Walk like an Egyptian
ears of trouble have kept tourists away, but now visitors are returning to Egypt. Alison Stewart takes a tour of the world’s richest treasure trove.
For seven long years, the Great Pyramids of Giza stood forsaken, the pharaohs’ tombs silent and the historic hotels abandoned after Cairo’s 2011 Arab Spring, as political turmoil and security crises drove travellers from this land of antiquities.
But it is no longer death on the Nile. As the lifegiving river streams in from the Ethiopian highlands and the Great African Lakes, so the visitors are flooding back to this crucible of civilisation whose ancient world is still a model for Western culture. To understand ourselves, we must understand Egypt.
Some return with trepidation, for Egypt is still not quite itself, but the country that holds arguably the world’s richest treasure trove is irresistible.
Our journey will take us almost the length of Egypt from Cairo to Abu Simbel near the Sudanese border, carried along the Nile and by internal flights to fabled places still inhabited by the ghosts of pharaohs.
Our Egyptologist guide and tour director, Salah Sholok, will weave a chronicle of Egypt’s ancient world, explaining the complex chronology, dynasties, symbolism, myths, and treacheries, even the hieroglyphics. Days 1 to 2: Giza Great Pyramids, Sphinx and Solar Boat Some people joining our journey are overcome by emotion as they trickle in for drinks on the terrace of historic Mena House, built as a royal hunting lodge for the Khedive Ismail and an Australian forces World War I oasis.
Rising rosy in the evening light is the last of the ancient world’s seven wonders – Giza’s Great Pyramid – that has stood for more than 4500 years. It’s a wondrous sight and the first of many, for at the start of the journey, the quantity and sophistication of Egypt’s antiquities is unimaginable.
Salah delivers ‘‘seven centuries in seven minutes’’ as we head the next day to the pyramids.
There were three kingdoms – Old, Middle and New, taking in the old-era pyramids, the classical middle era of high art and culture, and the prosperous new era of strong central government. This was when great structures like Abu Simbel, Karnak and Luxor temples, and the tombs of the Valley of the Kings and Queens were built.
The Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops), the middle pyramid, built for Khufu’s son, Khafre, and the shortest, built for Khafre’s son, Menkaure, are on a scale commensurate with these Old Kingdom pharaohs’ godlike powers. Smaller queens’ pyramids, mudbrick mustabas (tombs) for relatives and nobles surround the monoliths.
Never again would pyramids be built to this scale, though the pyramid shape remained as it represented the ascent to the sun and eternal life.
As I climb into the Great Pyramid’s innards, up countless steep rungs, bent double at times, it is best not to think too hard on the structure’s scale.
With eternity and bling in mind, the pharaohs favoured limestone – lesser limestone for the blocks, fine white Tura limestone for the casing and a pyramidium limestone or granite capstone covered with gold or gold/silver alloy.
Most of the outer limestone has been stripped but the effect would have been a suitably heavenly radiance.
The stairway to the king’s chamber bears the weight of 6.5 million tonnes or about 2.3 million blocks of limestone – enough to almost ring the Equator. It’s stuffy, despite the engineering marvel of airshafts.
We spend hours at the dramatic, sand-yellow site, with camels, ponies and carts, hawkers, hang gliders and the white-hot sky. There’s the Solar Boat Museum, whose solar boats (for the eternal journey to join Ra in the two paradises – sky and underworld) have been recently unearthed and reassembled. One is on display.
Then there’s the mysterious Sphinx, human head, lion body, face mutilated, which reclines enigmatically. Some claim it’s possibly 12,500 years old, consistent with water damage and constellation alignments. Days 3 to 4: Luxor and the Valley of the Kings It’s an early flight to the gorgeous ‘‘open-air museum’’ that is Luxor, about 650 kilometres south of Giza. This is ancient Thebes, Land of the Thrones, capital of the most powerful of kings. It possesses two-thirds of ancient antiquities.
In Luxor’s Old Winter Palace, my elegant balcony will later show an evening molten path rippling across the Nile to the Western Theban necropolis.
Luxor Museum is a small treasure with its mummies, hieroglyphs, alabaster and granite sculptures and the museum’s masterpiece – an enigmatically smiling statue of Thutmosis III, sixth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty and son-in-law to Hatshepsut, the second female pharaoh.
