Karnak, Luxor, Abydos, and Dandara

At the end of our boat trip down the Nile, we met a new guide, Mohammed, and set out for Kom Ombo ("golden mound"). This was a crossroads for importing gold for the pharaohs, as well as where the Romans trained elephants for their campaigns. They found out that African elephants are not that trainable, so that didn't last long.

Kom Ombo was built around 150 BC during Greek rule is a strange temple in that it was dedicated to the gods Sobek, the crocodile god, and Horus, the falcon god, who were traditional enemies. Some think the Egyptians were trying to placate the actual crocs in the river, who were eating people crossing the river. The temple has a dividing line inscribed to separate the halves for the two gods. 

At the rear of the temple were a a depiction of medical tools and a calendar of festivals by days of the month. It's thought that people might have come here for healing.




Archaeologists found many mummified crocodiles at the temple. Though the real crocs were eating people, Sobek was believed to bring fertility. Everything in balance, I guess.

We stopped at the temple of Edfu, where the highlight was a stairway lined with the images of Egyptian priests.

The next morning we were off to the famed temple complex of Karnak. About thirty pharaohs, from the Middle Kingdom to Greek times contributed to it, and it's the second largest religious temple complex in the world, after Angkor Wat.

You wonder how the Egyptians raised huge blocks to build pyramids and great walls. Behind an unfinished pylon, or entry wall, are the remains of a mud brick ramp that was used to raise the blocks. That's a lot of mud.

Hatshepsut, the woman who ruled as king, erected two obelisks here. This one is over 90' tall. Her son Tuthmosis III, perhaps miffed at having to wait to be pharaoh, later built a wall around it so no one could tell it was hers.

Each temple has a "holy of holies," a room at the back of the temple where an image of the temple's god was kept and only the high priests and pharaohs were allowed. The ceiling of one of these was decorated with stars on a blue sky.

With a bit of a gratuity for the guard, we were able to get into the small and seldom-visited temple of Ptah, which contains this exquisite statue of Sekhmet, the warrior goddess and also the goddess of healing. I don't know how to put words to the silence in this room other than say it was transcendent and indeed, healing. We both felt changed. I'm the empirical and practical sort, yet can't help but believe that bits of the old magic live on in places.

The temple of Luxor is nearby, in fact an "avenue of the sphinxes" used to connect the two temples and was used during special festivals. It's romantic to think that these temples are out in the desert, but they're right in the modern city.

The hipostile hall is not as large as Karnak's, but big nonetheless. Statues of Ramesses II ("Ramesses the Great") are everywhere in Egypt; he seemed to think highly of himself.

The Romans, when they came, plastered over the Egyptian carvings here, but time and weather caused most of it to fall off. Empires come and go.

On Sunday we set off early to the temples of Abydos and Dandura. In Egyptian mythology, the god Osiris, after being chopped up by his envious brother Set, was reassembled and brought back to life at Abydos by his wife Isis. 

King Seti I offers the deed to the temple to Isis

There isn't much to see outside, but the wall carvings and paintings at Abydos are beautifully preserved after over 3000 years.

The king makes an offering to Isis

Even in the unpainted carvings, the detail is exquisite.

Anubis gives the king his symbols of power

On the way to Dandura, Mohammed picked up some molasses for home from this guy who set up shop at the highway intersection.

The highlight at Dandura, dedicated to the goddess Hathor, is the ceilings that have been restored to their original color. Hathor's image is at the top of the columns.

The goddess of the sky, Nut, arcs over a series of ceiling panels.

Under the temple floor is a long storage crypt with more spectacular images. It was feeling a bit like an Indiana Jones movie.

No one knows what this long eggplant-shaped thing with a snake is--nothing like it is seen elsewhere. There were other images of a snake emerging from a lotus nearby, so my guess is it has something to do with the serpent.

Dandara,  built during the era of Greek rule, is the only place bearing an image of Cleopatra VII. There were several Cleopatras, but the one made famous by the movie was the last ruler of Egypt before it was conquered by Octavius the Roman. So ends 3000 years of history. Cleopatra's on the left, her son Caesarian on the right.

Tomorrow we're off the Valley of the Kings!

Down the lazy (Nile) river

We'd arranged to meet Sero, captain of a small falukah vessel at 10:30 Wednesday morning to sail down the river toward Luxor. It took a while for Sero to collect water bottles and food in town, but eventually we were off.










