Egypt: Day Thirteen, Part One

Temple of Luxor, with remaining obelisk on left

Up in the dark of still-night.  Down the gangplank of the boat before breakfast.  Why this time?  To see the Temple of Luxor before it opens, guided around by Dr. Waziri, who showed us the parts of the Karnak Temple being restored a few days ago on our way upstream.

The sky is still pitch black but Dr. Waziri has turned on the illumination for us.  The sandstone walls stand out sharply against the darkness.  It’s amazing that any of this is still here, seeing as it’s 3400 years old, except for the much newer granite shrine added by Alexander the Great a mere 2200 years ago.
  The very first thing I notice is the obelisk outside the entrance.  That’s because its twin stands in the middle of Paris, on the Place de la Concorde.  This one, too, was given to France, but it was so difficult and costly to transport the first one back in 1833 that Mitterrand, during his presidency in the 1980's, evidently told the Egyptians they could keep this second one.

Ramses II

  Dr. Waziri has been excavating here for many years.  As he did in the Temple of Karnak with Mahmoud, he lets the workers unveil the head of Ramses II that they’ve found.  There’s been an infinite amount of work done here because, as centuries went by, the temple was built over with streets and houses, and even a mosque right at its entrance.  (The mosque is still there.)  Dr. Waziri walks us through the entire complex, whose excavation is his responsibility.
  During Roman times, the Copts hid here.  Unfortunately, they damaged the site.  They tied up their cows there and the cows rubbed themselves against the walls... rubbed so hard they wore the hieroglyphs off.  In addition to their cattle, the Copts themselves defaced the friezes of the gods, which they found sacrilegious, and stuccoed over many of the walls to paint their own scenes.
  That reminds me of a story about the church of Germigny-des-Prés back in Burgundy, built by an Armenian architect in 811. (And he must have traveled from Armenia to France by foot!)  Emperor Charlemagne visited to admire its mosaic of the Ark of the Covenant.  Centuries later, the church’s priest was looking for his choirboys so mass could start. He found them in the chapel behind the altar, playing tiddlywinks with some small square tiles. “Where did you find those?” he asked. The boys pointed all around on the floor.  And when the priest looked up, he saw that some of the plaster had fallen off the wall, and there was the finger of an angel pointing down at him. It was the ancient mosaic which no one remembered had ever existed.  Now it’s been restored and is the only surviving Byzantine mosaic in France.

But back to Luxor.

Reunification of the 2 Egypts

  As with the drawings in the tombs, the hieroglyphs here were written in red with corrections in black.  But it’s too dark to see them clearly.  There’s one particularly unspoiled carving that I notice:  the unification of the Two Egypts, where two facing figures are tying together the lotus and the papyrus, symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt respectively.  There are also friezes of Ramses major battles, against the Asian (Hittites) on one side and against the Nubians on the other (as in Abu Simbel), with prisoners shown at the bottom.  There are also scenes of birthing in another room.
  This temple feels more unified, more homogeneous than Karnak.  That’s because it’s basically the work of only two kings - Amenhotep III and Ramses II - and it took just over a hundred years to build, if you exclude the part added by Alexander.  It’s borne up remarkably well over the millennia, except for the first courtyard, where the foundations of all the columns had to be restored recently.  In ancient times, water affected the temple only during flooding, but with the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the water table is much changed and it’s made the original foundations shaky.

As we prepare to leave, my eyes are drawn to the illuminated Avenue of the Sphinxes that stretches almost two miles between this temple and the Temple of Luxor.  At one time there were about 1,350 human-headed sphinxes on both sides of the ancient causeway; now about 850 have been found and replaced on their bases.  People head back to the bus, but I stand there soaking in the quiet spectacle as day starts to dawn over the sphinxes.  For a very brief moment, I have it all to myself... and then the lights go out and one of the guards calls to me.  “Shoukran” I tell him, and he replies “afwan habibi”, you’re welcome my beloved.  The Egyptians seem to like it when you appreciate their culture, which can be infinitely mesmerizing.*

* For a video of what the Temple of Luxor looked like originally, click on   https://discoveringegypt.com/luxor-temple/