Egypt’s boundless and incomparable riches
• Tourist sites are packed with objects 1,500-2,000 years older than anything on display anywhere else
In February 1991 — towards the end of the Gulf War —I found myself sitting next to the then CEO of SAA, Gert van der Veer, on a flight from London to Johannesburg. He told me he had just been in Egypt to engage with his counterpart there with a view to opening the route between Johannesburg and Cairo. During the course of our conversation, he mentioned that the war had kept tourists out of Egypt. He said he had been one of only two visitors to the Valley of the Kings.
The image was extraordinarily evocative. The idea of the world’s greatest collection of antiquities unencumbered by thousands of tourists and therefore available to be enjoyed in tranquillity visited me many times over the ensuing three decades — usually when being carried forward on a tsunami of visitors at the Sistine Chapel or the Acropolis.
Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to see many of the world’s most iconic sites out-ofseason. Egypt has eluded me, partly because my wife maintained that it was “an unsafe destination”. Sometime in the middle of 2023 she had a change of heart, so we booked our flights for a January 1 2024 departure. Then along came a new war in the Middle East. For most of the past few months, I was able to resist the not inconsiderable pressure to abandon the arrangements.
We have now all returned from a sensational week away. I would be lying if I said we could count the number of tourists with whom we shared the Valley of the Kings, but a safe estimate would be in the early hundreds, rather than thousands. In fact, almost everywhere we went we had the sites largely to ourselves.
It seems many northern hemisphere travellers book packages that include Israel and Jordan. Instead of modifying arrangements, they simply cancelled, leaving the Egyptian operators desperate and more than usually obliging.
The short answer to the question “was it worth the wait” would be a resounding “yes”. It is impossible to describe the breathtaking range of sites and experiences we enjoyed. Even if you have only a passing interest in ancient civilisations, and have seen a few temples and ruins in your time, nothing on earth can prepare you for Egypt’s boundless riches.
On any one day, you will visit sites or amble through a museum forced to remind yourself that the objects are 1,500-2,000 years older than anything you might see anywhere else in the world. At a time when the inhabitants of the British Isles were living in mud huts and painting themselves with woad the ancient Egyptians were building structures (not simply pyramids) requiring sophisticated engineering skills and decorating them in bright colours, and in intricate detail.
It’s worth setting out a timeline. At about 3500-3000 BCE the most “advanced”
civilisations were in Mesopotamia (Fertile Crescent) and along the Nile Valley. Records suggest that by about 3100 BCE a single ruler had united Upper and Lower Egypt — at which point Egypt’s dynastic period begins. The first pyramid — the so-called Step Pyramid at Sakkara — dates from 2650 BCE. The Great Pyramid of Cheops (or Khufu), which required 2.3-million perfectly cut stone blocks each weighing about 2,500kg, was completed a century later.
Cheops was buried 1,500 years before the putative time of the Trojan War and almost two millennia before the rise of the Greek city states. He predates the assassination of Julius Caesar by 2,500 years —a timespan greater than the number of years separating us from the fall of Babylon. The great structures, the art, and the tomb contents that make a visit to Egypt so fascinating, date roughly from the era of his pyramid at Giza until the destruction of the first temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE.
I planned our trip so that we would see the major sites of Cairo before travelling south to Luxor (known to the ancients as Thebes), Aswan and Abu Simbel. But I chose to keep the Egyptian Museum for our return to the capital, primarily so that by then we would have a better sense of context before attempting a museum with more than 150,000 exhibits.
I think the format worked very well: on the first day, we managed the new Cultural Museum with its exhibits dating back to the stone age and continuing onwards — via an exhibition of most of the royal mummies (38 altogether) — to colonial Egypt with ease. We then visited the Citadel of Saladin (the largest fortification in the Middle East) and the Mohammed Aly Mosque before returning to our hotel. The next day we went south of the city, first to Sakkara (site of the Step Pyramid) and Memphis, and then on to Giza and the sphinx.
