Cultural Observation 4?

As I proceeded to gawk at all of the temples and artifacts that are so old, I kept wondering how they were in such good condition. For the most part the majority of the temples, especially the large ones, such as Luxor, Edfu and Karnak were in pristine condition considering their age. Come to find out the main reason for their good condition was that they were buried in over 40ft of sand, deeper sometimes as though the temples range from 40ft to 90ft tall.

However, there were other temples like the Pyramids and the Sphinx that were not in such good of shape, even though they were buried the sand and I wondered just why this was? To my surprise it was a combination of two things, one more detrimental than the other.

The first reason for the deterioration of the monuments and temples was the exposure of the stones and paintings to the elements of the weather. Which is natural. Some of the temples were affected by flooding of the Nile, however even then, were relatively well preserved. The hieroglyphics were still carved into the rocks, the paintings were still there on the walls, and the mummies were still wrapped and preserved thousands of years after the people inside them had passed. Moreover though, it would take thousands of more years to actually destroy the temples in the manner that the 2nd reason, the human element had upon them.

The most detrimental thing to the monuments was the lack respect and knowledge applied to the ones that poked up out of the sand. At Edfu, only the top 10 or so feet of the walls of the temple rose above the sand, and instead of the preserving the carvings and paintings that were upon it, the armies that passed through the temple used the walls as target practice for the rifles, swords and arrows as well as a place for graffiti. Luckily, there was another 50ft of temple and hallways below the sand.

As for the Pyramids, the once used to be white instead of the yellowish stone that they have now. This is due to the stripping of the limestone, white in color, by the Arab Muslim invaders who conquered Egypt in 700+ A.D. and used the stone for the local mosques. I can’t say that the mosques here are not beautiful, but really, to destroy something so grand and well preserved, when there are beautiful granite rocks all around Egypt to carve from, they destroyed some of the greatest wonders in the whole world. I wonder if one day the limestone from the mosque’s will be re-used for another temple for another religion. Only time will tell.

So, I am a little bitter about the peoples that have lived on this ancient land for the past 2,000 years and their lack of respect and much less, their curiosity to learn and to preserve the wonderful things that existed on their land well before they did. Maybe it’s the Boy Scout in me, but I can for sure say that if I were to go roaming around in the Nevada desert or anywhere for instance, and I happened to stumble upon a monument, even a small one, that no one knew what it was, I would consider it a good fortune and the last thing I would do is shoot it or carve it up. Furthermore, to think, that I didn’t descend from the peoples that invented the calendar, papyrus, pie (3.14), irrigation, oh yeah and beer.

Cruising on the Nile: Luxor and Aswan (Part 2)

Nile Cruise

Now, a Nile cruise is a must if you are planning on visiting Egypt at all. Cairo is good to see, but really the real ancient Egypt exists outside of Cairo in the small cities and Bedouin camps. The people and the culture are richer there and more authentic than the crowded, smoggy, dirty limits of Cairo. Plus the weather is much warmer in the winter.

Our cruise boat was quaint but nice. Food is always buffet style like any good cruise and the boat had nice clean rooms with a nice large roof top hangout area. However, the best part of cruising the down the Nile was to sit in my chair in my stateroom with the double French doors open to the water’s edge and watch the Nile river banks drift by. Truly it was like being in a old movie, with all of its grand romance and majesty, and be on the Nile river surrounded by ancient temples and quarries, and to breath the mist of the water that gave birth to Egypt and some of the most important civilizations in the world. Looking out from the boat you never knew just exactly you might see, but whatever it was, it was amazing.

The way I suggest cruising the Nile is to start in Aswan and proceed north, or down the Nile, towards Luxor. In doing this your last site you will visit will be Karnak Temple in Luxor, and it will have you leave Egypt with much respect for the Egyptian peoples and their history.

Along the cruise, which took 2 days, we saw the Temples of Edfu, Kom Ombo, Elephant Island, and the Pyramid Rock quarries. Docking at each one, we would take a local horse carriage to the temples, which were mini adventures in themselves and begin our explorations of the temples. My favorite temple was Edfu, as we saw it during the night, and its massive stone columns that held up the roof were still perfectly intact. The roof was about 50ft up, and even though originally had beautiful hieroglyphics painted on it, they were covered in black ash from the 1000’s of years the temple was used as a hideout for Christians are they were fleeing from the Roman’s and then the Muslims. Also, you we able to go exploring the temple and we found a dark hallway that descended below the temple, but was full of water and we had to stop. Who knows just what could be further down the hallway, underneath all of that water. I thought that this temple was huge when I first saw it, however, once I saw Karnak, Edfu became dwarfed in size.

Luxor

After seeing many temples along the banks of the Nile we arrived in Luxor. The name Luxor comes from, bear with me now, the plural of the plural of the word palace in Arabic. So lots of groups of palaces here…In the city of Luxor alone is 1/3 of the ENTIRE world’s historical monuments. Egypt in its entirety holds about 40% of world monuments. Not bad for one country. Reno has to get on the ball eh?

