Category: Egypt

This morning we woke up early to the sound of our tug boat gunning the motor.

Here is a picture of a man fishing with the sun rising behind him.

Once on deck we discovered we were at the Aswan bridge.  We were beyond the bridge when the transmission on the tug boat died so we were drifting down the river backwards. The crew worked on the boat for awhile until finally they gave up and threw out an anchor.  While we were eating breakfast another tug boat arrived.

We were pulled us the rest of the way to Aswan where we met Mona for today’s tours, Aswan dam and Philae Temple.

The most recent dams date from 1902 and from 1970.  The British built the low dam, as it is called today, from 1899 to 1902.  At the time it was largest masonry dam in the world.  They added to it twice.  It was replaced in 1970 with the “high” dam which created Lake Nasser, a 300 mile long and one of the largest man-made lakes in the world.  When it was built it provided enough electricity for all of Egypt, today it provides about 20% of Egypt’s electricity.  There is no lock system for boats to go from Lake Nasser to the Nile.  They have cruises on the lake, potentially a future adventure!

We took a small boat to Philae temple, built during the Ptolemaic Kingdom. The principal deity of the temple complex is Isis, but other temples and shrines on the complex were dedicated to deities such as Hathor. Egyptologists believe that Philae was the last active site of the native ancient Egyptian religion and that the last Egyptian hieroglyph was written there in the late fourth century.  Worshippers believed that the temple had power to cure them so they scratched off dust from the pillars to carry its healing power home with them (see picture below).

The temple was closed down officially in AD 537 by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. It then became a church dedicated to Saint Stephen.

Here are some pictures

Philæ temple Would have been submerged in Lake Nasser when the waters rose so UNESCO paid to move it.  This happened with a number of temples south of the dam. To move the temple it was dismantled into about 40,000 units and then transported to a nearby island, situated on higher ground some 500 metres (1,600 ft) away.

After Philae temple we went did a little shopping.  March, one of our sailing mates, wanted to buy a cartouche so we went to a gold store.  Rick and I briefly looked around and headed to the papyrus store.  There we got a demonstration of how they made papyrus.

We bought a very nice papyrus piece of art painted with a judgement scene from the Egyptian religion. Our print is the one behind the woman in the pictures of the demonstration.  We also went to a cotton shop, but didn’t buy anything there.

Finally we went back to the boat and had lunch.  After relaxing for a few hours we were picked up by our new guide, Mustafa, to go by boat to a Nubian village.  We got an interesting tour along the way.  From the pictures below you can see there were many cruise boats docked in Aswan.  They were up to three deep.  Also the little hut on the hill was a lookout to protect people from invasion.  The sailboats are called faluccas. Here are some pictures of Aswan.

Nubians are dark skinned people who lived between Aswan and Khartoum, Sudan.  Many of them lived in villages that were submerged by Lake Nasser and were relocated during the dam project.  The village was really commercial with lots of people trying to sell things.  There were lots of camels.  We went into a Nubian house and had some tea.  We walked around for about an hour and then returned to the boat.  Overall it was a waste.  Unfortunately, the Nubian people had been transformed from productive lives in their traditional homeland into beggars for the Aswan tourists.

Matt continued his lecture before dinner.  After dinner everyone went to bed early because we are leaving at 4:30 in the morning to go to Abu Simbel.  We are not coming back to the boat so we said goodbye to our great boat crew.  Our trip down the Nile was nothing short of fabulous.

 

 

We continued down the river all night and were met by our new guide, Mona at Kom Ombo, site of another Greaco Roman temple.  It was constructed during the Ptolemaic dynasty, 180–47 BC.  The southern half of the temple was dedicated to the crocodile god Sobek, god of fertility.  The northern part of the temple was dedicated to the falcon god Horus.  The temple is atypical because everything is perfectly symmetrical along the main axis and there are two courts, halls, and sanctuaries.

A couple of interesting things are contained in the temple;

1. There is a calendar carved into the stone with a daily menu for the gods.  The job of priest and priestess were hereditary and no one except the priests and priestesses were allowed in the temple.  This was there was a way of passing down the knowledge to only their offspring.
2. The priests and priestesses were also doctors and the surgical instruments were documented on the wall.
3. The Nile flooded every year and the priests measured and recorded the flood levels using a Nileometer, a deep pit off the main flow of the river.  The people were then taxed based on the flood level.  The higher the flood, the better the harvest, thus higher the taxes.  There is a picture below of the pit used to measure the flood levels.

Here are some pictures

After the temple we went into the crocodile museum.  They keep crocodiles at the temple and mummified them.

