As time passes and I get busy with the holidays - Thanksgiving is THE busiest time of the year in my business (fancy grocery food) - I find I've moved a bit on from Egypt, which seems now very long ago and far away, and I want to move on to blog about other things, but the knowledge that I still had more to say about Egypt (no time to say it) means that the blog entries in my head are just backing up.
So let me offer a few words about the trip, in closure. I did see a lot of the great moments, naturally, specifically:
The Great Pyramids of Giza, and the Sphinx. Nothing like them, as you imagine, and it's hard to say what the experience was like. As when you view anything famous, from the Eiffel Tower to Quintin Tarantino, the reaction was partially: "Oh. There they are. There is the actual one." And you've seen it so many times, there is an elasticity to the actual reality of being there. They were immense, they were impressive, they were ancient, and neither the crowds, tour buses or aggressive vendors could really distract from them. They towered over us all. They were gravitas.
I always pictured that, if I someday saw the Pyramids of Egypt, it would be hot and sunny and dry and still - you know, like the desert. However, we went early in the day (you visit desert sites as early as you can, as a general rule), and it was overcast and very windy. Very unexpected for me. Just goes to show that there's plenty of things you imagine all your life as being one way but the reality of it is eventually something you didn't even have on your radar. I happen to love wind, so this aspect made the pyramid visit even more glorious. I also had a nice view of them from my hotel room and from the luxe pool as well. There is really nothing quite like swimming in a perfect crystal blue pool, floating on your back and looking at the Pyramids.
The Egyptian Museum. As guide said, it's really more like a an open warehouse - things stacked higgedly-piggedly and barely labeled, but all of it old and impressive. It was hot and close and crowded as I've never experienced anywhere except on public transportation. The King Tut stuff was duly amazing and the mask you have memorized looks just like itself. The bathrooms here were the most shocking - the attendants wanted, for some toilet paper, not one Egyptian pound (about 20 cents) or even one American dollar, but one EURO. A rip off - which I would have paid but I had no money on me. A nice woman from Oklahoma or somewhere had mercy on me and shared some squares.
Medieval and Islamic Cairo. Some of our Cairo time was spent simply driving around and seeing some of the many amazing buildings. Islamic and Old Cairo (different places but next to each other) are impressive with a riot of mosques, churches, synagogues - I had never been in a mosque or synagogue and went in each one for the first time in the same hour - and other jumbled buildings. Like many Rome and old cities, there's an older Cairo underneath the modern one - shifting sands and time raise the ground and cover what's gone before - but some of it is exposed and we walked there, in a maze of ancient metal-studded doors, giant stone gates and narrow, high walled streets, complete with the Moorish intricate stone work you have seen and expect. This was one of my favorite parts of the trip, incidentally - it was exactly the idea of "Cairo" I had had in my head, only better.
Pyramid of Saqqara. The oldest cut-stone pyramid in the world. Built around 2630 BC (that's a healthy three millennium ago, and some change), it is surrounded by many other pyramids in various stages on collapse, one of which we went into. Nearby was the stunning Mastaba of Ti, an above-ground tomb decorated with unbelievable reliefs - since he was a high ranking official but not a pharaoh, he didn't have to brag about his wars and his relationship with the gods, so the reliefs are all of lovely and amazingly contemporary-seeming pictures of everyday people in everyday life. I was stunned at how modern-looking and well-preserved these reliefs were - it was very hard to imagine they were 200, much less 3000, years old.
Right next to the Mastaba was a collapsed pyramid that one could actually go down into the tomb of - full of hieroglyphics, with stars on the ceiling. Stars covered all ceiling of all the temples and tombs, everywhere we went - and the design was exactly the same, in terms of spacing and style and, when it was there, color....remarkably consistent art that spanned hundreds or even thousands of years. Think about it - they were able to say, "We've been drawing and carving stars the same way for millennia." No art or building method has been as consistent since then; indeed, ours seems to change by the decade.
