Nile Cruise: Day 3, Luxor

We spent all of our last day in Luxor. Modern Luxor stands on the site of the ancient city of Thebes, which, in turn, is the site of the Karnak temple complex, Luxor temple, Hatshepsut's temple, and Valley of the Kings. We squeezed in all that plus more...a long, thrilling day.

First off, we dragged ourselves out of bed to watch the sunrise during the boat's last stretch on the river before it docked at Luxor.



Then it was off to Karnak. A thousand years after the pyramids were built, Karnak was just a small temple dedicated to the local god, Amun. With the beginning of the 18th dynasty (around 1570 BC), this site became a religious center for the country with each pharoah adding his or her (in the case of Hatshepsut) elaborate homage to Amun. These also served as a tribute to the pharoahs' posterity as well, of course. :) Here's the entrance to Karnak...notice the row of sphinxes on the left:



The photos one always sees from Karnak is the great Hypostyle hall, built by Seti I and completed by his very famous son, Ramses II and I must admit that I couldn't stop taking photos of it. Amelia Edwards, an Englishwoman who traveled through Egypt in the 1870s, describes it perfectly in her memoir "A Thousand Miles up the Nile":

How often has it been written, and how often must it be repeated, that the Great Hall at Karnak is the noblest architectural work ever designed and executed by human hands? One writer tells us that it covers four times the area occupied by the Cathedral of Nôtre Dame in Paris. Another measures it against St. Peter's. All admit their inability to describe it ; yet all attempt the description. To convey a concrete image of the place to one who has not seen it, is, however, as I have already said, impossible. If it could be likened to this place or that, the task would not be so difficult ; but there is, in truth, no building in the wide world to compare with it. The Pyramids are more stupendous. The Colosseum covers more ground. The Parthenon is more beautiful. Yet in nobility of conception, in vastness of detail, in majesty of the highest order, the Hall of Pillars exceeds them every one. This doorway, these columns, are the wonder of the world. How was that lintel-stone raised? How were these capitals lifted? Entering among those mighty pillars, says a recent observer, "you feel that you have shrunk to the dimensions and feebleness of a fly." But I think you feel more than that. You are stupefied by the thought of the mighty men who made them. You say to yourself :--"There were indeed giants in those days."

David, Sara, and Steve letting all that history settle a bit before heading to the next site.











Next was the Luxor temple. A sphinx-lined road once connected Karnak to the Luxor temple, a mile away. A major project has been launched to unbury and restore this road to its former glory. I'm standing on the beginning of this road with Luxor temple behind me:


You can see the statues of Ramses II flanking the entrance. Ramses II was the one who erected the two obelisks as well. As you can see, only one is left, as one was given by Mohammad Ali in the 1800s to King Louis-Philippe in France who erected in the Place de la Concorde. King Louis-Philippe graciously sent a clock to Mohammad Ali, the first electric clock in the Middle East, as a thank you....except it didn't work. It stands today in the Citadel in Cairo....you may remember the whole story from our entry last September here . Doesn't the obelisk look lonely??

In the afternoon, we visited Hatshepsut's mortuary temple, Deir el Bahri. She built this for the purpose of housing her funerary cult as well as a way of strengthening her claim that she was the physical daughter of the god Amun and therefore was fit to be King. Reliefs throughout the temple show Amun claiming her as his offspring as well as other scenes from her twenty-year rule. We were struck by how Greek the temple looked.


No photos from the Valley of the Kings as we were only allowed into three tombs and we weren't allowed to take photos...actually cameras were forbidden on the premises. During the late Kingdom period, pharoahs were realizing that if the goal was to secure their mummy for the afterlife, publicizing their ornate burial chambers filled with treasure with a huge pyramid probably wasn't the best route. They started building their tombs in a valley miles away from Thebes, underground and unmarked. As we know today, this also didn't work, as all the royal tombs were robbed....all except for that of a certain famous pharoah whose name was King Tutankhamun. As I said, I went into three tombs: Seti I, Ramses III, and Ramses V. The colors and scenes painted in the underground chambers were dazzling!

Back at the boat, we ended our night with a wonderful gala dinner. The dessert was Baked Alaska in the form of the Giza pyramids, presented to each table as the rest of the staff played lively music, and then lit on fire....Fabulous!!