Luxor has fantastic sites to go see and it is recommended that one spend at least two days there. In seeing the sites you must spend one day on the west bank of the Nile, which is where the Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, Queen Hepepchutes Temple and the Two Statues are. The East Bank is the Temple of Luxor and Karnak Temples are and they are big enough to explore for hours, as Karnak is 19 acres large by itself. The significance of visiting each bank of the Nile separately derives from the symbolism the Egyptians put of the rising and setting of the sun in their ideology. The east bank represents birth, life and fertility. So, the temples of worship, farming and fertility, such as Luxor and Karnak, were built here. The West Bank symbolizes death and the after life and there the Egyptians buried all of their kings, queens and nobles along with the treasure and items they would need in the afterlife.

Oddly enough though, our trip started off with the West Bank first as the sun came up, but maybe because there was better light? Anyway, we drove the Valley of King’s first which is very very cool. It lies in a desert canyon surrounded by high cliff on each side. A gravel path extends from the Nile valley up into the canyon, and it looks like the gravel is the broken stone remnants of the massive excavations that took places into and below the canyon walls. As I walked up this gravel path I couldn’t help but wonder and visualize the thousands of workers and burial parties that have walked on this same path to the tombs below. All of the Kings that we read about and study in school and all of the power and grandeur that they exuded upon this land and the later influence that it would have upon peoples from all over the world up till today. So large that tourism here in Egypt is big enough to be the one of the largest imports and sources of money to keep almost 80 million people alive and working. Thanks to the Pharaoh’s eh?

After hiking up the canyon further you come to the tombs themselves. As they were discovered throughout the past 100 years, the foreign expeditions that came to dig here, built stone faces around the temple doors to identify them as being temples. As you look around all you can see are the many stone faces that are everywhere, basically one on top of another. If totally sparks the imagination to think that just below your feet are more tombs undiscovered, and I am willing to be a lot that there will be a lot more discovered within my lifetime. As I look around, just next to Tutankhamen’s tomb, which is one of the smallest yet richest of them all, and located just underneath the entrance to another tomb, the local labor is digging into the canyon in search of another tomb. I can’t wait to see what’s inside!

In the valley here you can usually go into many of the tombs. Some of them are quite large. For instance, Ramses the 2nd’s tomb has 52 side chambers, for all of his children to be buried. Because of the mass amount of rooms in Ramses tombs, archeologists are now looking for a large tomb in the Valley of the Queens that would hold all of Ramses’s wives. He was living large! The Valley of the Kings is something everyone must see if they come to Egypt. It is not too crowded usually, and is inspiring to think if these people died and were buried in this manner, who knows just how rich their lives were!

To conclude our West Bank of the Valley visit, we went to Queen Hepepchutes temple that I have previously written about, so I encourage you to read that blog entry as well.

Cruising on the Nile: Luxor and Aswan (Part 1)

Over the Thanksgiving weekend I opted to take another AUC/ALI sponsored trip. The ALI (Arabic Language Institute) organizes trips throughout Egypt in a highly efficient manner and usually they so much fun that one doesn’t even have to try to have a good time. This was trip #3 of 5 in my traveling while abroad.

One of the better things about the ALI is that it takes into consideration that the study abroad students will have a tough time adapting to Egypt and the rigorous intensive Arabic program that it has. With the students in class for about 5 hours a day, 3 more hours for commuting to school, topped off with a good dose of homework each night, the real study abroad experience of seeing the Egyptian culture and its history is quiet limited. However, it is my opinion that students would be able to see the culture and use the language more, if they didn’t have to spend 3 hours, or more sometimes, on a bus, 6 days a week; a little counter productive I think.

The trip to Luxor and Aswan only cost me about $400 and it included, all transportation and flights to and from Cairo; which were a godsend compared to traveling on the train, along with food, entrance fees to all the sites, and the Nile cruise ship that we would be staying on.

I became very excited to go on this trip because I was finally going to see the Egypt that exists in all of the dreams everyone wanting to visit Egypt growing up. I was proud of myself for choosing to come to Egypt. I knew that I was going to see the culture that thrived along the Nile for thousands of years, whom had in their possession the technology to build and develop their society to an advanced level. More advanced than many other modern cultures and societies today.

