already plying their trade, so I guess people need to get around the city around the clock.  And so gas stations are also open.
       Our progress is impeded nonetheless by multiple speed bumps (initially called “sleeping policemen” in the States).  As there are bloody few streetlights in Cairo (and Ahmed says people would drive through them anyway), this is how traffic is slowed.  And as they aren’t marked in any way - paint or signs - you have to pay attention or your shock absorbers will take it on the nose.  Everyone seems to know where they are - which is impressive - but sometimes new ones appear overnight.  All part of the game, I guess.

Louxor

The trip from Cairo to Luxor takes just a little over an hour in an Embraer 170, an 80-seat twin jet.  Embraer is a Brazilian aerospace company; it seems fitting for a developing country to buy from another developing country instead of from Boeing or Airbus.  (Besides, I’m not sure either of those companies even make small planes of this capacity any more.)

Luxor is a city of almost half a million people located on both banks of the Nile about 300 miles south of Cairo, and surrounded by sugar cane fields.  In ancient times, it was called Thebes.  And as Thebes, it was the capital of Lower and Upper Egypt combined, which accounts for all the monuments. Often called the world’s greatest open-air museum, it’s home to the temples of both Karnak and Luxor, plus the Valleys of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens directly across the river... all of which we will be visiting over the next five days.
       Thebes is the name the Greeks gave to the original Waset.  It became the wealthiest city of ancient Egypt, due to its geographic location.  Being close to both Nubia and the eastern desert, it cashed in on their valuable mineral resources and trade routes.  Its present name, Luxor, was given to it by invading Arabs much later; they thought the tombs were palaces, “el-Uqsur.”  And the name Karnak in Arabic means fortress.

Karnak causeway

Egypt: Day Seven, Part Three

Dr. Mustafa Waziri

Then we meet Dr. Mustafa Waziri, Director General of Luxor Antiquities.  He walks us through this section of the temple.  It has a long history of misuse, with Coptic Christians hiding in it from the Romans, and putting up their own frescos over the original ones.  Other parts were destroyed by the Persian invaders, as they did to most of the temples throughout Egypt.  And the Romans re-used the stone.  Then there were the earthquakes of course.  Waziri says only 30% of everything ever built is above ground; the rest still lies buried.

       Waziri’s team show us all the rooms in this part of the temple, where they’re busy restoring the artworks.  In the paintings that cover all the surfaces, there are many colors, all made from ground-up minerals.  The white is limestone, the light blue is turquoise while dark blue is lapis.  Red ochre makes the red color and yellow ochre the yellow.  Black is simple coal.  To prep the wall, the ancient Egyptians used beaten egg white; egg yolks were used as varnish.  All these details are fascinating.

Mahmoud with his discovery: a statue of Ramses II

Dr. Waziri is as excited about his work as Dr. Hawass, but tends to talk more in “we” than “I”.  In fact, he starts by introducing his team, and later on, after showing us the restoration work, he lets one of the diggers, Mahmoud, unveil a statue of Ramses II.
       Why Mahmoud?  Because he’s the one who found it.  Mahmoud is smiling from ear to ear.  I ask him how long he’s been working in archeological excavations.  He says “40 years”, then hesitates - to find the words - and adds “And my father before, and his father before.”  I ask him “All the way back to the Pharaohs?” and he smiles that big smile of his and says “Maybe”.
       The centuries buried this statue of Ramses all except for one corner that stuck out.  As it lay hidden near a water tap, all the women would use that corner as a pumice stone, to scrape the callus off their feet while their pails filled up...  which is why the statue has that one part worn away.  It’s little stories like this that I love.