The falukah had a shade cover, and the deck was covered with comfy mattresses where we slept under blankets at night. Sero pulled fabric around the sides to make it like a tent.

Sero at the tiller.

We passed several cruise ships on the way, but they seemed to carry only a small number of guests, while dozens of other ships sat idle. The dramatic drop in tourism since the revolution has many people struggling. Ironically, it's quite safe in the Nile Valley.

The falukah has sails only, no motor.  Against the breeze, we tacked back and forth with the current and made good time on the first day, yet had plenty of time to take in the sights. This fisherman was slapping the water to drive fish into his net.

Every couple of hours, we'd stop for lunch or a potty break. The latter involved some creativity and an improvised digging implement, as the river is bordered by mostly rural agricultural land. It took a while to figure out that this big wheel lifts water from a canal using donkey power. Donkeys, along with some camels, are the main work animals, and the donkeymotor for this wheel was dozing nearby.

Every time we'd climb up the river bank, we'd find a small farm. Alfalfa, used for animal feed, is a main crop, along with vegetables.

In the late afternoon, Sero and our boatman Murat would tie up to the river bank and prepare dinner. And though it's mostly rural, nearly all of Egypt's population lives along the Nile, so it's a busy place. Yet despite passing ships, the drone of pump stations, the railroad and highway, calls to prayer from the mosques, and the complaints of camels and donkeys, it was a peaceful journey.




Water birds, as well as hawks and falcons, frequent the river. To the ancient Egyptians, the ibis was the god of writing and knowledge--a kindred spirit of sorts to me.

A kingfisher scans the river for his next meal.

We took a walk above the river on the first evening and spotted a small fox running for cover.

The next day was dead calm, so we pushed off and let the river take us slowly downstream. About noon a breeze came up, and Murat raised the sail.

Sero and Murat were always exchanging banter with other boat crews and friends along the river, and a friend of Murat's invited us to see his home and have a cup of hibiscus tea.

It's a humble compound with five separate dwellings; one looked to be new. The central courtyard with surrounding rooms reminded me of traditional New Mexico architecture.

The word adobe is actually of Arabic origin. The mud brick construction method migrated from North Africa to Spain to the New World, and is still used at times in the US Southwest. In our last house we had adobe thermal walls, and our present home has one as well. In Egypt it rarely rains, so they hold up well.

The patriarch of the family still works the farm, here taking a load of alfalfa for the animals. His son (left) made friends with a Canadian novelist (Lynnette D'Anna?) traveling in Egypt, who bought him a new boat. Lucky guy. Many of the local people we've met just have hearts of gold.









Back on the river, we passed these sandals, which despite the use of big barges, are still used to carry cargo.








After one more night on the river, Murat and a friend who came by the night before rowed us across the glassy river to meet our guide Mohammed. Next stop: Luxor.

Aswan: Upper Egypt lives on

A short late-Saturday-night flight took us from Cairo to Aswan in the south--the old Upper Egypt (because the Nile flows from south to north). Bleary-eyed but functional, we arose for a sumptuous breakfast at our hotel, then met our guide for the day, Abdul. He took us across the Nile in a faluka, a small traditional sailboat, to see Qubbet-al-Hawa, or the Tombs of the Nobles, on a hillside overlooking the river.

Some of the tombs, which were for high officials of the late Old Kingdom (~2200 BC), contained beautiful paintings.

And we were reminded that this area was used for burials. I'm guessing that things got scattered during tomb looting, which is why all but a few Egyptian tombs were found mostly empty.

Back up the river a bit, we hiked to the fortress-like monastery of St. Simeon, which was occupied by 7th century Coptic Christian monks and originally dedicated to the local saint Anba Hedra, who renounced the world on his wedding day. It was rebuilt in the 10th century and rededicated to St. Simeon. A brand new monastery of Anba Hedra now sits just a few hundred yards away.

St. Simeon monks' sleeping quarters

From the top of the hill in the shade of an old mosque, we had a nice view of the Nile.


Abdul showed us around his village on Elephantine Island, where the local Nubians, following the ancient Egyptians, keep crocodile heads (and sometimes live crocodiles) as fertility talismans.

Along a stairway on the island is the Nileometer, a series of water gauges used in ancient days for measuring the Nile's height during flood season. Since higher water meant more crops, it also told the officials when to raise taxes.

