Egypt December 2003

After hemming and hawing for a few years, falling into that ugly American thinking of "We'll wait for things to be more stable in the Middle East" before we visit Egypt, we finally woke up to the fact that we should just go. For a detailed account of the trip, read Nathan's father's letter. This was the first trip Nathan had taken with his parents in about a decade, and it was Dannette's first. Rather than describe the trip in detail (which would be redundant), we'll focus on the photos.

Dannette has added notes to many of the photographs, below and in the albums. For those keeping score, the photos taken with the Canon S10 were shot by Dannette and those taken with the Canon S50 were shot by Nathan.

Lower Egypt

• Saqqarah was originally one huge cemetery for the inhabitants of the ancient city of Memphis, and was in use for more than 3500 years following the city's foundation. Deceased pharoaohs and their families, administrators, generals and sacred animals were all interred there.*
• Pyramids at Giza and The Sphinx The pyramids are the sole survivor of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World. Built by
  • the father: the Great Pyramid of Khufu, the largest of the bunch;
  • the son: the Pyramid of Khafre, the second largest with a limestone capping still intact;and
  • the grandson: the Pyramid of Menkaure, the smallest of the great trio.*
• The Sphinx dates to the period of Khafre (4th Dynasty). Although it has his face, it does not represent him but rather a guardian deity of the necropolis, a god known variously as Hwron or Rwty.~
• Cairo and the Egyptian Museum More than 100,000 relics and antiquities from almost every period on ancient Egyptian history are housed in the Egyptian museum. To put that in perspective, if you spent only one minute at each exhibit it would take more than nine months to see everything.* Cairo is home to more than 16 million Egyptians, Arabs, Africans and other iinternational residents. This is the city that inspired many of the tales that make up The Thousand and One Nights.*

Luxor/Thebes

• Luxor Town What most visitors today know as Luxor is actually three seperate areas — the town of Luxor itself, the village of Karnak a couple of kilometers to the north-east, and the monuments and necropolos of ancient Thebes on the west bank of the nile. No fewer than eight of what Lonely Planet considers the 12 highlights of Pharaonic Egypt can be found in this small southern town.*
• Luxor Museum This great little museum has a small but well-chosen collection of relics from the end of the Old Kingdom through to the Mamluk period, but mostly gathered from the Theban temples and necropolis.*
• Tombs of the Nobles This complex boasts more than 500 private tombs hewn out of the Theban mountains... The scenes in their interior, illustrating everyday life 3,500 years ago, are considered masterpieces of ancient Egyptian art.^
• The Valley of the Kings Contains 21 tombs of the Theban pharoahs who reigned from the 18th to the 20th Dynasties. They are decorated with magnificent paintings illustrating the afterlife, the great magical writings of the time and the otherwordly destiny of the king.^
• Hot Ballooning over the West Bank The view over the monuments and the desert mountains is amazing. You also get a bird's-eye view of early morning village life.*
• Medinat Habu The site was one of the first places in Thebes to be closely associated with the local god Amun. It is most famous for the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III, Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III also constructed buildings here. They were later added to and altered by a succession of rulers right through to the Ptolemies.*
• Collosi of Memnon This massive pair of statues are the first monuments that most tourists see when they arrive on the West Bank. They rise about 18m from the plain. The enthroned, faceless statues have kept a lonely vigil on the changing landscape, and they are all that remain of what was once the largest complex on the West Bank.*
• Dier Al-Bahri Rising out of the desert plain, in a series od terraces, the Temple of Hatshepsut merges with the sheer limestone cliffs of the eastern face of the Theban mountain... The daughter of Tuthmosis I, Hatshepsut was married to her half-brother Tuthmosis II, whose son by his minor wife was to be his successor. As Tuthmosis III was still young when his father died, Hatshepsut was made regent. With political support of the Amun priesthood, she ruled as pharoah for 20 years. For Egypt it was a time of peace and internal growth. After her death in 1458 BC Tuthmosis III became the sole ruler.*
• Luxor Temple Built by the New Kingdom pharoah Amenhotep III, this temple sits on the site of an older temple built by Hatshepsut and was dedicated to the Theban triad if Amun, Mut and Khons. Once a year, from Amun's temple at Karnak, the images of Amun and the other gods in the triad - Amun's wife, the war goddess Mut, and their son, the moon god Khons - would journey up the Nile to the Luxor Temple for the Opet festival, during which the pharoah 'met' with Amun in order to restore his own divine powers and reinvigorate himself...*
• Karnak Trying to describe this immense monument has vexed travellers for centuries. As Amelia Edwards, the 19th-century writer and artist who journeyed up the Nile, succinctly put it: "It is a place that has been much written about and often painted; but of which no writing or art can convey more than a dwarfed and pallid impression...The scale is too vast; the effect too tremendous; the sense of one's own dumbness, and littleness, and incapacity, too complete and crushing."*

Upper Egypt

• Edfu The Temple of Horus at Edfu is the most completely preserved Egyptian temple...*
• On the Nile Cruising up (and down) the Nile on the Nile Romance.
• Kom Ombo The Temple of Kom Ombo or, more precisely, the dual Temple of Sobek and Horus, stands on a promontory bend in the Nile, where in ancient times sacred crocodiles basked in the sun on the river bank.*
• Esna, Temple of Khnum and Khonsu The Graeco-Roman Temple of Khnum (the ram-headed creator god who fashioned humankind on his potter's wheel using Nile clay) is the main attraction of Esna, a busy little farming town on the west bank of the Nile. The temple was begun by Ptolemy VI and built over the ruins of earlier temples.*
• Aswan, Phillae and the Unfinished Obelisk The temple complex of Isis on the island of Philae has been luring pilgrims for thousands of years.* Both the temple of Isis and the monument at Abu Simbel have been moved from their original locations, because Lake Nasser would have covered it, after the Aswan high dam's project's completion in the mid 20th Century.
• Abu Simbel Carved out of the mountain on the west bank of the Nile the temple, Abu Simbel was dedicated to the gods Ra-Harakhty, Amun, Pthan and, of course, the deified pharoah himself. But mostly, with its four colossal statues of Ramses II addressing the river, it was designed as a show of strength, an awesome quartered sentinel watching over any boat sailing into the pharoah's lands from the south.*

* Text taken from Lonely Planet Egypt 2002
~ Text taken from Blue Guide Egypt 1993
^ Text taken from Egypt Pocket Guide: The Valley of the Kings and the Tombs of the Nobles

Notes:

• To view the panoramas, which appear at random spots in each area, you'll need to download and install the Apple Quicktime plug-in. It's free and if you don't have it you'll be prompted to download it (and offered instructions) when you get to one of the panoramas.
• We also shot a fair bit of low-bandwidth video, but that is going to take a while to edit and post. When it's ready, we'll have a separate section ("album") for it.
• With the exception of one photo taken outdoors while waiting for the balloon in Thebes, no flash was used for any of these photos. Everything was shot with available light -- out of respect for objects.