We walked back to the boat and continued down the river.

At lunch time we stopped at an island.  Rick, Lizette, and Armando (our sailing friends from Mexico), along with some of our crew went swimming in the Nile.  I just walked in the water, but that counts as going in the Nile.

After swimming we had a picnic and then the crew played the drums, sang and we all danced.  It was a lot of fun.

We had a leisurely afternoon and an excellent dinner.  Our boat guide, Ashraf, had said he would give us lectures with general Egyptian background information, but you may remember he had to leave unexpectedly on the first night so we never got our lectures.

Matt, one of our sailing friends, has a PhD in art history, teaches at Oberlin, and has been fascinated and studied Egypt since he was a boy, so he offered to stand in for Ashraf.  That evening he talked for about 45 minutes on the  history of ancient Egypt.  He was very informative and interesting.  His students are very lucky.  Here’s a picture of Matt at the picnic, looking like a rapper.

Matt and his wife, Lindsay, have a food blog, eatingthe world.net.  If you are interested in reading about Egyptian food, take a look at their blog.

We were able to sleep a little today.  Breakfast from 7 to 8.  At breakfast we learned that our guide’s brother had died and he left the boat in the middle of the night to take care of his affairs.  So, we will not have a guide on the boat but instead, guides at each of our stops.  The first stop is Edfu, location of Edfu temple. We took horse drawn carriages from the pier to the temple.

 The temple is dedicated to the falcon god Horus.  The temple was built in the Ptolemaic Kingdom between 237 and 57 BC.

The temple of Edfu fell into disuse as a religious monument following Theodosius I’s persecution of pagans and edict banning non-Christian worship within the Roman Empire in 391 BC.  As took place elsewhere, many of the temple’s carved reliefs were razed by followers of the Christian faith which came to dominate Egypt. The blackened ceiling of the hypostyle hall, visible today, is believed to be the result of arson intended to destroy religious imagery that was then considered pagan.

As is true in all temples, commoners were only allowed in the courtyard.  Priests populated the inside of the temple and only the high priest was privy to the altar room, the Holy of the Holies, which is where the god “lived.”

The temple is shaped like a pyramid on its side, getting narrower and lower as you approach the holy of holies.  The art on the inside was for the gods, the commoners never saw it.  The cartouches (hieroglyphics encircled in an oval) are only for the pharaoh and hieroglyphs between two straight lines represent the names of the gods.  If the depiction of the pharaoh has a straight beard it is a living pharaoh.  If it has a curved beard it is a god or a mummy.  The pharaohs were living gods.

Here are some pictures of the temple.

We got back on the boat and motored for the rest of the afternoon.  There was enough wind to briefly put up the sails so Rick won the bet.  Here are some pictures of the river.

 

That evening we stopped at Silsela Hormoheb Temple.  It was dark, closed and we didn’t have a guide.  I tried to find info on the internet but couldn’t so I will just show you some pictures.  Getting off the boat was a little dicey so I included a picture of that.

After checking out the temple we had dinner. It was another early evening.

 

We were up early again to go to the Valley of the Queens.  This valley was for queens princes, and princesses. The tombs there were amazing.  Here are pictures of the valley.

We went into Khaemwaset (son of Ramesses IV), Amenherkhepshef (son of Ramesses III), Titi (wife of Ramesses III), and Nefatari (wife of Ramesses II). Nefateri’s tomb is likely the most impressive of all of Egypt’s unearthed tombs to date. Here are pictures from the internet of the inside of the tombs.  

 

We returned to the hotel and checked out because Ahmed was picking us up to bring us to the boat going up the Nile. We stopped for another couple and our guide for the boat on the way.  The boat departs from xixx which is about an hour away. 

Our boat is called Om Kalthoum.  Joining us are three other couples, two from America, one originally from Mexico, currently living in Santiago.  Here are pictures of the boat.

We had lunch and then relaxed on the boat while we waited for everyone to arrive.  I slept since I had been up early every morning since we arrived.  

We left the dock around 5PM.   Our boat is a Dahabiyyas and has two large sails,  but no internal motor.  We will be towed all the way to Aswan, as is typical for these style boats.  Rick placed a bet with another passenger, Nick, as to whether the sail would ever go up (just a beer). Rick bet they would and Nick bet they wouldn’t.  No sails today.  

We had a nice dinner on board and then off to bed.

Yet another early morning.  This morning we had a 5AM pickup because we had a 3 hour drive to Abydos.  Luckily Rick is feeling much better after his marathon sleep.