After several hours and lots of information gleaned, the bus
appears and takes us to our new home away from home:  a four-story boat.  The lower level, part-way below the surface of the water, is the restaurant.  The main floor is the front desk, gift shop, lounge and bar.  Above that are two levels of rooms and the top deck is for just watching the water flow by while you read, have a drink or soak in the jacuzzi or mini-pool.  The outer wall of each room is pure window, which sometimes is a blessing and other times means that, if there weren’t any drapes (which mercifully there are) you’d be looking into the room of the boat you’re tied up against.  On various days, in various towns, we’re the first at the quay; other times we have to cross one or two other boats to reach terra firma.  It’s kind of a crap shoot, and you never know when you go to bed if you’ll be moored in the same place when you wake up.  They’re very good at doing the switcheroo while you sleep.
       As we have time before sunset, fellow traveler Julie and I decide to try to find the Luxor Museum.  As she works in the museum curating business, she’s been here before a decade or so earlier and thinks she can find it.... which it turns out she can’t.  We walk along the river, then down a few perpendicular streets and finally back along a main street that triangulates us back to the river again.  No museum in sight, and some of the sidestreets are not too reassuring.  But in spite of the fear that’s been instilled in us by the U.S. news, and as two Western women unaccompanied in a Muslim country, no one bothers us - although they do stare - and we make it back in time for supper.
       After that, there’s nothing to do but a shower and sleep.  Especially as tomorrow will be the second early-rise day in a row, but for an excellent cause:  a hot air balloon ride over the Valley of the Kings!

Luxor Corniche along the Nile and our boat-hotel (right)

Egypt: Day Six, Part Two

After the Pyramids, we run the gauntlet of vendors and our bus takes us to Abu Shakra for lunch, which it’s been serving since 1949.  It’s the usual grilled meats with rice - which Ahmed says is safest so none of us comes down with Nile Belly - but it offers a great view of the pyramids nearby from the picture windows in the restaurant upstairs.

     Once lunch is finished, we head back to hose off the dust of the millennia and dress in our finery to take tea with Jehan Sadat, the widow of President Anwar Sadat.  She lives in the very ritzy Dokki neighborhood in Giza, near the Nile, amid tall trees and embassies, carefully guarded, lo these many decades.  Her husband was assassinated before her eyes in 1981 by Muslim extremists during a military parade commemorating the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel.  (Strangely enough, Mubarak, then Vice-President, was seated right next to Sadat but was only lightly wounded in one finger, although others died with the President.  One could wonder whether Mubarak knew, or was even part of a plan, given how long he ruled once he came into power.  But that’s just my fertile imagination.)  Mrs. Sadat has been given this house in Giza until her death, and protection to go along with it.
       She greets us personally as we arrive.  She notices I’m carrying her book, “My Hope for Peace” (as we were told she’d be signing them).  I reply that I also have her other book,  A Woman of Egypt, back in America, and read it many years ago.  She seems pleased.  We’re ushered into her living room, where armchairs have been set up.  She spends about half an hour telling us a few stories about her life with Sadat, and then invites us into the dining room where we’re served tea or coffee and a selection of many kinds of pastries.  The house is filled with photos of her family and we’re allowed to walk around, including into the study where she says Sadat did most of his writing.  She is most gracious, and still beautiful in spite of her 83 years.




       After a group photo, we pile back on the bus - our books still unsigned (more about that later) - and head back to the hotel for dinner and an early bedtime.  Tomorrow we’ll get our wake-up call at 3 am for the flight to Luxor, so it will be a very short night!

Egypt: Day Six, Part One

Today is the Great Pyramid.  And we get to visit it before it opens to the public.  There will be only the 38 of us and no one else.

There are, in fact, three pyramids.  The one most people talk about is the Great Pyramid of Cheops, who is called Khufu here.  It’s the oldest and largest, and in fact was the tallest man-made structure in the world for almost 4,000 years.  Originally 481 feet tall, it has lost 26 feet somehow.  Some people think that’s because there was once a cap on it which is now missing.  This pyramid has three chambers, the deepest cut into the bedrock and the others above it.  The Tura limestone used for its casing (the cover layer) came from quarries across the river.  It was transported across the Nile during the flood season (June through September) by boat when the waters reached all the way up to the Temple of Khafre near the Sphinx, making it far easier to transport from there.  Which is a very good thing, as each block weighed in at up to 88 tons.  And there were no wheels or pulleys back then, just brute force.
       The second pyramid is the Pyramid of Khafre, son of Khufu.  It’s less tall than his father’s (471 feet), which was respectful on his part.  However, it’s built on higher ground, so it surpasses the father’s in altitude, if not in height.  There are still casing stones on the top third, but the pyramidion and part of the apex are missing.  Originally the bottom course of casing was pink granite but the rest was cased in Tura limestone, which is a finer quality than the stone blocks underneath.  The first two levels inside are cut into bedrock.
       The third and smallest at only 215 feet is the Pyramid of Menkaure, grandson of Khufu.  It’s slightly out of line with the two others.  The bottom was cased in red granite, floated downriver all the way from Aswan far to the south, and the top casing was Tura limestone.  There’s nothing inside this pyramid because the king died suddenly, which is also why there are only six or seven levels of casing laid on its north side.