We visit Queen Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple the next day, but first, the fabled Valley of the Kings where royal tombs plunge into limestone crags topped with an auspicious pyramid peak.
Egypt’s Old Kingdom pharaohs favoured Giza and the delta for their tombs. The New Kingdom pharaohs, concerned about looting, chose this white-hot valley on the edge of the Sahara for their royal burial ground – 64 tombs so far have been unearthed.
The temperature is nudging 40 degrees, made bearable by the anticipation of seeing the artistic virtuosity of the tombs’ still colourful frescoed friezes and intricately carved bas-reliefs.
We enter the tombs of Rameses III, IV, VI, IX and Tutankhamun, down the long, exquisitely decorated corridors that represent the pharaohs’ journey to the underworld.
The treasures are mostly gone, though Tutankhamun’s pitiful little mummy remains. Later in the Egyptian Museum, we view his dazzlingly vast tomb and its contents, discovered intact in 1922 by British archaeologist Howard Carter. They are bound for the New Egyptian Museum nearing completion in Giza.
Tutankhamun died at 19, possibly from
gangrene, and it seems wrong to be gazing on him.
This feeling of intrusion continues when I descend into Seti I’s tomb – at a cost of an extra 1000LE (about $100). I’m glad I came. It’s a veritable underground city.
The Theban necropolis offers more treasures – the Valley of the Queens with the tomb of Nefertari, wife of Rameses II and the two Colossi of Memnon, representing Amenhotep the Magnificent, which stood before his mortuary temple.
Rameses III’s Medinet Habu mortuary temple is remarkable for its peristyle hall column details and ceiling decorations, but also for the carving of a pile of unfortunate male genitals – an unusual accounting method to show enemy deaths.
And finally the massive fallen statue of Rameses II, the most powerful pharaoh, son of Seti I, named Ozymandias by the Greeks.
Shelley wrote his sonnet, Ozymandias, in 1811, on viewing this fallen giant, ‘‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains …’’. Days 4 to 7: The Nile, Karnak and Luxor Temples We join our Nile cruise at Luxor for the four-night journey to Aswan, following the pharaohs’ procession. Our Sanctuary Sun Boat III staff are excellent. Gentle chef Hamman – once Richard Gere’s chef – teaches us how to cook several Egyptian specialties.
A late afternoon visit delivers us to the Karnak Temple complex dedicated to Amun-Ra and Mut.
Called ‘‘The Dazzling’’ for its once-gilded hieroglyphics, Karnak was, with Luxor Temple, integral to the annual, 27-day Opet regeneration festival, which celebrated the Amun-pharaoh connection. Soon, people will be able to walk the 2.6km route lined with about 1200 sphinxes.
Next evening, it’s Luxor Temple, whose gates glow in the setting sun and feature the Rameses II’s battle against the Hittites at Kadesh in Syria.
The next few days are a whirl, literally, of dervishes, belly dancers, traditional galabeyya nights, and more glorious temples including Dendera’s Hathor Temple, which has the only remaining engraving of Cleopatra and Caesarion – her son by Julius Caesar.
The Temple of Horus at Edfu is the most well preserved ancient temple, while Kom Ombo Temple is an unusual double temple with sanctuaries dedicated to the crocodile god, Sobek and Horus. Days 8 to 11: Aswan, Philae Temple, Abu Simbel, Cairo
The Nile valley stands in stark contrast to the line of Sahara that shoulders the fertile plain. Hard to imagine that lush forests and rivers once covered the western Sahara. The Valley of the Whales at Wadi al-Hitan, 150km southwest of Cairo, proves the existence of a vast ocean.
Aswan is unexpectedly beautiful, the upper reaches of the Nile above the dam splitting into channels. This is where Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile.
We visit the unfinished obelisk, which gives a lesson in the ancients’ sophisticated engineering techniques. Another Herculean engineering feat is the relocation of the Abu Simbel rock temples, one of which bears the colossal seated statues of Rameses II. Originally these temples were cut into a solid rock cliff at the second cataract but were moved for Lake Nasser.
Then we’re whisked back to Cairo, which offers up its riches along with crazy traffic. There’s the incredible Egyptian Museum to round out our antiquities binge, Islamic Cairo, Coptic Cairo, and the Khan Al-Khalili bazaar. Too soon, we must leave this vivid country. All things are possible … Who you are is limited only by who you think you are. – Traveller