The burial complexes around Sakkara include the resting places of high-ranking officials. Visitors are free to walk through the beautifully decorated interleading burial chambers, all generally well illuminated,
many with the reliefs carved into their walls still bearing ample traces of the colouring used to enhance the images. In many ways, these turned out to be more interesting than the better-known sites. Once you arrive at Giza and you’ve walked around the Great Pyramid or taken a camel ride to view the complex, you’ve done pretty much all that is possible.
OVER THE YEARS, I’VE BEEN LUCKY ENOUGH TO SEE MANY OF THE WORLD’S MOST ICONIC SITES OUTOF-SEASON
THE LUXOR TEMPLE IS AN EASY VISIT AND INCLUDES WITHIN ITS PRECINCT EVIDENCE OF EARLY CHRISTIAN WORSHIP
The next morning we took an early flight to Luxor, visiting the Temple at Karnak — one of the largest temple complexes in the world — as well as the Luxor Museum, and the Luxor temple. Karnak is evidently the second most visited site in Egypt. We shared its 100+ hectares with several boatloads of tourists who make day visits to Luxor. It was the closest we came to feeling crowded.
The Luxor Museum is very fine, its collection beautifully displayed, and with enough carvings in immaculate condition, grave goods from Tutankhamen and a couple of royal mummies to satisfy the most discerning visitor. The Luxor temple — much smaller than Karnak, is an easy visit, and includes within its precinct evidence of early Christian worship as well as a more recent mosque.
The next day provided ample time to visit the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, the Temple of Hatshepsut and the remarkably intact Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III at Habu. The following day we left by road for Aswan, stopping en route to visit Edfu, where many of the murals still reveal more than a glimpse of their original colouring.
In Aswan it is more or less mandatory to take a boat to an island between the old and new dams to see the Philae Temple, relocated to the island of Agilkia after it had been submerged by
the rising waters. The Nubian museum in the town offers some wonderful exhibits relating to the southern Nubians, some of whom became pharaohs in the 25th Dynasty.
Abu Simbel, built by Ramesses II about 200km south of Aswan and literally on the Sudanese border, would alone have justified the trip to Egypt. Fronted by four 20m high statues of the pharaoh hewn into the cliff face, it contains a series of inner rooms many still showing the brightly coloured paintwork completed almost 3,300 years ago. This entire structure, together with the smaller adjacent temple of Hathor and Nefertari, was relocated to a site 65m above the old one in the 1960s to prevent them being lost under the waters of the High Dam, the construction of which was completed in 1970.
After this, we returned to Cairo: the Egyptian Museum the next day might almost have been an anticlimax — though it still houses many extraordinary exhibits, including the golden caskets and death mask of Tutankhamen and a couple of his thrones. No doubt when the Grand Egyptian Museum opens later in 2024 (after many postponements) it will secure most of the important remaining items from the National Museum’s collection. Hopefully, its curators will make more of an effort to label and catalogue what it has on display.
Travel notes
Though I am sure that it is possible to have a perfectly successful tour in Egypt without a guide who contracts with specialists in the various centres, I wouldn’t recommend it. I did a lot of research before employing George Bassely (g.bassely@gmail.com) in Cairo to set up everything from the airport meet-and-greets to the Egyptologists who accompanied us.
He arranged air-conditioned vehicles at every stop — including Cairo, where selfdrive is really not an option. Your guides get the tickets for every site and shepherd you past the hustlers and vendors who follow tourists with the determination of carrion thieves. All of ours were graduates; most had worked on digs.
For the same reason, you may wish to stick to wellknown hotel groups. We stayed at the Kempinski in Cairo (a grand old dame in need of a bit of a facelift) and were well looked after. A comparable hotel in Cape Town would have cost us significantly more. Dining outside the hotel environment proved challenging, but also rewarding at least 50% of the time. The Movenpick at Aswan was also pretty good; the Steigenberger in Luxor less so.