Part of the entertainment at the end of the night was a whirling dhervish, who twirls constantly to music for hours. Our whirling dhervish only twirled for about 20 minutes which was enough for me but I liked this photo:

Nile Cruise: Day 2,

Most of our time on the second day of our cruise looked like this:
















We spent the majority of the day moving down the river so we spent a lot of time on the top deck reading, people watching, and just watching the Nile valley drift way. It was wonderful. Here are some scenes viewed from the ship. As you may notice, the villages look quite a bit different than those in Lower Egypt. Not sure if these were Nubian or not, but we agreed they were quite picturesque.


































We stopped along the way at two Greco-Roman temples. In the morning, we drifted up to Kom Ombo, a temple dedicated to the Crocodile god Sobek as well as to the god Horus who was characterized by a falcon. It was fascinating to me that the Greeks would simply drop their own dedication to Zeus and Athena and erect temples to their new adopted Egyptian gods. I guess if you're already polytheistic, what's a few more? :)























































Then back to the boat for a hearty lunch. At this point, David had termed it as "strapping on the feed sack". :) We ate so much...but everything was so good. :)


In the late afternoon, we stopped at Edfu to visit the Greco-Roman temple dedicated to Horus. This is the best preserved temple in Egypt; it stands much as it did two thousand years ago.


















David doing what David does best. :)














Statue of Horus at temple entrance.

Nile cruise: Day 1, Aswan

We'd been waiting for Steve and Sara to go on a Nile cruise and we're so glad we did! It was fun to share such a special experience with them. The number of operators and boats on the Nile is a bit overwhelming but, on recommendation, we went with Abercrombie & Kent and I think it's safe to say we were wowed....by the service, the accommodations, the food.....oh, and the ancient Egyptian sites we saw along the way too! :)

Getting on the boat:


Some more photos from the boat at its dock in Aswan that first day and night:
















During that first afternoon, we visited a few sites in the Aswan area. The first was to the granite quarry where so many of the granite structures in ancient Egypt came from. There is still an obelisk there, unfinished, which was abandoned after a flaw in the stone was discovered. This unfinished obelisk gives archaeologists important clues as to how the ancient Egyptians could possibly carve something so immense out of stone.


Here is the granite bed from which another obelisk had been carved. You can see the trenches which quarrymen pounded out with 10 lb. balls of dolerite. To break the obelisk away from the granite, they believe that quarrymen hammered in pieces of wood on the underside of the obelisk, then soaked them in water; the expansion created cracks. You can see the parallel shafts below where they placed the wood.


Then we went to the island of Philae where a huge temple to Isis was built in the Ptolomaic period and used through Roman times as well. It was a beautiful afternoon.













































These were inscriptions from some of the scholars who accompanied Napoleon's expedition in 1798!


This temple was located above the site of the first Aswan dam and so after 1902, it was almost completely covered by water for most of the year. When construction for the new High Dam was being planned, UNESCO along with the Egyptian government launched a campaign to save Philae and other important monuments from being submerged forever. The entire temple site was dismantled and reassembled, stone by stone, on a nearby, higher, island between 1975-1980. Amazing!

After coming back to the boat, we were served afternoon tea in the lounge:


and one photo from dinner that night. We decided we could get used to this life. :)

The Giza Pyramids!

These are the big ones....the ones everyone sees on postcards. The only one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World still standing. A few days into Steve and Sara's visit, we drove up to the Giza plateau, stopping on the way to have coffee at the famous hotel, the Mena House. The Mena House lies at the foot of the plateau and has hosted celebrities and heads of states for over a century, most notably Chiang Kai-shek, Churchill, and Roosevelt at their Cairo Conference in 1943.

Sara and Steve agreed to describe this as our house to the folks back home:


A photo from the coffee shop just off the lobby. It has floor to ceiling windows that look out on the pyramids.


Before we head up to the pyramids, I wanted to backtrack for a paragraph. Now the day before, we had visited the pyramid site of Dahshur where the art of building pyramids had progressed from what we had seen at Saqqara and Meidum. The step pyramid at Saqqara was the first manifestation of the idea of building a tomb with height, then came the step pyramid at Meidum which they had tried to fill in with a limestone casing. This outer shell was built at too steep an angle and collapsed as you may remember from our blog entry last month. Enter Dahshur where again the pyramid was built at too steep an angle so partway up they changed the angle, so it is known as the "Bent Pyramid". Sara's pointing out where you can see how the angle changes:


The Bent Pyramid was built by Snefru...the same Snefru who built Meidum. For reasons we can only guess at, he decided to built a third pyramid. Maybe he just wanted to get it right. :) This time he succeeded. It's called the Red Pyramid, from the reddish limestone used in its construction, and it's right next to the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur. Thank you, Steve, for pointing out the first "true" pyramid:


OK, hopefully that wasn't too confusing. Fast forward to Giza. Snefru's son, Khufu, took the advances made by his father and proceeded to construct the largest pyramid of all: the Great Pyramid of Giza. 2.5 million blocks of stone, averaging 2.5 tons each. Our tour guide (that's him on the left in the picture below) pointed out the irony that while Khufu built the largest pyramid of them all, the only representation we have of him is a tiny statuette in the Egyptian Museum, about 7 cm. tall.


The pyramid in the foreground below was built by Khufu's son, Khafre. This is the sole pyramid which still has a remnant of the white limestone casing, giving us an idea of how these pyramids must have gleamed in the sun.


Khafre's pyramid is also the only one which still has an intact valley temple which was pretty cool to see but no pics unfortunately. But here's the remnant of the causeway connecting the valley temple to the pyramid.


The most famous feature of Khafre's pyramid complex is the Great Sphinx, located next to his valley temple. I think I missed her lips. :)
















Oh, and I almost forgot....and it was so fascinating too. In 1954, Egypt's President Nasser was driving the King of Saudi Arabia around Khufu's pyramid and the story is that the King noticed that part of the south side of the pyramid was obstructed by a large pile of debris and said something to the effect of "Why don't you have that removed?" Nasser got his Antiquities Dept. on the task and in removing the pile, they uncovered a large pit which contained an entire boat which had been dismantled into 1,244 cedar pieces. This boat was to carry the pharoah into the afterlife. It took a team 14 years to reassemble the pieces and it is now displayed in a small museum next to the pyramid. Amazing!

Medinet Madi, Attempt #2

Well, I was a little surprised to see that it's been 3 weeks since my last post!! I slacked off after the New Year and then David's sister Sara and her husband Steve visited from the 9th-19th, so now we're settling back into our relatively normal life and I have a lot of blogging to catch up on! :)

For those regular readers, do you remember the temple site Medinet Madi we were trying to find last July?? We ended up getting caught in a market day traffic jam plus we were completely lost....an interesting day but no temple. Well, Steve and Sara said they were game so we tried again. This time armed with a better map, plus personal directions and Arabic spellings of towns from those Egyptians we know who live in the Fayoum area. We still got lost but this time my Arabic was a bit better and we were at least able to ask for help. Two guys on a motorcycle took us to the site. This was good bc, as it turns out, we would have been hard-pressed to find it on our own!



We were expecting to find the site completely abandoned and was completely surprised to find about twenty guys busily at work, clearing out piles of sand and rocks as well as reconstructing walls and restoring monuments. No one could communicate with us in English so it wasn't until we got home that I looked online to discover that this is part of a UN development program. The Egyptian government and the UNDP along with the Italian government (Pisa University has been excavating here for years) have agreed on a management program for Medinet Madi which will include a visitors' center among other things. I was reading their objectives and one was to track visitor traffic to the site and I thought Good Luck. :)

Anyway, it was nice for us because so much of the site had been unburied from the piles of sand we had seen in photos. Medinet Madi was a temple built in the 12th dynasty by Amenemhat III dedicated, of course, to Sobek the crocodile god as well as Renenutet, a cobra goddess. The Greeks came along, always amenable to new gods to add to their pantheon, and added their own temple, statues, and bas-reliefs. They have evidence that this site housed a Roman military camp and there was a Coptic community here too. It appears that Medinet Madi had been in use for at least 2500 years.

An avenue of sphinxes leading to the entrance of the old temple.















There were several of these lion statues too. They don't look particularly Egyptian or Greek, do they?










A gate to the entrance of the temple with a giant foot, probably of Sobek. You can imagine how big the original gate must have been!
















Another Sobek relief on the back wall of the old temple.




















David and Steve looking at the hieroglyphics on a papyriform column in the old temple.




















We weren't sure what this was. Our guidebooks had told us that recent excavations had uncovered a crocodile nursery and pool along with crocodile eggs but it appeared to be located somewhere else on the site. Adjacent to this, the Pisa team has uncovered some impressive hydraulic engineering built by the Roman military unit stationed here so maybe this is connected with that.




An extremely interesting site. I wish we would have taken more photos, which just means we'll have to go back!! Maybe this time we'll be able to find it on our own. :)