It is Friday night and I would like very much to finish up the photo log of my Egyptian trip by Monday. The main reason I would like to finish up quickly, is because I am off on another trip this coming Tuesday. My Sweetie Pie and I are flying to Vancouver to see the family. When I come back I want to work almost exclusively on the Memory book of Egypt. This blogging about it has forced me to sort and research the photos in such a way that it all makes sense. On Day One of our Nile Cruise, we boarded the ship and have been to the Luxor Temple and the Karnac Temple. This morning (Day Two) we were in the hot air balloon and now we are on the West bank of the Nile to visit the Temple of Hatshepsut and the Valley of the Kings.
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Hatshepsut was a powerful female pharaoh who ruled for 20 years
Steep cliffs in a horseshoe shape provide the background to this funerary temple. |
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A series of ramps and terraces to reach the Temple. This is looking back down to the parking lot.
From here we traveled to the tombs at the Valley of Kings. We were not allowed to take pictures here. Admission tickets took us to three tombs, which is more than enough to visit in one day. Egyptian Kings, in order to stop the looting and desecration of the graves, stopped building pyramids to carve burial chambers deep in the mountains. In this location, they have found 63 royal burial sites. There is also the Valley of the Queens and the Valley of the Nobles, but we only visited 3 chambers in the Valley of the Kings. We would have had to pay extra to see the burial site of King Tut, but we declined. His chamber was that of a lesser king (not very decorated) and the treasures were actually in the Egyptian museum in Cairo, which we would be visiting on our last day.
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| Highly decorated, very colourful religious scenes, with instructions to help the king find his way to the afterlife. |
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These photos were "borrowed" from the internet, as cameras were forbidden inside the tombs. Chambers were built all along these corridors to house everything the king would need in the afterlife (from sandals to chariots). Of course, all these tombs were looted in antiquity except for the lost tomb of the boy king Tutankhamon. His tomb was found almost intact, and of course those items are found today in the Egyptian museum in Cairo. Because he was a lesser king, we can only imagine the riches that were taken from the great and wealthy kings.
At this point, we are still in Luxor. When we return to the ship, we will set sail for the first time to go to the lock at Esna. This is Day Two of our Nile Cruise. |
I was marveling at how good your pictures of the inside of the tomb was (even after you warned that you hadn't been allowed to take pictures, lol, but my dad routinely ignores those instructions so I didn't think twice about it) and then I saw you hadn't taken them. Still, thanks for sharing because it really shows how gorgeous everything is. Wow. And to think they couldn't have seen it all very well without electricity back then!
ReplyDeleteIsn't Hatshepsut's Temple the one that they had to move up from the Nile because of flooding problems? Quick check of Wikipedia... no, I was wrong. It was Abu Simbel and because of the Aswan Dam.
You know, I just remembered that I have a book about the Valley of the Kings that I read years ago. I'm going to find it and re-read it along with your blog posts this summer.
How fun that you're going on another trip and this time with your Sweetie! It'll be fun for you to see family and talk about your trip and will help you compose your memory book in your head too! Wave at Greg's boss for us, won't you? She lives in Vancouver :)
It is absolutely staggering the amount of looting and destruction that took place in these most sacred of places, first by Egyptian peasants, then by successive occupying forces after the fall of the empire and the resulting anarchy. The worst of it though was through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when treasure hunters arrived in droves to supply a never-ending and lucrative market. Museum curators turned a blind eye to how these antiquities were obtained. Pyramids and tombs were dynamited, crowbars and battering rams were used to smash and remove gold and semi precious stones, and even mummified remains were reduced to dust to get to the next chamber. It is amazing that anything survived at all from this barbaric vandalism. Even after the dust settled and laws were introduced to reduce the worst excesses, common Egyptians used the stones and broken rubble to build their own homes. Such a shame. I guess we must be thankful that the art and writings for the most part survived and that we can marvel at the sheer brilliance and talents of these craftsmen who created in the most difficult and impossible scenarios.
ReplyDeleteSorry. I just get a little carried away, having seen some of these treasures for myself. It is amazing they have survived being buried under sand, and the subsequent desecration.
I agree and I felt odd seeing Egyptian and Greek antiquities at Le Louvre last summer, wondering how I would feel if I were Greek or Egyptian and visiting the same place. However, I also think about all the treasures that the Taliban & ISIS have destroyed in Afghanistan, Syria and other places and I'm thinking that, at least for now, the ones at Le Louvre and other western museums can be preserved a little longer. So it's a toss-up. But it was absolute greed that drove people back then, I would think, more than a "let's save this by sending it to another country because otherwise it'll be looted" frame of mind. They used to crush the mummies themselves too to sell them as "medicines", which is incredible. I just saw a headline yesterday that they just discovered another 30 unmolested (I think) tombs along the banks of the Nile so just think of what is yet to be discovered!
DeleteI guess history is full of stories of lost art and treasure from every past culture. It is an atrocity what is happening in the Middle East with DASH destroying all those monuments. And you are right, having those antiquities in ANY museum is better than having lost them all.
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