All this is revealed to us by Dr. Hawass, who is waiting for us at the Sphinx just after daybreak.  When we arrive, he’s already there, leaning against the Sphinx’s paw, in his levis, blue jean jacket and Indiana Jones hat, ever the debonnaire character.  He starts by explaining the meaning of the Sphinx:  the brain of man and the courage of the lion.  Its face is said to be that of Khafre, and indeed it bears (or once bore) the pharaoh’s three attributes:  the cobra, the beard and the headdress.  Between its paws stands a stele relating the dream sequence that legitimizes the pharaoh’s right to reign.  Originally cut out of bedrock, its shape has been restored by blocks of limestone, because the erosion of centuries has not been kind, even if the Sphinx was once buried in the sands up to its neck.  Overall the monument measures 250 feet in length and stands 70 feet tall.

Khafre statue at Cairo Museum

       Dr. Hawass also tells us about his excavation of the nearby Temple of Khafre.  Originally its floor was made of alabaster floated downriver 650 miles from Aswan, and it boasted two rows of six columns each.  Mummies were blessed here before they were moved along the limestone causeway to the mortuary temple.  There they were put in the sarcophagus and installed in the pyramid, which was then sealed.  In this temple stood the striking dolorite sculpture of Khafre with the falcon embracing his head which we saw yesterday in the Cairo Museum.
       The last thing to see here is the Cheops Boat Museum.  There are old sepia-colored photos of what was unearthed in 1954:  five of the pharaoh’s solar barges built to transport him through the afterlife, and one perhaps that carried his mummy across the Nile to the pyramid for burial.  These boats had no nails; they were held together only by rope.  The one restored had been dismantled - all 1,224 pieces of Lebanese cedar - and buried, piled in 13 layers, in a large pit.  The other four boats, all discovered in different places around the pyramid, have been buried again.

Pharaoh Cheops solar barge at Cheops Boat Museum

Egypt: Day Five, Part Two

After an onslaught of hawkers almost blocks our bus’s departure, we head to the Cairo Museum.  Traffic has picked up but we reach Tahrir Square, now calm after many rowdy days over the past few years.
       Patiently and knowledgeably, Ahmed explains the highlights of the museum to us.  (I don’t think even the curators can know all they have!  Some of the explanatory panels are so old and faded...  And French is the second language on them, not English!)  We cover both floors of the museum under his guidance, except for the special King Tut room which he cannot guide us through.  No idea why.  The upshot of this is that, not having seen the sign over the door, I get sharply and loudly rebuked for taking photos.  Of course it was about the sixth photo I’d taken, and it was a different photographer who drew the guard’s attention.  “DELETE, DELETE!” he shouted.  And I did, one photo.  “Show me!” he yelled at the other photographer, and I made quietly my exit before he turned his attention back to me.  I told Ahmed he should warn people, and he said that he really didn’t know it was forbidden, even without flash.  Maybe it’s a new rule?

     At the end of two hours, we’re given about 45 minutes to wander on our own.  I choose to fly solo a bit after being in a group all morning.  I happen upon the prehistoric part of the museum and note that all mankind, at that moment in time, seems to have been at the same point of evolution.  No difference with prehistoric France.  It makes me wonder what made things move faster artistically here in Egypt than elsewhere after that point.

     After buying a book in their understaffed and under-inventoried gift shop - which was evidently ransacked by looters looking for easy money during the recent Revolution - it’s back on the bus.  Ahmed, in his inimitable fashion, has scared up a book that has almost all the treasures we’ve just seen, and he takes orders on the bus for those, like me, who want one... and at an unbeatable price.

