Egypt: Day Eight, Part Two

We head off in the bus to a café, where we buy some coffee or tea and eat our Doggy Bag breakfast.  The conversation is obviously centered on all we’ve seen from the air.  And now we’re going to see it from the ground.

Hatshepsut's Tomb

  The Valley of the Kings is a maze of tombs, each one indicated by a number.  Ahmed gives us a crash course on the funereal customs of Ancient Egypt.  For instance, the tombs are all on the West Bank of the Nile because the west is where the sun sets and dies, and so the land of death.
But why was this valley chosen for the tombs?  One thought is that the valley lies below a hill named Qurna that’s shaped like a pyramid.  Also, it was hidden by the mountains, although that didn’t seem to prevent the tomb-raiders from finding and emptying the tombs of anything of value.  The idea was that the gods would protect the valley and tombs, but the gods must have had other things to do. 
        The first of the king’s tombs built here was, ironically, that of the only female pharaoh:  Hatshepsut, in 1500 BCE.  Another tomb, re-discovered only in 1989 by American anthropologist Kent Weeks, is that of the sons of Ramses II; Carter had used it as a dumpsite for all the debris from his excavation of King Tut’s tomb nearby, then covered it back up, thus hiding and preserving it.  This tomb has 155 chambers in all, including one for each of Ramses’s sons.
  Ahmed explains that the tombs were all dug out using only metal chisels and wooden mallets.  After that, the walls were smoothed with plaster.  Finally the scenes were sketched in red, with corrections made in black, and then they were carved into the walls.

The god Kephri

  He goes on to explain some of the symbols we’ll see. There are three that represent daytime.  There’s sunrise with the scarab, the god Kephri, the sun god at sunrise.  And given that the sun rises in the east, he is important for rebirth.  Scarabs also roll dung across the ground, which Egyptians found similar to moving the sun across the sky.  At noon, there’s the sun god Ra, of course.  And at sunset, Amon, the ram.  Once night has fallen, Nut swallows the sun disk.  Nut is often shown on tomb ceilings, where all 24 hours of the day are painted.  Snakes represent danger, and where shown at a gate they are the most dangerous gods.  And then there’s the boat, with the ram head for Amon-Ra, that sails the dearly departed through the afterlife and across blue zigzags representing water.

Kha (center)

  As for the afterlife, there are three parts that make up every human being.  Bha is the soul, represented by a bird with the head of a person.  Kha means the spirit life and afterlife, represented by two connected and uplifted arms.   Akh - a heron-like bird with a long, pointed beak - represents the body.  At death, your heart is weighed, which is why it’s the only viscera the mummifiers left inside a person’s body. It’s weighed on a scales and compared to a feather... but not just any feather, the feather of truth and justice.  You then work your way through the afterlife:  the twelve hours of darkness, separated by twelve gates.  At each gate, the person is asked for a password.  If you don’t know it (and that’s where the gods come in, if you’ve been good), your head is cut off.  If you’ve been good, you make it to aaru, heaven, which is in the east where the sun rises and is described as expanses of reeds, as in the fertile Nile delta, ideal for hunting and farming for all eternity.
       Ahmed then points out which of the tombs are the most interesting.  Some of us have bought special tickets for certain tombs, such as Tut’s, discovered intact by Howard Carter in 1922.  But Ahmed says that it’s the smallest - due to Tut’s untimely death - and there’s not much to see in it, as everything has been removed to the Cairo Museum and we’ve already seen it.  Or the tomb of Ay in the adjacent valley on the west, the Valley of the Monkeys - because baboons are prominent in the paintings.  All the scenes in the tomb are of daily life, but it also requires a special ticket.