Egypt: Day Ten, Part Three

Caravan along the Nile at Aswan

On the way back to the boat we stop at the Sandalia Papyrus Institute.  Like the carpet school, it includes a demonstration of how papyrus is made, and then an opportunity to buy something.  The paper is made from the inner part of the papyrus plant and the green outer part is used to make baskets.  We all gather around as a woman shows us how the process is done, all by hand.   First she takes a section of papyrus stem that’s been cut to the desired length.  She slices it fine, takes the inside and rolls it.  Then she beats it with a mallet.  After that, it’s soaked in water for six days to make light papyrus or twelve for dark.  And after that, the strips are laid out in a crisscrossed pattern and pressed for twelve days, which not only extracts the water but also the natural sugars.  It’s interesting to find out how things are made, especially something that can last down through the millennia.
       There are some beautiful works here, but I only have my carry-on bag on this trip - and a growing number of books - so I choose to buy a small papyrus with two cartouches into which, while I wait, an artist draws - phonetically - the names of my two children.  It will go with the T-shirts that have been decorated with a cartouche of the name of each of my grandsons.

The last event of the day is a visit by boat to a Nubian village.  It doesn’t sound like much at the time but ends up being the non-monument highlight of the trip.  We board a boat that takes us upriver along the left bank of the Nile.  (On the way back we go around the islands on the right bank side; no rocks to avoid  - so faster, and easier in the dark.)
       There are two million “Nubians” in this part of Egypt.  Many of them have had to be relocated because of the Aswan High Dam, as I said earlier.  They now live on an “almost-island” that seems to be moored at the south end to the dam itself, and that provides them with highway access.

Stage of Nubian school

     The village has a primary school with about twenty students to a class, and after scrambling up the riverbanks that’s where we’re headed.  The school is decorated with artwork, especially the stage side of the inner courtyard.  We’re ushered into a classroom and there Mr. Omar, the teacher, sets to teaching us the numbers from 1 to 10... none of which I now remember.  He then has us repeat the alphabet, as he taps the blackboard with his pointer and calls them out.  It’s all good fun until he points at us and asks us what this or that letter is.  Henry gets called up and doesn’t answer right, so is made to stand against the blackboard, much to our enjoyment.  Then he points at me and asks my name.  I tell him and he writes it on the board... then calls me up to write it myself.  I probably make a pig’s ear of it, but it doesn’t look too bad to me.  And I’m not made to stand in the corner, so...

     After that, we walk a street or two to a Nubian house that also serves as a café.  The floor is earth, and Ahmed explains that they sweep it every night to erase all footprints, so you can more easily spot scorpion tracks.  Not very reassuring.  And there's another kind of beast in the house:  crocodiles, small ones that the owner keeps until they’re big enough to be released into the wild.  He encourages us to come and hold them.  After that, with our hands still intact, we’re offered a choice between hibiscus or mint tea; I choose mint.


       Meanwhile the lady of the house is busy applying henna “tattoos” to anyone who wants one, on the back of their hand.  Dawn and Suzanna volunteer - and the next day Dawn will have a reverse replica on her cheek, having slept on her tattoo.  And no, it didn’t wash off.

     We return to our boats through the market, which is still open even though night has fallen.  (After all, night falls shortly past 6 pm.)  The vendors aren’t pushy here, but the spice merchants do a brisk business just the same.

Back at the boat, it’s a light meal and then bedtime.  Tomorrow will come all too early, with a wake-up call at 4 a.m. for our departure to Abu Simbel, the other highlight I’ve been looking forward to.  For years!

Egypt: Day Ten, Part Two

The island of Philae

Doubling back toward Aswan, the bus drops us off at a dock where we take a boat across the smaller lake between the two dams, old and new.  There are several islands, and one of them is Philae.

       To save it from the rising waters, a cofferdam was built around it, the water pumped out and the temple raised piece by piece.  It’s been rebuilt on higher ground, on an island only a quarter mile from its original site.  Philae is Greek for “the end”, because it marked the southern limit of ancient Egypt (the end of the world).  There’s a story that goes with the island:  The daughter of a ruler fell in love with a poorer man.  Her father exiled her to the island of Philae.  Her lover searched far and wide for her, and the animals helped him because he was kind to them.  Finally, a crocodile gave him a ride to the island where she was hidden... and they lived happily ever after.

       This love story goes along with a temple to Isis, who lived her own love story involving her brothers Seth and Osiris and their sister Isis.  The part Ahmed tells us involves Seth having a magnificent sarcophagus made out of the finest Lebanese cedar and offering it to anyone who fit in it.  Many tried, but when Osiris got in, Seth had it sealed up and taken far away.  Isis searched until she found it and brought it back.  That only made Seth angrier, so he chopped the body of Osiris into fourteen pieces and cast them to the winds.  Isis again searched and searched, eventually finding all but one of them.  The one part missing was his phallus - because the Nile catfish ate it (and are still eating things in the Nile today, along with the perch, but hopefully not phalluses).  Ever the clever one, Isis made Osiris an artificial phallus. After which, Osiris became the god of the afterlife.  And that is why Philae’s temple is for the worship of Isis and of her son with Osiris, Horus.
       (I find it interesting that there’s a parallel between Seth and Osiris on the one hand and Cain and Abel on the other hand:  one son kills the other out of jealousy.  What differs is that the murderer is the younger son in the Egyptian myth but the older one in the Bible.  There’s also a parallel between fitting in the coffin and Cinderella’s slipper or the three bears' beds, but that’s a whole other story.)
       As long as we’re in mythology, Ahmed tells us the Egyptian creation myth.  In the beginning there was nothing (Nun), primal waters everywhere.  Then the creator god Atum created a mound that emerged from the nothing.  This story is related on the walls of the pyramids.  Again, a similarity with the Bible, and other mythologies, including those of the Ojibway tribe of North America (who also have a jealous brothers legend).
       But enough of phalluses; back to the island of Philae.  In addition to the Temple of Isis, there are other buildings from the period of Ptolemy V (181 BCE).  Unlike other temples, the temenos wall is missing here because it wasn't needed; the Nile provided the necessary protection.  There are also traces of the Copts, who hid here from the Romans, as they did elsewhere.  That explains the Coptic crosses everywhere, including on an altar they added, using one of the fallen stones.

