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.

Egypt: Day Eight, Part One

As it did yesterday, morning comes all too early, before daybreak, and even before breakfast, although those of us who have opted for this side-trip are given a Doggie Bag as we get off our boat-hotel.  I’m too excited to be sleepy.  In my sideline of tour guide, over the years I’ve organized hot-air balloon rides for people in France yet never been up in one myself.  Today’s the day!

       A small boat takes us across the Nile where we board a minibus and head inland a bit, into tomb territory.  Unlike Cairo, almost nothing here is stirring yet, although the horizon is getting lighter.  We pull into a parking area where other buses are already parked... and where some balloons - about a dozen in all - are already taking off while others fill with hot air and excited people.  The flames from the burners stand out against the still-dark sky and magically light the balloons from inside, turning them translucent.

Mohammed

     We scramble aboard as the balloon is still inflating, but already erect.  Mohammed is our pilot.  He’s young, calm, cuts a dashing figure... and knows it.  Some of the crew hold the lines while others help us into the basket.  A woman I’ve become friendly with, Dawn from British Columbia, is in our group, as is Suzanna, who walks with a cane and has a hard time getting into the basket.  But she’s resolute, as she will prove to be throughout the entire trip, along with Larry and Tim, all three of them walking with canes.
     


      Slowly, as the sky warms to pink, the balloon lifts off, straining at its lines... and then we’re free.  The only noise is our burner keeping us upward-bound.  When Mohammed shuts it off, all is silence, except for our exclamations of “look over there!” and “do you see that?!”  I’ve never seen palm trees from above .  They spring up along the irrigation canals, like an eruption of green fireworks..  And there are fields of sugar cane - the biggest crop in the Luxor region - all in tight-knit rows that mask the parched earth.  Where the canals end, all greenery stops abruptly, contrasting starkly with the desert hills of the Libyan Plateau beyond.

Temple of Amenhotep

       First we see the columns of the Temple of Amenhotep as we drift south.  And the Colossi of Memnon in the distance, which we’ll see later on the way back to the boat.  Below lay the ruins of Deir-el-Medina, where the artisans who built all these tombs of the Valley of the Kings lived.  We see the beaten paths they took to work, paths weaving up the sides of hills and disappearing.  We float silently above mere holes in the cliff walls, every single one a tomb of some noble.
       Then slowly we change direction and suddenly there it is, one of the things I’ve always wanted to see:  the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, its three simple tiers of columns tight against the cliff behind.  I’d expected to visit this - put it on my A List - but not from the air, and not with no one within miles of it.  Its beauty is breath-taking.

Temple of Hatshetsup

       There are shops below also, still closed, one of which advertises items made of alabaster.  We skirt the minaret of a mosque also, its needle the only thing even close to our basket.  Flying over the houses is less beautiful.  They’re simple boxes, of the same color as the sands around them, with a few trees.  But some of them have their roof literally covered with trash... old tires, building materials, boxes, anything that isn’t needed inside the apartments.  That I would have preferred not seeing.

       After a good hour or so - I’ve totally lost track of time, which is fitting in such timeless surroundings - Mohammed brings us lower and lower... and worryingly seems to be aiming at a field where the farmer is burning sugar cane.  As we come lower, children run out to greet us.  Mohammed explains to us about landing.  He uses a line he’s surely used before - and the other pilots also perhaps: “In Britain, you land in a crash.  In America, a landing is bumpy.  But an Egyptian landing is smooth.”  And it is.  We don’t even have to do whatever it was he said to do immediately if he yelled out the order.  The basket was suddenly just down, the crew appearing, to grab the lines.  The children are trying to beg for money.  Dawn and I want to share our food with them, but the crew tells us not to.  Although both of us would like to share what we have, maybe some other tourists don’t.

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 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!