The drive to Abydos was crazy.  Our driver is pretty aggressive (although not as bad as some places we have been).  There are lines in the road which they seem to just consider recommendations.  Our driver often moved into the oncoming traffic lane in order to pass someone.  Everyone is constantly honking to let other drivers know where they are.  Luckily we arrived in Abydos in one piece.

Abydos is home to the mortuary temple of Seti I. Abydos has a special place in the sacred landscape of ancient Egypt, as it was believed to be the place where Osiris was buried.  The temple is dedicated to Osiris, Isis (Osiris’ wife), and Horace (Osiris’ son).  It still has some of the original color.  Here are some pictures.

Dendera was our next stop, about half way back to Luxor. It contains the Dendera Temple complex, one of the best-preserved temple sites from ancient Upper Egypt.

We were escorted by police part of the way to Dendera.  I guess they do this to provide protection for the tourists, although no one would say it seemed unsafe for us. At one point there was police truck in front of us with to police officersoldiers sitting in the back with guns. The supervisor must have told them to put their helmets on.  One of the soldiers put his helmet on backwards.  We were all looking at him laughing and I spun my finger around to tell him to turn it around.  Eventually he figured out the problem and rotated the helmet 180 degrees but he did not fasten the strip under his chin.  He looked like a bobble head doll.  After a few minutes of wearing it like that he tried to fasten the strip behind his head.  Eventually he realized that wasn’t going to work and got it fastened under his chin.  He was smiling the whole time and watching us laugh at him.  Rick said he hoped he didn’t needto shot his gun.  🤪

Dendera temple complex was built around 350 BC in the Greco style.  It honors Hathor, goddess of beauty, love, joy and motherhood.  Hathor was often depicted as a cow, symbolizing her maternal and celestial aspects, although her most common form was a woman wearing a headdress of cow horns and a sun disk.  In the pictures below she is depicted with “cow ears” on the top of the columns.  Most of the figures in reliefs were faced by people who later lived in the temple.  (It seems that people lived in temples during the Coptic and Islamic periods.)

We returned to Luxor arriving back around 3.  We ate a late lunch at the same restaurant that we ate in on the first day in Luxor.  Then we said goodbye to Ahmed.

We relaxed for the rest of the day by the pool.

 

We were picked up for our balloon ride at 3:50 this morning.  We collected up some other people and then headed to the river.  We got on one of the boats, had some breakfast and filled out paperwork.  There we met some very nice people from the Maldives and spoke with them about sailing around their homeland someday. They were very encouraging and eventually asked us to visit them if we ever made it there.

Once the Luxor airport tower declared the weather conditions satisfactory we went across the river and were loaded into vans for transport to the balloon launching area.  They were blowing up the balloons when we got there.  We were in a large basket with a capacity of 32.  We only had 26 so there was a little extra room for all.  The balloon ride was amazing.  It was beautiful to watch the sun rise on the West Bank.  The ride was calm, stable and we were never concerned.  We couldn’t take our cameras because the army has several installations close to theValley of the Kings and thus doesn’t want people taking high res photos. We were limited to our cell phone cameras.  We came down in a farming area and the crew had to pull us away from the active fields so that we wouldn’t damage the farmers crops.  Here are some pictures.

After we landed we stopped at a small restaurant to wait for our guide to pick us up.  We sat with our new Maldivian friends and had a coffee.  After about 1/2 hour Ahmed the Great picked us up and off we went to Valley of the Kings, where, for a period of nearly 500 years from the 16th to 11th century BC, rock cut tombs were excavated for the Pharaohs and powerful nobles of the New Kingdom (the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Dynasties of Ancient Egypt).

With the 2005 discovery of a new chamber and the 2008 discovery of two further tomb entrances, the valley is known to contain 63 tombs and chambers (ranging in size from a simple pit to a complex tomb with over 120 chambers). It was the principal burial place of the major royal figures of the Egyptian New Kingdom, as well as a number of privileged nobles. The royal tombs are decorated with scenes from Egyptian mythology and give clues as to the beliefs and funerary rituals of the period. Almost all of the tombs seem to have been opened and robbed in antiquity, but they still give an idea of the opulence and power of the Pharaohs.  Here are a couple of pictures of the valley including people excavating.

Our tickets allowed us to go into 3 tombs.  Based on Ahmed’s recommendation we went into Ramesses IV, Ramesses II, Merenptah and Tutankhamen (we had paid extra for King Tut).  Each one was different but they were all amazing.  I found it very overwhelming to think about being inside a tomb which was almost 4,000 years old and a place that optimizes the royal families of ancient Eygpt.  Ahmed did a great job of explaining the process of entombing the pharoahs, their beliefs about the after life and what the images represent.  We didn’t take pictures but here are some that I found on the internet.