Hathor's columns

       Also saved from the waters is a kiosk in honor of Roman emperor Trajan, a small building whose ceiling is long gone but is beautiful for its fourteen columns.  There’s also a small temple for Hathor, who took care of Horus - and she’s well-represented.
       I notice somewhere a piece of French graffiti:   le 13 ventose de l’an 7.  I don’t know why it’s there except that the date indicates a day in March of 1799, according to the calendar set up under the French Revolution.  That places it during Napoleon’s military campaign in Egypt, before he became Emperor of France.
      Starting in 1970, and over a decade, 38,000 pieces of the monuments on the island were disassembled in order to save them from the already rising waters of what is now Lake Nasser, created by the new Aswan High Dam.  Meanwhile, a new island was prepared, which took five years.  And then another five years were necessary to reassemble it all on the new site.  Originally the buildings were painted, but the paint is now gone because monuments were flooded by the Aswan Dam four months a year.
     The whole project is mind-boggling in its scope and cost.  It all fits together as if it had always been there.  I'm so glad this - like Abu Simbel we'll see tomorrow - wasn't lost forever, as some other monuments were.

Trajan's kiosk

Egypt: Day Ten, Part One

Aga Khan's tomb across from Aswan

When we wake up, we’re in Aswan.  And we’re not the only ones, because we have to walk through several boats to get to terra firma.  We’ve traveled 600 miles upstream of Cairo, part by air, part by river, to the Governate of Aswan, whose population is three million, mostly “Nubians”, which accounts for the darker complexion. 

     Lucky for us we have a tourist bus because transport outside of Cairo is sketchy at best, which explains the host of minibuses and even pick-up trucks loaded with people standing in the bed.  Our bus takes us along the river, then uphill past a huge Coptic cathedral to the old Aswan Low Dam, built by the English at the turn of the last century.  As with many things in Egypt, it’s heavily guarded and Ahmed tells us we can take as many photos as we like, but not of the guards at either end.  He encourages us to put our cameras out of sight to avoid the bus being stopped.   With my zoom, I manage to take a few from far away when the bus maneuvers a turn.
       Aswan’s quarries are the only ones in Egypt supplying pink and grey granite.  That made the region very important.  Our first stop is at the quarry where an obelisk was carved for Hatshepsut.  The 10-foot-thick needle was to be the tallest ever at 90 feet, weighing in at 1,200 tons.  That’s more than twice the size of any obelisk made before then.  It was to be a symbol of Hatshepsut’s power, which must have been important, seeing as she was one of only two women - before Cleopatra - to have ruled as pharaoh, and by far the more powerful of the two.
        All that rock-carving was done by hitting dolorite spikes to create notches; then iron chisels took over.  The large round stones used as hammers are there for us to see.  But if the obelisk is still resting in the quarry today, it’s because it cracked near the top before completion and was abandoned on-site.  I can just imagine the worker reporting to his foreman - or the foreman reporting to Hatshepsut! - “I have some good news and some bad news.”   
       Of all the vendors we encounter, the ones here are the least pushy as we run the gauntlet of the bazaar at the end of the quarry (like the gift shop as you leave a museum).  There’s going to be a costume party tomorrow night so I buy a white cotton tunic with pale blue trim.  The price has already been negotiated by someone within earshot for a similar item, so it costs me a royal 130 Egyptian pounds, which translates to about $8.  And it’s not made in China; I check.  What’s more, the merchants worry about their reputation with future tourists.  One extremely alert shopkeeper actually runs up to the bus as it’s pulling out, saying that the book someone bought was in German, asking if they did that on purpose.

Next attraction:  the Aswan High Dam.  This one was Nasser’s idea, which is why the lake it created - one of the largest man-made lakes in the world - is named after him.  As we drive, Ahmed explains that Egypt had no money for technology, so Nasser decided to ask America and Europe for help.  Given the politics in 1954, the answer was no.  So the Soviet Union stepped in.  Construction stretched from 1960 to 1971.  Workers were paid initially, but later on people were forced to work - for the glory of Egypt (as in Pharaoh's time) - and more than 100,000 of them died.
       It’s a rock-filled earthen dam 1½ miles wide with a road along the top.  There are twelve turbines in all, but only four work at any one time.  In case the level gets too high and there’s a danger of flooding, the lake has two spillways:  one here, where we’re crossing, and one 140 miles to the south.  Both empty into the desert and have only been necessary five times so far.
       The lake created by the dam, although a blessing to Egyptians, would engulf several ancient sites.  UNESCO stepped in with a world-funded project and saved 22 temples.  Egypt gave four temples away - to Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and the United States (Dendur, part of which went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art).  The temple of Abu Simbel was moved to higher ground and the temple complex of Philae was also saved from the rising waters.  Forty-two Nubian villages also had to be moved.  In total a quarter of a million people had to be relocated, mostly to Edfu and Kom Ombo.
       We only drive across and back.  The jaunt offers us a great view of Lake Nasser and a chance to admire the dam.  But even though we obey Ahmed’s warning and hide our cameras, we’re stopped at the checkpoint just the same and the bus’s trunks are inspected by a guard with a sniffer dog.

Aswan