The Temples: Philae, Kom Ombo, Horus, Karnak and Luxor. I include these together - they were all different of course, but more similar to each other than other things I saw. The guides did a good job of explaining the carvings - I'd read a book on how to read hieroglyphics but it was so overwhelming. We heard so many interesting stories of the gods and goddesses and pharaohs of Egypt, I can't even begin to mention them here. It was all fascinating and extremely sophisticated - indeed, you realize that ancient Egypt was really a fully fledged, totally "modern" society. They didn't have electricity or other technology we do now, but basically their cities were like ours, with bars and restaurants and whorehouses and temples and markets. They had brain surgery, barbers, scribes, artisans of all kinds. They had all the goods and services we have, and even banking - you could travel a thousand miles from where you lived and make a "withdrawal" from the temple bank, as long as you had your tablet or papers. Basically, they had credit cards.
The temples were the heart of the cities - the larger ones functioned as the seat of their institutions: schools, government, banks, libraries, etc. They were big, bigger than I'd expected, and so intact! Temples 2000 or 3000 years old with roofs, and columns. Forests of columns. Karnak was huge, massive, a veritable city to itself - looking down its awesome main "road" reminded me of the Forum in Rome, leading to Colosseum. It's hard to imagine how they would have looked in their prime - remember, Egyptians covered everything with gold and marble.
I won't go into any specific on each temple; they were all similar, and all so different, and I'm not sure the stories are as amazing unless you are standing there, where the priests stood, looking at the hieroglyphics they read. You should just go, if you can, before tourism (it's sad but true) wipes out some of the best sites.
The Nile - We cruised this mighty river - from Upper to Lower Egypt, confusing terms for first time visitors, since Upper Egypt is south of Lower Egypt. However, the Nile is higher in the south and so flows north. Hence the Aswan Dam, which is a famous feat of engineering - we toured it briefly and learned the startling fact that if the dam were breached, all of habited Egypt would be underwater within four hours. Rather alarming, especially on returning to the boat. I mean, I had no idea the country I was touring could be utterly sunk by one well-placed bomb.
But cruising the Nile is so nice, seeing the riverbanks and crops and oxen and carts and villages with the mosques that glow with green lights at night. Egypt is extremely dry (no rain to speak of) so the river is the water in the area - there really is no other. The banks to either side for about three miles are unbelievably green and then you hit a pretty stark demarcation line and suddenly it's sand dunes and nothing but golden desert. It's fascinating, and stunning.
The Unfinished Obelisk is a fairly underwhelming, pointless site every tour visits. It's the biggest obelisk ever cut - except it was too large so it cracked immediately, and they just left there in the quarry. It's mildly interesting to see a two-thousand year old mistake, but due to the heat and the other nearby sites that are better, if you ever get the chance to skip it, do.
The Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut I mentioned in my last post - you've seen pictures of this, I'm sure, and wondered if it was real. It's been heavily restored - which is one of the reasons it looks so good - but much of it is original. The paint left on this temple was really impressive; you could really see the "dark blue sky with yellow stars" motif that is everywhere in Egypt. The main building accomplishment of the female pharaoh was impressive and lovely and unusual, I will say that much.
Valley of the Kings Also on the dry and hot West Bank of Luxor, the Valley is famous for housing, among some 60 other tombs, the one belonging to King Tut - which was found intact recently, incidentally, because he was such a young do-nothing king. The grave robbers had history to tell them which Kings were buried over there, so they looked until they found the ones they knew of. But Tut was Pharaoh so young and for so few years, he didn't really build anything of note or be famous in any way, so no one knew he existed and didn't search for his tomb. His immense treasure, by the way, was probably one of the smaller, less impressive ones of that time. It'd be like us finding a biography of Millard Fillmore and thinking it an indication of how great American Presidents are.
The tombs in the Valley - typically, you visit between two and six, we did three - are all similar, tunneled back into the mountain (naturally pyramid-shaped, a boon because it supposedly pointed you to heaven but wouldn't advertise the location of your remains and treasure to the grave robbers....it didn't work but it was a sound idea) and very lavishly painted. They are in various states of preservation, but the first one we went into was still very richly decorated, with colors more vibrant than I expected. It was actually breath-taking - I gasped when I saw it. Unfortunately, this was the hottest part of the trip (the tombs and Hatshepsut's Temple) and the tombs, once you went in deep enough, were so stiflingly hot, it made one almost insensible.
Well, there's more to say, but time is passing, and it's already December, and I've got to move on with my life and this blog. That was Egypt. I highly recommend it.
No comments:
Post a Comment