On the way back to the hotel, we learned that it takes a village to decide what to do about a fender bender.

On Monday morning we headed out with a new guide, Islam, to see the quarry that was the source of granite used for all the pyramids, temples, and obelisks in ancient Egypt. Craftsmen excavated blocks by heating rock, drilling holes with bronze chisels, and wetting wooden plugs, which would expand and crack the rock. The obelisks were lifted with a rope-and-pole lever mechanism and transported to the nearby Nile on rollers. This unfinished obelisk is 41 meters long and turned out to be too heavy not to crack under its own weight, so the project was abandoned. According to papyrus records, 137 obelisks were made by the pharaohs. Only 37 have been found, so many more await discovery underground.

We approached the temple at Philae by boat. It was built on an island in the Nile and flooded up to 24 feet after construction of the first Aswan dam in 1902. The writer Agatha Christie, boating down the Nile, saw it mostly underwater and through her book Death of the Nile, drew international attention to the Egyptian temples that had been flooded. Many nations came to the rescue, and Philae's temple was disassembled block by block and reconstructed on another island a few hundred yards away.

Napoleon Bonaparte, who invaded Egypt in 1798, is sometimes credited with the birth of modern archeology. His fleet was destroyed, but he had brought 150 scientists and scholars to study ancient Egypt. Napoleon went home after a while, but the abandoned scientists were the first to study ancient Egypt.

Part of the temple was dedicated to childbirth; Egyptian women gave birth in water. This series of columns shows the goddess Hathor becoming happier and happier as the childbirth proceeds and the baby is born.

The first temple here was built during the Old Kingdom, but the Greek Ptolemaic pharaohs who ruled Egypt around 300 BC (this is why the name Philae sounds Greek) built most of it. The Greeks greatly admired Egypt and adopted its ancient customs and religion. They also brought the artistry that produced several temple rooms of exquisite reliefs here.

We had dinner at a restaurant on a Nile island with views of the river, the distant mausoleum of Aga Khan III, who died here in 1957, and a faluka sailing by on the wind.

Last stop for the day was the Nubian Museum. Nubia was a region to the south of Upper Egypt that extended to modern day Khartoum in Sudan. The Egyptians ruled Nubia for a time and got most of their gold there. I was surprised to see petroglyphs engraved on stone that resembled the Anasazi petroglyphs of the American Southwest. But my favorite artifact was an image of Maat, the Egyptian goddess of truth.

A three-hour Tuesday morning drive across the desert brought us to the spectacular temple of Ramesses II and that of his queen. We were very fortunate that there were few tourists, and for part of the time we had the temples to ourselves.

It's almost unbelievable that the entire temple complex—Ramesses II’s temple and his wife Nefertari’s—was sliced into blocks and moved from the Nile's banks to the desert above to save it from the waters of Lake Nasser when the Aswan High Dam was built in the 60s. It was like moving a mountain.

I had seen photos of the famous exterior of the temple, but didn’t realize that the interior was wonderfully decorated with scenes of Ramesses’ conquests and images of the Egyptian gods. 

We saw Ramesses' mummy in the Egyptian museum a few days earlier. In 1974 it was flown to Paris for examination and repair with a passport listing Ramesses' occupation as "King (deceased)." He was received at Le Bourget airport with full military honors befitting a king.

Nefertari’s temple is slightly smaller but equally impressive. All of the rock wall around both temples was moved along with the temples themselves.

After over 3500 years, some of the colors are still vibrant.

On Wednesday morning, we went to the Temple of Kalabsha on an island near the Aswan Dam. This is another temple that was relocated to higher ground when the dam was built. The temple dates to 30 BC, and was constructed by the Nubians and later built on by the Romans.

The temples built by the Greeks and Romans were always built on previous temple sites and honored the same gods. The Greeks greatly admired the Egyptians, and the Romans honored the traditions of lands they conquered to keep the locals happy. The small Beit el Wali temple, built earlier by Ramesses II was to me the most interesting. 

The colors adorning the walls are preserved in many places after many centuries. Here, Ramesses suckles from the goddess Isis showing that he is a devoted son. During the Coptic Christian era, many temples were defaced.











We had to run back to Aswan city for the next stage of our journey, a two-day trip by falukah sailing boat down the Nile to Luxor. Stay tuned!