Egypt, Aswan & Abu Simbel

This was the looooongest day of our trip. We had a wake-up call at 3:30 am, to depart the hotel by 4:15 for three interior flights on Nile Air and Egypt Air. Our first flight was south to Aswan. Our suitcases were sent on to the river boat. We boarded a second short flight to get us to Abu Simbel for a couple hours. We toured the twin temples of Ramses II and his wife, Nefertari. The Ramses facade with its four statues of pharaoh, each 70 ft tall, was impressive. Even more impressive is that these temples were disassembled and moved here to save them from floodwaters caused by construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s. 

Twice a year, the light shines through the entrance door and hits these statues at the back of the temple. 

The theme in the pic above was quite common, once we understood what we were seeing thanks to our Egyptologist. The cartouche (elongated ovals with hieroglyphics inside) tells us the name of the pharaoh (seen above his hands holding the offering), and he's seen presenting an offering (baked goods were a common thing, believe it or not) to a god sitting on a throne. 

If you look closely at the pic below, you can see some graffiti dated 1836. Proof there are idiots in every era!

The detail of the images was amazing, considering these temples were built in 1244 BC. I found myself saying this same phrase over and over again throughout the trip. It's X millennia old and you can still see the original paint! The pic below has a very easily seen phallic symbol. This was poor Osiris, who was chopped into pieces by the evil Set. Osiris' wife Isis put him back together. The last piece to be added was... you guessed it! He was re-membered.

In the pic below, the god on the throne is being offered flowers by the pharaoh.

Once I got home, downloaded and started reviewing my pics, I realized I had several that included fire extinguishers. 

After another puddle jumper back to Aswan, we got a tour of the old/new dams before taking a ride on a felucca. By the time we boarded our river boat for the next four days of touring, we were all ready for either happy hour or a nap.

I love the pic below. I was always struck by the starkness of the scenery along the Nile, the contrast of the green river valley with the desolate desert just beyond it.

We drifted by the Old Cataract Hotel, shown above. Built in 1899 by Thomas Cook to accommodate British travelers, it has housed a lot of famous folks over the years. Agatha Christie wrote parts of her book Death on the Nile while staying in one of the guest rooms in the 1930s.

Egypt tour, second day Giza

On our second full day in Egypt, we toured the pyramids at Giza. Constructed about 2500 yrs before the birth of Christ, they are ginormous structures containing the final resting places of pharaohs. Smaller pyramids nearby are for wives and other royals. There are also deep pits carved into the adjacent bases of the pyramids to hold boats to be used in the next life. Neither of which I realized in my ancient Egypt ignorance. But makes sense - keeping the top three wives nearby for the afterlife reunion. Plus his boats to cruise around. Beneath all of the existing sand and roads, undoubtedly some underneath modern development in this area, there must be many other burials, artifacts, etc. 

The Sphinx is about 4500 yrs old, and so they had up some scaffolding for ongoing conservation. I was amazed that some of the pyramids still had a bit of their casing stones after all this time - see the top of the one directly behind the Sphinx. Those are the smooth polished limestone blocks used on top of the building stones to "face" the pyramid by giving it a finished look and protect the primary stones underneath. 

Our view at lunch was pretty amazing. On this trip, I got to eat my fill of falafel, hummus, babaganoush and Egyptian flatbread called aish baladi. 

Egypt tour, starting with Cairo museum

Geez Louise, I just downloaded pics off my phone onto my computer to start the culling process and there were 1315 from our Egypt and Jordan trip. I haven't even thought about downloading pics from the actual camera we took along on the trip. We were gone for a total of 17 days, which seemed like the blink of an eye and yet forever. All in all, we had a fabulous time and learned so much along the way from our guides.

It took us almost 17 hours of flying time to get to Cairo, but we had a good trip on American and Royal Jordanian. And on time, too! It was pretty cool to see the menu in Arabic on the flipside of our dinner card. 

Our older daughter A, my traveling buddy on this trip, was the mascot of our tour group in Egypt. Everyone else was my age or older, so she was everyone's daughter or granddaughter for nine days. They were a really fun group, very diverse and well traveled, so we really enjoyed spending time with them to hear their stories. We stayed at the historic Mena House Hotel our first couple nights in Cairo, and the view didn't disappoint.

We kicked off our touring, led by Egyptologist extraordinaire Ahmed Abul Ella, at the Cairo Museum. 

They're in the process of building a beautifully modern and large museum to replace this one, so some of the antiquities had already been moved in anticipation of its opening later this year. I can't recall the story behind every pic I took, but I'll add commentary as my middle-aged memory allows.

We saw several folks dusting the historic statuary.

One of our favorite rooms was the one containing pieces from King Tut's grave goods. Discovered by Howard Carter in 1922, it was cool to tour Tut's tomb in the valley of the kings several days later while on our Nile River cruise. 

Above is daughter A standing in front of one of the largest of the nested burial boxes found in Tut's tomb. In the second pic, it looks like somebody wrote some symbols in black Sharpie on the gold. Believe it or not, these were found on the different pieces of the nested burial boxes because they were all put together in the tomb. So these are basically the 33 centuries old version of modern-day IKEA assembly instructions.Below are three of the four alabaster carved canopic jars that contained Tut's preserved organs.

I enjoyed seeing an original B&W photo of the Anubis statue removed from Tut's tomb, and then the actual statue in an adjacent display case. Below is a close up of the arm of a chair made for King Tut. The hieroglyphics contained inside the elongated oval is called a cartouche. These are used to denote the name/title of an Egyptian monarch. I have no idea if this is Tut's cartouche since I can't ready hieroglyphics. I just found cartouches interesting and for the rest of our time in Egypt, I was always on the lookout for them.

We obviously saw all sorts of interesting things. Here are a few that caught my attention. 

This is a statue of some old pharaoh. Notice the double hands on the top of his head, plus the eyes. It was a bit creepy. Also notice how it's housed in a box and slides out at the bottom. The story is that this statue was taken around "on tour" in Egypt so the folks could worship it. Per the ancient Egyptians, kings were divinely appointed. 

Below is a statue of rebel pharaoh Akhenaten, son of Amenhotep. Every other pharaoh adhered to the stylized statuary, but this guy wanted his to be more realistic. And strikingly androgynous. Maybe this actually reflected genetic abnormalities from all that inbreeding and this is how the king really looked?!

This is Akhenaten's desecrated royal coffin. It seems the priests were NOT happy that this guy tried to change Egyptian religion/worship while king. So once Akhenaten was safely dead, they removed all of the gold from the head piece as a sign of dishonor in the afterlife.

Below is the topmost point from a pyramid, now housed in the museum.

Lastly, this was our fearless Egyptologist who shared his vast stores of wisdom. He's standing in front of a slab of rock with hieroglyphics chiseled into it. Down near the bottom, he told us it mentions how the Israelites had been run out of Egypt. This was just the beginning of several historical Bible moments-places-things we were able to see on this trip. It really whetted my appetite to go on a Holy Lands tour sooner rather than later.