Our first stop was to Aswan, which is towards the southern part of Egypt, about 300 miles north the Sudanese-Egyptian border. We flew from Cairo to Aswan on a wonderful and clean Egypt Air flight, that only took about 2 hours from Cairo, and as I mentioned earlier is much more convenient than the 14 hour train ride, if the train didn’t derail or worse enroute. In Aswan we were to visit the High Dam, Abu Simble, Elephant Island, the Nubian Museum and also board our cruise boat. We landed and the weather in Aswan was marvelous, it was about 83 degrees with no wind and the sun was shining. I could instantly feel warmth of the city, and being a summer person within a heartbeat my mood perked up significantly and I was ready to be a tourist, well partially; coming from Tahoe and Reno I don’t like tourists…


The High Dam is huge dam, but its design makes it less impressive than other dams that I have seen in my life, such as the Hoover, Lake Powell, and Bonneville dams. The High Dam is thick in its width, and it is tall, hence the High Dam name, but as you can see from the picture, it height is spread out over gradual steps, and the slope of the face of the dam is very shallow. I believe the reason for this is to be to give the dam the strength to withstand the massive force exerted upon it by Lake Nasser, which is now the worlds largest man made lake and extends the 300 miles or so from the High Dam into Sudan. However, the beauty of the dam comes not from it size or design, but from the importance of it existence in Egypt, and the role it played in the international political systems during the Cold War between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.

The dam’s role in Egypt was to stop the annual cyclical flooding that would destroy towns and farms that sat along the Nile River each year and killed thousands of people each time. Instead, the dam regulates the flooding and as an upside provides a constant year round supply of water that can be used to irrigate the Nile valley and provide for three agricultural growing periods each year, instead of just one before the dam was built. This constant water supply also is a contributing factor in the population explosion that Egypt has faced, as now about 60+ million people (maybe as much as 80 million) live in the Nile Valley alone.

The role the High Dam played in the international community was a turning point in the U.S.’s relationship with the Middle East, both then and now, with the Socialist Nasser regime in 1956, and more importantly the efforts to stop the communist expansion of the U.S.S.R. President Nasser of Egypt was looking to propel Egypt into the modern western world through a large variety of government subsidized programs which included developing a large agricultural base to export goods to the world through the building of the High Dam. However, Nasser did not have the funding to so and asked the U.S. for financial assistance to build the dam. The U.S. refused to give the money to Egypt as a result of Nasser nationalizing the Suez Canal. The result of this refusal gave the U.S.S.R. and opportunity to gain a footing in the Middle East as they sent money and advisors to Egypt to construct the High Dam. This allowed for a Soviet influence and arms trade to develop in the Middle East, until President Sadat kicked them out in the 80’s. After the dam was completed the U.S.S.R. built a large monument of friendship to Egypt at the site of the high dam in the shape of a lotus flower, but to me, it looks like a giant signal or temple to aliens, like in the movie Contact, and is probably more impressive looking when seen from space as communists were never known for their style. See picture below.

However, the best part of this dam was to see my first Nile crocodile! In the Lake Nasser side of the dam is where all of the old Nile crocs live, and we saw a “Big Mother!” as Steve Irwin would say, swimming along the dam waiting for something to fall in. My friend Graham and I were trying to coax our 5’1” friend Laurie to approach the water’s edge, so that we could get a better look at the croc. We were confident that we were able to pull her out of harms way quick enough to get a picture. Oh and to save her too….;)

Abu Simble

Visiting Abu Simble was a very long journey from Aswan, but is probably in the top 2 sites to see in all of Egypt after Luxor. In Abu Simble is the large temple of Ramses the 2nd. This temple and about 11 others, not including the thousands of discovered and undiscovered graves and temples of the Nubian kingdom, were to be drowned in water as Lake Nasser filled up after the completion of the High Dam. Under what I think is the largest and best example of international cooperation ever, the UN (UNESCO) and 35 countries from all over the world realized the importance of the Ramses the 2nd Temple and the 11 others in the area south of the High Dam, and a massive effort went into place to save these sites from being lost forever. However, the same effort was not put into saving the Nubian sites and temples, so they now lie at the bottom of the Lake. In the case of Abu Simble (Ramses the 2nd) UNESCO cut up the temple into thousands of pieces, each weighing anywhere from 1 to 10 tons, and piece by piece reassembled them in perfect unison about 300ft higher up the mountain they were carved into, so that they would now be located on the beach of the new Lake Nasser, instead of beneath its waters.

The magnificence of Ramses the 2nd’s temple is breathtaking. This temple is one of the largest and most detailed temples ever built by man, and the original paint, hieroglyphics and sculptures, are still in amazing condition. When visiting this temple, you walk around the mountain from behind and come the face of the temple along the waters edge, and you stop instantly in front of what lies before you. Few times in my life have I paused like this, but really this is something that gives me hope in the art and scale of creation that humans are capable of. In addition to think that this temple was cut up and put back together again. This temple was built 2500+ years ago and still looks this good. I can promise that not many of our current structures will last this long and let alone look this good!

After taking around 200 pictures of the temple, inside and out, it was time to head back to Aswan. I hope that one day, I will be able to visit this temple again, as it is well worth a second trip to Egypt, well 3rd for me ☺

Next post coming soon!