Tomb it may concern..

If ya don’t want

your afterworldly possessions burglarized it might be a good idea not to store them in a triangle that’s almost five hundred feet tall – it’ll kind of stick out – especially if you build the things somewhere the terrain is really, really flat – like oh say, a desert. It just might attract some looters – I’m just sayin’.

The ancient Egyptians weren’t buying the old “Ya can’t take it with you” adage in any way shape or form. A couple of millennium before the Boy Scouts of America coined their slogan these guys were pegging the dial on a hitherto unmatched standard in preparedness. They went to great lengths to be sure they were well packed once they broke the constraints of the here and now. Early on they had stored all of these afterlife provisions in tombs encased inside those aforementioned pyramids. After a couple royal cycles though, it was realized that no sooner than they had rolled that big boulder over the tomb’s entrance burglars were slinking off like jackals with all the pickings meant for the hereafter. So, they moved their underground spiritual launch pad/Elysian Fields department store-like tombs into the hinterlands, buried into the base of a range of the desolately non-descript Theban Hills and known today as the Valley of the Kings. The original name of the area was The Great and Majestic Necropolis of the Millions of Years of the Pharaoh, Life, Strength, Health in The West of Thebes. I’m going to stick with Valley of the Kings.

We leave the boat extra early at 7am catching a ferry across the river. Magdi wants to get to the west bank and do some tomb viewing before the sun gets too high on the horizon. This is the desert after all; there will be no shade or respite from the sun once we get out of our shuttle van that picks us up on the other side.

The ancient Egyptians spent a lot of their time on earth preparing for their eternities off the planet. A royal burial chamber could take over seven years to construct and outfit so one of a new pharaoh’s first orders would be the start of his tomb. Since the conventional wisdom of the time figured that we would be spending a whole lot more of eternity wherever we were going after this life than we would be spending here these tombs were no holes in the wall.

The vaults are multi chambered affairs walls decorated with colorful depictions of the journey into the spirit world illustrated from several texts including the Book of the Dead. Along with the decorations would be included a dizzying cache of swag made from anything expensive. Gold, Silver, fine linen, boats, chariots, furniture, nesting sarcophagi – add it up and ya literally got a king’s ransom and then some. This booty was kept safely nestled hundreds of feet through stone into the mountains, angling down over ninety feet below the surface. The Egyptians didn’t do anything half asp.

Don’t even get me started on the whole mummification thing. Secret herbs and spices, miles of linen wrappings, some straw, some mud, internal organs removed and placed in jars – except for the heart of course – that has to be left in the chest cavity so it can be weighed by Osiris during the final jeopardy portion of the eternal judgment show. A whole studio audience of Egyptian deities sitting on pins and needles waiting to see if the heart is indeed lighter than a feather; as everyone knows, the only scientifically accurate measure of a decedent’s virtue.

We go into a couple of the tombs. Magdi gives us the lowdown on them before we go in. Guides are no longer allowed to give talks inside the tombs – it slows the turnover of viewers down to a crawl and the keepers of the crypts feel the less time folks spend inside the better for their preservation. On average around five to nine thousand souls visit the Valley of the Kings daily. There are 18 tombs capable of being opened to the public. Three are opened daily on a rotation basis. No pictures whatsoever are allowed in the tombs – violators can face a five hundred Egyptian pound fine – about a hundred bucks. So when I got caught taking pictures inside Ramses IV tomb I thought my nightmare of incarceration in a country where I don’t speak the language was about to come true. Fortunately for me I was able to assuage the security guards temper by offering to “tip” him fifty pounds as a token of my esteem for a job well done. I also erased the pics I took from my camera – except for the ones I must have accidently missed and are posted here.