After Valley of the Kings we had some time to kill so we went to an alabaster showroom.  They explained how they shape the stone and then they took us into a showroom.  We liked a candle votive and were just curious about how much it would cost.  We didn’t want to buy it, but were just wondering.  Their original price was $80 but we ended up buying it for $20.

Next stop: Queen Hatshepsut mortuary temple. Queen Hatshepsut came to the throne of Egypt in 1478 BC and was the second confirmed female pharaoh.  According to Ahmed she usurped power from her step son.  Here are some pictures

Rick has been fighting a cold for last couple of days and between that and lack of sleep, he was feeling pretty bad by this time.  We were supposed to go to lunch, but he just wanted to go back to the hotel where he took a short nap and then we had lunch.  After lunch he slept for most of the rest of the day while I worked on the blog.

I know it’s just the beginning of the trip but it’s hard to image we are going to have another day as wonderful as this.  Words can’t describe it.

We were up very early to catch a 7:30 flight to Luxor. Our guide, Mustafa, picked us up at 4:30am.  There’s no traffic at 4:30 so the trip that took over an hour the evening before took us 20 minutes this morning.  We had time at the airport to get coffee and eat the box breakfasts provided by the hotel.  

The short one hour flight was uneventful and we were met at Luxor airport by our local tour leader, Ahmed, and our driver.  We arrived at our hotel by 9:30.  We were scheduled for lunch at 1 and our tour was scheduled to start at 2 so we had a couple of hours to get settled.  Our hotel is on the east shore of the Nile.  It has a beautiful pool area overlooking the Nile and the West Bank, where the Valley of the Kings is visable in the distance.  Here are some pictures of the hotel, the West Bank, and the Nile.

Ahmed picked us up at the hotel and took us to a local restaurant, El Hussein, for lunch.   The food was great and we really enjoyed getting to know Ahmed.  He graduated from college in June with a degree in English and started working for our travel company in August.  He lives in Cairo but is stationed Luxor for the next three months.  After lunch we came back to the hotel where we meet our tour guide, again named Ahmed (we called him Ahmed the Great, ATG, to differentiate between the two).  ATG was a high school teacher who taught Egyptian history for many years before becoming a tour guide.  He has a great sense of humor.  Here he is acting like a pharaoh and walking like an Egyptian.

 

Luxor, also called Thebes by the Greeks, was the Egyptian capital during the 16th–11th centuries B.C.  Our first stop was Karnak Temple.  The temple was started around 2055 BC, augmented over the next 500 years and used for about 2100 years.  It is the second largest temple complex in the world (Angkor Wat is the largest).  The temple is dedicated to Amun, his wife, Mut, and his son, the moon god, Khonsu.  Here are a couple of renderings I found on the internet of what it might have looked like in its prime.

Here are some pictures of what it looks like today.

From Karnak we went to Luxor Temple.  An avenue of sphinxes runs the entire 3 kilometers between Karnak and Luxor temples connect the two sites. This avenue is currently under excavation.

Amenhotep III, one of the great builders of ancient Egypt, started constructingthe temple during his New Kingdom reign, which lasted from 1390 to 1352 BC.  Ramesses II also make significant contribution to the temple.  ATG gave us a lot of information on the statues and hieroglyphs.

It was getting dark while we were there so I couldn’t get as many pictures as I would have liked.  Here are a few:

Luckily we had a big lunch because that evening we went to the Karnak Temple sound and light show.  Rick is interested in photographing the various temples at night.  The show was a little cheesy but here are a couple of his pictures.

I was so tired because we had gotten up at 3:30 that I fell asleep at the end of the show. We got back to the hotel and immediately went to bed because we have to get up very early for a hot air sunrise balloon ride.

 

Happy 12th birthday Josh!  I can’t believe you are 12.

Not much to report.  The flights to Frankfurt and Cairo were uneventful and largely sleepless.  We were met in Cairo by our tour company who whisked us through immigration.  We drove for about a hour, through rush hour traffic, to our hotel.  We are staying at the Sheraton which is a very nice hotel overlooking the Nile.  After getting settled in our room we explored the hotel a little.  The area around the hotel didn’t look great and our guide, Mustafa, told us that we would be approached by aggressive vendors so we decided to eat at the Egyptian restaurant in the hotel.  Rick got hummus, roasted beet salad, and tameeya.  I had chicken shawarma.  Everything was great.  After dinner we fell into bed to get soon very needed sleep in preparation for an early 4:30 AM departure for Luxor.