We have lunch nearby at a kitschy looking, Ali-Baba-type place called Felfela, with a distinctly Middle Eastern decor.  I choose to sit with Arlene and John in a quiet corner.  It’s 4:00, the hunger has come and gone somewhere in the museum, but the food is good:  Egyptian cuisine, very similar to Lebanese cooking back home, where nearby Dearborn has the largest Middle Eastern population outside of the Middle East.

The Nile waterfront

     With the traffic jams, which have returned to their normal density, there’s just enough time to change at the hotel, do my laundry and make it to the Zahi Hawass lecture, Chapter 2.  In spite of my dislike of his pharaonic ego, I sit in the front row again, joined by Floyd, a physician.  Tonight Hawass starts with his autobiography, as he did two nights ago, but gets caught up in the history side of his presentation.  There are fewer “I”s tonight, perhaps because he’s not feeling well, as he later reveals at table.
       Still, he eats with us... or rather in our presence.  Floyd and I sit opposite him and we both are determined to make him talk to us, which we manage to do.  Somewhat.  But soon I leave him to Floyd and his wife Victoria*, and concentrate on Hawass’s Assistant, Tarik, to my right, who is much more simpatico, and a colleague of his seated across from me, who is Chilean with a French father.  More at home in French, he and I discuss Easter Island and its archeological treasures.  Then Hawass rises and prepares to leave, quipping something over his shoulder about the Pharoah needing his sleep, meaning himself.  I guess I wasn’t far off with my earlier metaphor.
       Back to the room, shower and wash my hair, then bed.  Our 5 am wake-up call looms all too soon.

(* Side comment:  Over dinner, my Lost Hat Issue comes up and Victoria kindly offers me her second one, which is very generous of her and will save my scalp from burning off during our remaining time here.  February in Egypt is mild, but relentlessly sunny just the same.  And I’ll manage not to lose this hat as I did Sally’s!)

Egypt: Day Five, Part One

Citadel of Saladdin

 There’s been entirely too much eating going on, so I skip breakfast and just eat the tangerine from last night plus the three complimentary cookies they leave when they turn down my bed in the evening.  Such service!  I also have what’s left of my pistachios, just in case, because lunch today will be late.

Mosque of Muhammad Ali

       We’re venturing into Cairo.  It’s a bustling, sprawling city of 8 million people, to which must be added 8 million for Giza just across the Nile and an additional 6 million from another suburb whose name I didn’t catch (something like Hababea).  Egypt itself is very concentrated as a whole, with its population of 92 million crammed into a mere 5% of its territory.  The rest is desert.
       Ahmed is amazed at the lack of traffic, especially on a Wednesday.  His commute in the morning and evening can take a full hour or even more.  But this morning we speed all the way to the Citadel of Saladdin (or actually Salah el Din) in which stands the Mosque of Muhammad Ali (no, not the boxer).  We arrive so early that the hawkers aren’t even out yet plying their trade in souvenirs.  (An Ahmed Trick:  getting off the bus, the price of something may be one-for-$5, but by the time you’ve run the gauntlet back to the bus later, that same souvenir will be two-for-$1.  And it works.  Every time.)

Muhammad Ali's tomb

       The imposing alabaster tomb in the courtyard is that of Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Ottoman ruler from the start of the 19th century.  Although Albanian by birth, he is highly respected and seen as the founder of modern Egypt because of the dramatic military, economic and cultural reforms he implemented.
       High above the tomb is a clock that was given to Egypt by French king Louis-Philippe in 1845, in return for an obelisk from the Temple of Luxor, gifted to France by the self-same Muhammad Ali and carted off to stand to this very day in the Place de la Concorde in Paris.  Ahmed looks at me as he points out that the brass clock doesn’t work, and never has worked properly.  Not a great trade.  (I find out that the other obelisk was also given to France, but it was so hard to move the first one that France never came back for the second.  In fact, it was only under President Mitterrand in the 1980's that the French gave ownership of that second obelisk back to the Egyptian people.)