The Amazing Karnak

We cue up
to pass through a drawbridge immediately preceding the lock at Esna. Two cruise ships can fit into the thing at a time and it seems some other boat has cut in front of us and our captain is laying pretty hard on the air horns. This is what wakes me. I think his protestations it would carry a bit more weight though, if they didn’t sound like the eight opening notes of that drunken wedding reception standard The Chicken Dance. Then again, what is more intimidating than Aunt Amy strutting around bouncing and flapping her wings in some puffy sleeved chartreuse bridesmaid dress? Compared to the driving on the streets though – the river traffic is sedate and this little outburst is the first sign of hackles being hoisted, in fact I have noted the ships taking turns leading down the river like considerate bicyclist trading drafts.

As exciting as a an altercation between two 200 foot boats may sound it is really rather boring, sort of like a sumo wrestling match where the combatants are required to strap fifty pound bags of onions to each of their ankles along with the stipulation that they are not allowed to touch each other – there’s a lot of grunting but nothing happens very quickly. So, I head below deck for breakfast. When I come back up almost an hour or so later I see that we are through the bridge and heading into the locks and we are now ahead of the other boat so victory is ours! Once we’ve cleared through the gates we are headed to our last stop Luxor.

Luxor was the capital city of the Egyptian empire from 1500BC until 300BC. Alexander the Great called the city Thebes. There are two big temple sites in the city and Magdi loads us into a shuttle van to head to the first one, Karnak a name made familiar to me by a fortune telling character played by Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show.

Karnak Temple is the largest temple in Egypt – in fact it is more of a conglomeration of many temples on a sixty acre site – kind of an Egyptian god’s one stop big box shop. The principle deity here is Ra, the grand Pooh-Bah of the old and middle dynasties. Once again I am blown away at the scale of the architecture – these Egyptian cats thought big. One attribute of these temples that I haven’t mentioned yet is their color. All the hieroglyphics, columns and walls were brightly colored in – they were not the tan sandstone that we, for the majority, see today but a mix of vibrant shades. Amazingly enough, some of the coloring is still visible – three thousand years old and the pigments survive – Sherwin Williams should be so lucky.

There is a double row of sphinxes leading into the temple where we pass through a hall of columns, 134 massive stone structures arranged in sixteen rows ranging from thirty to over sixty feet tall and up to nine feet in diameter. The site boasts some pretty huge statues too over thirty feet tall and one big ass obelisk over sixty feet tall and weighing sixty thousand pounds approximately the height of three telephone poles stacked on top of each other end to end and the weight of twenty automobiles. All the sandstone to build this place came from quarries over a hundred miles away south on the Nile. How did they erect these things!?

Magdi squats down on the ground and draws a diagram of the most commonly accepted method for lifting these massive stone monoliths involving ramps and sand pits. After our guided tour portion of the visit we are cut loose to wander around the site for an hour or so and then we head back to the boat for lunch before we visit our last temple of the tour, the Luxor temple, that afternoon.

Magdi explains a cartouche

Work like an Egyptian

The ancient

Egyptian calendar was divided into three seasons - planting, harvest and flood. The yearly flood of the Nile sent everyone inland to higher ground. This same flood provided the nutrient rich silt and water which created the fertile conditions for the farms along the river once the water receded.

Each of these three seasons lasted four months and each of these months consisted of three weeks with ten days for a grand total of 360 days. After awhile the ancient Egyptians (the Egyptians of the time – not really old Egyptians, we saw some really old Egyptians while we were there – but you couldn’t call them ancient unless of course you’re talking about a mummy – I guess THEY really would be ancient - but I digress.)

Anyway, the Egyptians who lived over two thousand years ago and used this particular calendar realized after awhile that they were five days off so they added them at the end of the year. These five days, according to our guide Magdi, were amazingly enough known as the five missing days – later of course leap year was included, I don’t know what it was called back then. The work week consisted of eight days with two off.

