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!