       Like the pyramids, the Ottoman-style mosque and minarets are made out of limestone, but the mosque’s interior walls are covered with alabaster tiles up to a height of almost 40 feet.  Above that rise a huge central dome and four smaller domes around it.  The light plays through the high windows, seemingly pointing out architectural details, of which there are many.
       This is my first time in a mosque, except for eating couscous at the Paris mosque.  It’s very majestic, with that high dome and the light streaming in.  The floor is carpeted totally, with a repetitive design pointing east toward Mecca so the faithful know which way to face.
       As Ahmed explains certain facets of Islam, and takes questions, I start to feel the presence of my grandson Ibrahim, who miscarried at seven months while I was an ocean away.  I’m overwhelmed with both grief and a feeling he’s near.  I say a little prayer for his soul, and then take Ahmed aside to slip him some money to pass on to a needy family, alms to the poor being one of the Five Pillars of Islam.  (Later, to comfort me, Ahmed tells me that in Islam children who are never born go directly to Heaven and do not need our prayers, but still...)

Cairo as seen from the Citadel

Egypt: Day Four, Part Three

On the way back to Giza, we pass loads and loads of “tuk-tuks”, those three-wheeled auto rickshaws which are illegal in Egypt but can be imported anyway.  Go figure.  Kids drive them as of age 10 or 12, especially in the countryside... and obviously without a license.  We also see a lot of buildings that look like tall ovens with sticks and holes poked in them.  They’re dovecotes, pigeon being one of the favorite dishes in Egypt.  (We’ll see more of them along the highway from Cairo to Alexandria later on in the trip.)

Pyramid builders' tombs

As we drive past the Giza Pyramids and the Sphinx, which we’ll be visiting in two days.  Ahmed tells us that the Nile used to reach the Sphinx when the river flooded.  In 1942 the water came up to its neck!  That was also the year that the Temple of Khafre was uncovered and excavated.
  Waiting for us when we pull up at the Pyramid Builders’ Tombs is Dr. Hawass, who discovered them.  And there were plenty of builders.  Estimates today are 20,000 workers to build Khufu’s pyramid aka The Great Pyramid aka The Pyramid of Cheops (the Greek-isized name by which we know it in the United States).  As Hawass says, that’s the population of large cities in the Near East in the third millennium BCE.   And that population went on for nearly 70 years, year round, while construction continued.  The facilities would have included housing for the workers as well as storage for food and building materials... and even a cemetery for those killed on the job.  Men came to work from villages all over the kingdom.  It was certainly an eye-opener for country boys here in the Big City, much as it was for soldiers from France’s villages on the front lines in World War I.  Hawass explains to us that “The pyramid builders were not slaves but peasants conscripted on a rotating part-time basis, working under the supervision of skilled artisans and craftsmen who not only built the pyramid complexes for the kings and nobility, but also designed and constructed their own, more modest tombs.”
  As with many of the monuments hidden over the millennia by the sands (at least three we were told about), the cemetery was found when an American tourist was thrown from her horse who stumbled on a previously unknown mud-brick wall.  The mud-brick wall turned out to be a tomb.  And then the rest was excavated, giving us an idea of how “the other half” lived, this half being not the pharaohs but Ancient Egypt’s blue-collar workers.

Although it’s not far to Mena House, it takes us half an hour to go just the short distance.   Cars are parked on either sides of a narrow street and there’s only one lane, which is blocked.  There are also spare lots filled with camels waiting for something... perhaps tourists to ride them across the plateau.  It’s often like this, evidently, in this neighborhood of stables, where you can rent a horse to ride across the Plateau of Giza.  But all the horses are skinny and their coats aren’t brushed at all.  It’s something I’ll notice often during my time in Egypt.  Animals here seem to play a role - breadwinner or mouse-catcher or guard-dog - but not act as pets.  (Camels may be an exception to that rule, although I doubt if they’re pets, but I’m not well-versed enough in camel to tell if they’re well looked-after or not.)

I seem somehow to have lost Sally’s safari hat that she lent me for this trip.  I thought I’d left it in my room, but when I get back, it’s not there.  I ask at the desk if anyone found it, but no.  The only other possibility is that I left it on the bus, but also no.  (It turns out later that Suzanna found it and left it on the bus near the empty water bottle box, so either it got thrown out or the person who cleaned out the bus liked it and adopted it.)  Luckily for me, our early start this morning meant I was wearing both my sweater and my jacket with the hood.  That hood kept my head from burning up, but that’s how I’ll be immortalized in all those photos taken at the pyramid builder’s tombs.  Sigh.