Magdi explains this to us at Edfu temple, the most intact temple in Egypt. Edfu means land of the warrior and this temple too is dedicated to the falcon headed god of protection Horus, this time without subletting to any other gods. I am again astounded at the scale of the architecture and even though some of these structures took hundreds of years to complete the physical effort is mindboggling. The twin towers of Edfu temple are over one hundred and ten feet tall made from solid blocks of sandstone the size of refrigerators.

Contrary to conventional supposition, the building and furnishing of these shrines was not undertaken by slaves at the crack of a whip. No, these temples served as the nucleus of a pretty ingenious public works project based on the three Egyptian seasons.

During the planting and harvesting seasons the population was expected to bring offerings to the temples. Foodstuffs, beer, wine, honey the usual things one figures would appease a god with the head of a crocodile, jackal, or ibis. These offerings were used to pay and sustain the priests who ran the temples, numbering in the thousands in some of the bigger joints like Karnak in Luxor. What was left over, which still amounted to quite a lot, was placed in storehouses near the site.

Come the flood season, when all the fields were under the Nile and the populace had moved inland where they could roam the streets being bored and getting up to generally no good like a bunch of students let loose on four month spring break, this is when the work such as temple building, statue carving, obelisk cutting etc. was performed. Seems thousands of years ago the powers that be realized that an idle population is not a happy one, and an unhappy population never bodes well for the powers that be.

So, while the farmers and their families waited for the Nile to return to her banks they were gainfully employed in the arts of building, carving, painting, sculpting and the like. How did they get paid for all this hard work? From the storehouses at the temples! Pretty slick huh? And, since a temple could endlessly be added on to, and the bigger the temple the more offerings it could garner the work was steady.

I thought we were supposed to learn from our history, it seems that quite a few good lessons have fallen by the wayside – doesn’t it?

Kom Ombo Temple or "Just one more thing..."

Our boat

leaves moorage in Aswan and we motor with the current up the Nile toward the city and temple of Kom Ombo. This temple, relatively speaking is newer in that it is only 2,300 years old sans a few home improvement type additions added by a couple Roman emperors.

We travel with the current passing scenery reminiscent of the illustrations in catechism texts of my stint at St. Gabriel’s parochial school. Cattle herders, mostly boys wearing the traditional Egyptian galabia, a long flowing ankle length shirt – tend to their cows. Fisherman row small color faded boats back and forth near the shore, one manning the oars another beating the water with long poles, chasing their catch of Nile perch and catfish into nets.

At the banks of the river date palms and other greenery hold the desert at bay with varying success, sometimes only a couple yards sometimes nearly as far as one can see, but always eventually the sand and heat wins. Here and there floating pump stations the size of two car garages aid and abet the greenery while some farmers employ smaller and louder diesel engines coughing black smoke into the air, everybody along its banks wants a piece of the Nile.

Our MS (motor ship) Sherry Boat docks in the town of Kom Ombo and our group walks the ten minutes to the temple. Kom Ombo temple is considered Greco-Roman as it was built during the time of the Greek occupation of Egypt by Alexander the Great. The temple took 400 years to complete and was finished in 80BC. The unique detail about this particular temple is that it was built to worship two of the over one thousand Egyptian deities. Generally temples were built in honor of a single god. In this case though, the duo is Horus – the falcon headed god of divine protection and Sobek the crocodile god of evil (pronounced eeeeeeevil by our tour guide Magdi.)

It was hoped that by erecting a temple in the honor of the crocodile god that the actual crocodiles which used to bask in this area of the Nile would refrain from snacking on the locals. Of course a town could be considered suspect if they had a temple to the god of evil so it was decided to split the thing with a much more reputable god Horus.

The country was under the occupation of the Greeks at the time of the temple’s groundbreaking Alexander the Great and after him the Ptolemys understood that in order to get the populace to submit to foreign rule they had to show respect for the local culture and customs. Rather than erecting temples to the Greek gods, these guys depicted themselves in the style of the established Egyptian divinities, employing a “you catch more lies with honey” style of governance. This technique seems to have been lost to some more recent heads of state.