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

Egypt: Day Eight, Part Three

In the backgreound, the Valley of the Kings across the Nile

With our entrance fee, and in addition to the special ticket to the tomb of Ramses VI, we have a right to visit three of the 64 tombs, 26 of which are royal.  I ask Ahmed to suggest which three might be the most interesting.  Armed with all he has just told us, I head off along the many paths, starting high up near the far end.

K14 is the tomb of Queen Tausart (1189 BCE) and her successor King Setnakhte (1186).  As a two-for-one, it’s one of the longest   Also it is remarkably well-preserved, even those some of the scenes are unfinished.  Near the entrance is the lion god with two knives.  And there’s a column with Horus painted in vivid colors, the lotus in his right hand and an ankh in his left, and another with Anubis.  There’s also a frieze of spitting cobras on one wall, the spit represented as little dots, like in a cartoon.  In the burial chamber the ceiling has the Nut depiction with the hours of the afterlife, twelve suns for the day and twelve stars for the night.
  (Anecdote,  On my way down the long corridor, some women coming back up said to me “It’s easy going down, but harder coming back up”.  I told them, “Dying is easy, living is harder.”)
  The second tomb I visit is that of Ramses IX (1111 BCE).  It’s an easy one to visit, not strenuous, and has been restored.  In every tomb, there are people pointing out things to you, and then expecting some bakshish at the end.  Again one dollar bills come in handy.  They also will often tell you that you can take a photo, even though photos are forbidden in any of the tombs.

The third tomb is KV8, Merenptah (1203 BCE), the son of Ramses II, the Great.  This tomb is being restored, due to damage from flooding, but there is still much to see.  There are two of the four original nested sarcophagi, the first of which has a mirror below its raised lid so you can see the decoration inside as well as out.  The corridor seems steeper than the others   The length of the ceiling is covered with a starry sky and astronomical symbols.  When you reach the burial chamber, that sarophagus is quite magnificent, made out of pink granite
  The last tomb I visit is the one requiring a special ticket:  Ramses VI (1137 BCE).  Its multiple scenes depict the stories of the origin of the heavens and earth, and how the sun, light and life were created.  Present are Anubis, the jackal-headed god, to guide Ramses through the gates of the afterlife, and of course Horus, the “good god” who is there to help.  Osiris can always be picked out by his green skin and there’s Isis as a tree with a breast.  Strange.  And the sun god Ra is ever present.  And there are inscriptions in many languages because this tomb has been known since antiquity.  The Copts hid here from the Romans, both leaving graffiti behind.
  The corridors here are wider and higher, which means that if you’re claustrophobic - and luckily I guess I’m not - this is the one for you.  Perhaps because it’s lunch-time, there are few people here, and at one point, while I’m in the burial chamber, I have it all to myself for a few minutes.  Not even a guard; just a pigeon who has found its way in and is trying to find its way out.  Aside from its occasional fluttering, I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere quite so quiet.  (To see the tomb, click on www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT1OehShhJk)

After all this splendor, and for some of us a very early start, the bus takes us back to the Nile where we’re ferried across to our boat-hotel.  A buffet lunch is waiting for us, and as we eat, the boat heads off upriver on our way to Edfu, one of tomorrow’s excursions.  Out of the window, just upriver from Luxor, I see a bridge brightly decorated with paintings of the gods.  There are few bridges across the Nile, which is good for the ferry business.
  Tea-time finds me up on the top deck, reading and talking to another Sandy (there are four of us in the two groups combined - that’s never happened to me before).  At 4:30 the bar up there doles out tea and little Middle Eastern pastries, plus tiny crêpes that one of them takes great pleasure in flipping.
  I notice a Zodiac dinghy moving alongside with us and see that the two men inside are police.  I don’t know whether that’s standard procedure, given past unrest, or whether it’s because Mme. Sadat has joined us, complete with her major-domo and two daughters.  (It turns out to be the latter.)  Also on the boat is Dr Hawass, and the Ambassador of the Dominican Republic to UNESCO.
  At 7 pm, just before dinner, there’s a cocktail where the ship’s three pilots are proudly introduced - one of whom scurries off back to the bridge before we run aground.  The chief pilot is called the raïs, the Arab word commonly used for the leader of a country, and his country is this boat:  the LeFayan.  All these pilots know the Nile by heart, much as Mark Twain said the Mississippi pilots did.  And then Mr. Ambassador pulls out a guitar and sings us two songs before dinner.
  After which, to bed.  It’s been a long day.

Our boat-hotel, Le Fayan

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.