The hieroglyphs are on the wall
With the centenary of the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb approaching, Sarah Freeman fulfils a childhood dream
REDUCED to ant-like proportions in a forest of 65ft-high, hieroglyphcarved columns, our group stood a mere arm’s length from 3,500 years of history. ‘Karnak was the holy shrine of ancient Egypt,’ my guide Mohammed explained of the vast temple-within-a-temple, crowned the largest surviving religious complex in the world. ‘Some pharaohs chiselled away pictures of their predecessors in an attempt to wipe out their memory,’ Mohammed continued, pointing to a gougedout face in a sandstone wall.
Karnak is one of a rich cache of monuments that lure modern-day-pilgrims such as me to Egypt’s legendary city of Luxor, home to two-thirds of the ancient world’s antiquities. Many ornament the fertile banks of the Nile, that fabled river that courses through the country’s heart and has been the lifeblood of Egyptian civilisation for aeons. Whereas its eastern shores were reserved for the living, its west banks were where Egyptians erected their ‘cities of the dead’.
I sailed through 4,000 years of history on a five-day river cruise, from Luxor to Aswan, aboard Sanctuary Sun Boat III. The elegant cruiser is one of a small fleet, operated by Sanctuary Retreats, part of Abercrombie & Kent. These are the only boats on the Nile with private moorings. In a Bedouin-inspired lounge, aboard my new four-decked floating home, I quenched my thirst with glasses of the pharaohs’ favourite beverage (iced hibiscus tea, in case you were wondering).
Another cooling (not to mention cultured) way to escape Egypt’s stifling heat is to descend into the vividly painted royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. The final resting place of the New Kingdom pharaohs, in a remote tract of desert, famously came to the world’s attention thanks to the famed boyking of bling, Tutankhamun. Luxor’s west-bank treasures also include the limestone mortuary temple to Hatshepsut. The shining example of ancient architecture was built during the reign of Egypt’s first female pharaoh, who likely inadvertently killed herself by applying a carcinogenic skin lotion.
Over three days, our small group also saw millennia-old mummified crocodiles, a ‘nilometer’ (used for predicting the coming harvest) and a sunken Ptolemaic-roman temple. It falls to Egyptologists such as Mohammed Ezzat to try to decrypt the latter’s magnificent reliefs. He kindly shared some of encyclopedic knowledge with us, in satisfyingly bite-sized morsels.
To rest our brains and our eyes, there were long lunches in Sun Boat III’S copperclad restaurant and long dips in the pool
on the upper deck (known as Cleopatra’s Oasis). On the banks to each side, we watched water buffalo and farmers hoeing sugar cane—a sort of biblical tableau. The 19th-century voyager Amelia Edwards hit the nail on the head when she said that ‘the traveller on the Nile really sees the whole land of Egypt’.
When the Aswan Dam first opened
(it was built between the 1960s and 1970s), it caused the river to burst its banks, flooding the Greco-roman Temple of Philae.
The 40,000 pieces were rescued from the water and, like a giant jigsaw puzzle, moved and reassembled on the nearby island of Agilkia, by UNESCO. Perhaps even more remarkably, we had the palm tree-studded complex all to ourselves. The current scarcity of tourists to these cradle-of-civilisation sites means that you can revel in a sort of romantic era of travelstyle luxury. It’s a sentiment echoed by Abercrombie & Kent’s founder, Geoffrey Kent. ‘The experience for tourists in Egypt right now is welcoming and upbeat, but the chance to see the pyramids without crowds won’t last long,’ he explains. ‘We’re seeing huge demand for Egypt as the world opens up again.’ The pandemic fuelled a new-found lust for bucket-list-style travel and, even as the dust begins to settle, it seems the seed has been planted for making those dreams of safari elephant encounters or cruises to the ends of the earth a reality.
On our final day, we hopped over to a smaller vessel, a felucca, or puff-sailed, open-deck boat, scattered with cushions. Propelled forward by the breeze and current, the group drifted for an hour or so past Elephantine Island, a military stronghold
in ancient times, where British army officer Lord Kitchener grew exotic plants, and the Old Cataract Hotel, from author Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile.
The Queen of Crime’s first brush with Egypt was in Cairo, the final chapter in my own Egyptian escapade. Known as the city of 1,000 minarets, Egypt’s capital was once a cornerstone of Islamic civilisation, which is best experienced on dusk-time walking tour past Mamluk-era palaces on El-moez Street.
I stayed at Hotel Four Seasons First Residence, in a suite worthy of a pharaoh. As well as gilded furniture, the hotel has views over the Zoological and Botanical Gardens—staying there, it’s easy to forget that Cairo is one of the world’s most populous cities. Dine on shami cuisine in one of the Nile-facing private cabañas as the aroma of brick oven-baked bread wafts by. There’s also a neo-classical tea lounge, reminiscent of the country’s Napoleonic era.
Legend has it that it was a cannonball fired by one of Napoleon’s soldiers during the French campaign that severed the nose of the famed Sphinx. The best time to see the 220ftlong mythical creature is in the early morning, when it glows golden in the rising sun. Towering over a desert plateau near Cairo, the Sphinx’s pyramidical neighbours scarcely need an introduction. Overwhelming in scale, the Great Pyramid reigned as the tallest structure in the world for 4,000 years, until St Paul’s Cathedral managed to soar higher. Following the advice of our Abercrombie & Kent guide Nabil, we forwent a tour of its claustrophobic chambers and instead joined a few yawning cameleers to admire the trio from Giza’s dunes.
A 45-minute drive south of the Giza Plateau lies another ancient necropolis, Saqqara, home to an extraordinary netherworld of treasures that are still being unearthed today. There, Nabil ushered me into a mastaba or flat-roofed tomb decorated with hieroglyphics describing harpsists, feasts and the grape wine harvest. It once belonged to an Egyptian vizier, he explained, before being swallowed up by the sand and lost for generations. Flash photography is forbidden.
The year 2020 saw a flurry of new discoveries, including a series of megatombs and a new (to us at least) queen in Saqqara and an ‘Egyptian version of Pompeii’ in Luxor. And despite the fact that for centuries much of Egypt’s archaeological heritage was carried off to foreign shores, Egyptologists believe that about 70% of antiquities still remain hidden. One reason to hotfoot it to the oldest tourist destination on earth, before the crowds return.