Egypt: Day Nine, Part Two

Edfu waterfront

Ahmed has warned us that the vendors here in Edfu are the most vicious anywhere.  But in fact I don’t have any trouble when Peter and I leave.  I just pull Victoria’s hat down over my eyes and keep walking.  I’m getting the hang of it.
     As soon as everyone is back on the boat, we set sail farther up the Nile toward Kom Ombo and our next temple.  After lunch, we have an event waiting for us: an exposé on the search for Cleopatra.
       Along with us on the boat is Kathleen Martinez, from the Dominican Republic (which might explain the presence of the Dominican ambassador on board.)  An ex-criminal lawyer, Martinez was so fascinated with Ancient Egypt, and Cleopatra in particular, that she became an archeologist.  Everyone knows the story about Cleopatra committing suicide with a venomous asp (is there any other kind?), but no one knows where she’s buried.  Martinez is convinced there is a tomb, and that Mark Anthony is buried with her.  She spent 15 years studying any document she could get her hands on, and then decided to ask Zahi Hawass for permission to dig; he was Minister of Antiquities* at that time.  According to her, the meeting didn’t go well.  “He gave me two minutes to make my case, but after 25 seconds he wasn’t listening.  I told him,’You don’t listen because I’m not from Harvard’.  There were three professors from Harvard there.  They all stood up and said ‘We”re from Harvard and we’re listening’ ”.  Hawass gave her permission.

       Her hypothesis is that the asp/cobra was part of a ceremony, and thus religious, which means that she would have been buried - surreptitiously, without the Romans knowledge - inside a temple.  One temple in the north as important at that time as Phylae in the south is Taposiris Magna, 20 kilometers west of Alexandria.
       Martinez has been searching for six years, and now employs 50 workers plus 10 to 12 specialists, all Egyptians.  For the past month, she’s been using radar devices and has found three promising sites.  Within two months she discovered two chambers, underground passages, and now has amassed 600 articles, a bust of Cleopatra’s face, statues of Isis, 500 coins, and a stele like the Rosetta Stone.  All this in a temple that functioned for 600 years and would be the biggest temple to Isis, which could be a connection to Cleopatra.  But no inscriptions and no decoration.  She also mentions 800 skeletons plus 14 mummies.
       In opposition to Hawass’s theory that Cleopatra was just after power, Martinez’s theory is that Cleopatra wanted power, yes, but she might still have loved Mark Anthony and when he died and  Rome was going to take her country from her and carry her off to Rome as a prisoner, she knew had lost everything and wanted to die
       At the end of her presentation, and after Dr. Hawass steps in to jest that Martinez may be  the reincarnation of Cleopatra but he’s not sure she’s right, many of the women in our group tell her to stand strong.  That if Zahi Hawass thinks she’s wrong about her theory, he’s just seeing it from a man’s viewpoint and we understand her interpretation.

Throughout lunch and the presentation, our boat has been sailing 35 miles farther up the Nile toward Kom Ombo, and its temple.  We’ve passed construction on a new bridge across the river, although there are no signs of activity right now.  As I already said, there are very few bridges across the Nile, and I’m sure that trucks are happy to see new bridges that would take miles off their delivery routes.

       As the invitation was extended to visit the ship’s bridge, and we have some spare time, I decided to take them up on it.  Especially as one of the other passengers tells me he’s already done it and was welcomed there.  First I go down to the deck on the bow and look inside.  Then I walk around the small deck a bit, just to let them know there’s someone around.  The captain - the raïs is pacing back and forth in his caftan, on the phone.  He waves me to one of the wicker seats, but I leave him to it.  I stick my head into the bridge and ask if I can enter.
       The pilot on duty -  also in a caftan - is sitting cross-legged in a chair, keeping a close eye on the river ahead, while a TV set blares some sort of Egyptian soap opera well off to the starboard side of the room.  There’s no sonar to be seen, no depth detection; the pilots “just know” where the sand bars are... and there are lots of them.  The Nile is only 30 feet deep.  He smiles and invites me to steer - hopefully just a joke - and I tell him I only steer sailboats.  Well, actually I strike my chest, make a triangle with my hands for the sail and pull on an imaginary line, then steer an imaginary wheel and waggle my finger no, back and forth.  He’s laughs, and I leave him to it, not sure whether he understood or just thought I was another crazy tourist.  Time for a nap.
       When we reach Kom Ombo, there’s enough spare mooring for us to sidle right up to the quay.  A gangway aft is lowered and one of the crew strides right to the end of it, then when we’re just a foot or two from the quay, he jumps down and is thrown a line.  Quite the spectacle, but I’m sure he’s done this before.

Temple of Kom Ombo

Dinner will be late tonight because we visit the Temple of Kom Ombo as the sun sets.  It’s always interesting to know “why here?”, especially as there doesn’t seem to be much else around for miles.  In this case, for centuries the town was on the trade route toward places south in Africa.

     Like the one back in Edfu, this temple is also from Ptolemaic times (the last two centuries BCE).  One thing that’s unique about it is the use of tongue-and-groove architecture.  But the most unique thing is that it has two sets of everything because it served two gods.  The two halves are laid out symmetrically along a central axis.  The north half was for my old friend Horus.  The south half was dedicated to Sobek, the crocodile god... and what could be more fitting along this southern part of the Nile where there are crocodiles.  Or at least there were; Ahmed says the only ones he knows of are in Lake Nasser, beyond the Aswan High Dam.

Birthing scene

       Ceremonies were held here for the seasonal flooding of the Nile, for agriculture and especially harvests.  But there’s also an interesting medical element that is unique.  The Greco-Roman god of medicine, Aesclepius was evidently worshipped here, judging by wall carvings that depict numerous medical instruments used 2200 years ago.  Sick people would visit here to be treated, not necessarily because the doctors were better (although...) but because the god of medicine would be smiling on them here.  One carving depicts a woman on a birthing stool and another shows a woman actually giving birth!
       As in Edfu, here again the lighting is striking, underlining the curves of the gods’ bodies.  The mellow light adds to the magic of being here.

As soon as everyone is back on board, we shove off from this city where the region’s sugar is refined, on the last leg of our trip upriver to Aswan.  When I get to my room after dinner, the towel fairies have been at work again.  This time it’s an elephant and a mahout astride him, holding the reins.  This is the best of all the towel artwork our room crew has come up with so far, after the two swans kissing when we first arrived.  The towel mummy sprawled across the foot of my bed last night gave me a jolt though when I spotted something out of the corner of my eye, seeing as I was supposed to have the room to myself!
       After a warm shower to wash off the sands of Edfu and Kom Ombo, I slip into bed and turn off the lights.  Through the wall-window, I watch the full moon shimmer in the Nile as the dark river banks slipped by, with occasional faint lights from villages.  And then I guess I fell asleep.

Egypt: Day Nine, Part One

Galila in the streets of Edfu

When I wake up, we’re moored to the quayside in Edfu, about 75 nautical miles up the Nile from Luxor.  No early start today, and easy outings:  Edfu in the morning and then we sail to Kom Ombo in the afternoon.
  As Horus is my favorite Egyptian god - because of a statue I saw decades ago in the Louvre Museum - and this temple is dedicated to Horus, I’m looking forward to it.
A horse and buggy takes us from the boat to the Temple of Edfu.  As most people on this trip are couples, and as the buggies fit only two, I buddy up with Peter, who I think is the only other single in our Ramses Group.  People always being proud of their horses, I ask the driver what his horse’s name is “Galila”, he says, specifying she’s a mare.  She looks relatively more well-tended and better fed than the horses back in Cairo.  I see that the horses waiting for tourists all seem to have a feedbag on, so I guess they’re kinder to their animals here.

Temple of Edfu

Edfu is the most complete temple from the Greco-Roman era, which lasted about a thousand years.  The last Egyptian ruler reigned during the 30th dynasty, in 400 BCE.  Then came the Persians, but they were not liked.  Alexander the Great conquered the Persians and made himself raïs of Egypt in 332 BCE.  He reigned a short time - until his death in 321 BCE - and then his general Ptolemy took over, becoming governor of the province in 305 BCE and then king of both Upper & Lower Egypt.  The Roman era stretched longer, from 30 BCE to 628 AD.
The temple itself took 180 years to build and includes a granite shrine that predates it.  It’s the second largest in Egypt, after Karnak.  Edfu was dedicated to Horus, the sky god, and his wife Hathor.  It celebrated the Festival of the Reunion, when Hathor sailed south on the Nile and reunited with Horus.  It was one of, if not the major festival of the year, and lasted two weeks.  (By the way, Hathor is quite the goddess, being responsible to love, joy, music and maternity; that’s a tall order.)

  When the temple was rediscovered by a French archeologist in 1860, part of it had been used as a garbage dump and another part, the first hypostyle, as a stable.  The rest was silted up from Nile flooding or buried under sand, and homes were built on top of it.  The ceiling of the second hypostyle is covered in black soot, from fires set by the Copts, but its twelve columns are still standing and support an intact roof.  The Copts also defaced almost all the faces on the wall decorations throughout, as they were deemed to be pagan.

Horus

  In spite of all that, the temple as a whole is remarkably well-preserved and gives an excellent idea of how all such temples were built.  The first pylon is quite colossal, even for Egypt - over 120 feet tall - decorated with mammoth carvings of battle scenes as well as Horus and Hathor.  The lintel to the entranceway still has traces of the paint that once covered the entire building, as do some of the columns. At either side of the gate stand statues of Horus that are taller by far than the tourists streaming by.  In the first courtyard is a column with the inscription “all life and dominion” which demonstrates the power of the god... and the pharaohs.  That concept of the unification of the two Egypts is reflected in symbols throughout the temple:  lotus and papyrus, vulture and cobra, white crown and red crown.  In fact, the second hypostyle’s twelve columns alternate the lotus and the papyrus on their capitals.  All this leads to the Sanctuary of Horus at the heart of the temple, complete with the barque that Horus traveled in to reach Edfu for that Festival.  Some of the stone here is so smooth that it’s hard to tell whether it’s polished granite or alabaster.
  One interesting feature here is the lighting.  As the roof is intact on much of the temple, it’s been studied to light obliquely.  And that makes the relief of the carvings stick out.  These are not just flat artwork; the stomachs of the characters, their cheeks and breasts are all gently curving.  It’s especially evident with Horus and Hathor in the sanctuary, ankh in hand.

Second hypostyle