Karnak, the Magnificent
‘I am not African. I am not Asian. I am Egyptian.’ — our guide, Mona
Two sides of Egypt... the ancient:
... and the contemporary. I don’t think the word modern fits:
Luxor, Egypt, April 18 — From Aqaba, Jordan, we sailed southwest down the Gulf of Aqaba, past the southern point of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and across the Red Sea to Safaga, the port that serves the tourist meccas of Luxor, Karnak and the Valley of the Kings. Sinai is, in fact, in Asia. Hence Mona’s comment, above. Very well-educated and a guide for 27 years, she is proud to be Egyptian. Egyptians were sailing the Nile 5500 years ago... there were 31 dynasties of powerful pharaohs... the great pyramid at Giza, built 4500 years ago, is the only extant wonder of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Yet in 1970, a survey concluded that only 25% of the Egyptian population could read and write.
Thomas Cook started bringing tourists to Egypt in 1869. David’s grandparents brought his father and uncle to Egypt as part of a Grand Tour in 1926 — just a few years after the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. I inherited a tiny vial of Saharan sand with a very tattered Egyptian flag attached to the neck, a souvenir from that trip.
Egypt was under British rule from 1882 until 1952, when the military overthrew King Farouk. Since then a series of mostly military men have been president: Naguib, Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak, Morsi (a U.S.-educated member of the very scary Muslim Brotherhood, he was deposed after 1 year in office), and the current leader, Field Marshall Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. But back to ancient history...
Luxor, once known as Thebes, was the first capital, and the entire city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We didn’t go into Luxor proper, but hit the road out to the temple of Karnak. From the port of Safaga, we entered the desert. The mountains get their color from copper and iron oxide.
I could have cropped this photo, but what’s the point?
There are vast expanses of sand everywhere, including leading up to this roadside mall. There are also mosques of varying sizes everywhere, all along the roads and highways in Egypt. I imagine it’s to accommodate male drivers who are on the road when it’s one of the five times a day the men are required to go to a mosque to pray. The women are not expected to go to a mosque, they pray at home. That way they won’t neglect the children, or the cleaning, or the cooking or their cottage industry work. Should they decide to attend a mosque, they have their own separate prayer hall.
But I digress... We rode for miles and miles through towns along an irrigation ditch...
The first thing we had to get used to in Egypt was the police presence. As in, we were escorted by ‘tourism security’ guards on every tour. Our caravan of buses was led and followed by police cars with sirens — and men with weapons. We got used to it.
Following the uprising in Tunisia the year before, Egypt had a revolution in 2011 (when they kicked out President Morsi) that made tourists afraid to come. The ‘Arab Spring’ crippled the tourism industry, upon which the country had depended for years.
Starting last year, tourists started to come back, and the government wants them to feel safe. I have blurred faces for their safety. Truly. I will explain in a later post, about Sinai. Several times the sharpshooters facing out the back of the blue truck smiled and waved at us if we passed them. Sometimes there were men holding rifles in the elevated watchtowers at every police checkpoint — but sometimes it was just a rifle resting on the sill.
The other prevalent thing — but we are already used to it, from Asia — is litter everywhere. This street sweeper has a Sisyphean task.
Egypt is the largest Arab country, with a population of 104 million — 95 million in Egypt and 9 million abroad. Since Nasser’s time, 50+ years ago, the population has quadrupled. Some 75% are Sunni Muslims, 25% are Orthodox Christians. In case you’re considering it, the cheapest way to make your haj to Mecca is to take the ferry from Safaga across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia. By the way, haj means the pilgrimage, but it is also the title given to anyone who has made the pilgrimage. Your first haj is free... thereafter, you must pay to make one. That’s to limit the crowds. The crescents on the roof of every mosque represent the moon, since rab calendars are based on lunar cycles. By Arab reckoning, this is year 1438. The banner on this one seems to indicate that Egyptian men have a weight problem since, reading the Arabic way, an overweight man on the right becomes a thinner man on the left. Maybe Weight Watchers meets at this mosque. I could be wrong.
Egypt manufactures aluminum and is rich in metals, stones, and, despite all the gold lavished on the pharaohs, it still mines gold. It farms wheat, millet, cabbage, clover, oranges, bananas, guava and sugar cane. Industries associated with the Army account for 30-40% of the GDP. There is a strong whiff of military everywhere.
Here are wheat fields and the most prevalent form of transport... can’t figure out what they’re towing.
Harvested wheat with a sugar cane train in the background, awaiting its locomotive. A narrow-gauge train track ran for miles along this route. Note the two donkeys.
See the hieroglyphic-inspired decoration atop the pink wall? Transport, back to front: Tuk-tuk (three-wheeled vehicle; I don’t know the Egyptian word)...2 motorcycles...donkey-drawn cart loaded with something green... and on foot. As the two-man bike got closer, the man on the back raised his arm and waved at us. Children waved at us all along the way — remember, we were a caravan of a dozen or so buses with police cars in front and in back. Except this dude, below, who couldn’t care less about the fact that tourists are beginning to return to Egypt, which will inevitably help their economy.
Locals have a choice of free water from one of the gray metal dispensers at the wall, or they can purchase a bottle of water from this man. I suspect it may be dispenser water to-go.
As I mentioned, in 1970 literacy was only 25%. By 1990 it had risen to 57% and by 2018 it is 75%, though youths 15-24 years old have a 90% literacy rate. The median age is 24 (!).
Education is free — though there might be 60 or even 80 students per classroom. After high school, students with high grades can go to university for free or at a modest charge for less excellent students. But despite its well-educated population, youth unemployment is around 30%. (Overall it’s around 13%.) Trained doctors, lawyers and engineers cannot get work. It’s been suggested the country stop free education for all, and send those with poorer grades to technical schools.
More hieroglyphic-inspired wall decoration.
For umpteen miles, we drove along the two-lane road that bordered that irrigation ditch. At each intersection of this road and one of many bridges that crossed the ditch, there was a man in a galabeya (long robe) carrying a rifle — more of our tourism security. I asked who exactly these guys were: just locals who had a gun and were hired to stand on the bridge as our security. Some of the guns looked very old.
Speaking of men in galabeyas, I couldn’t get the phone up in time to shoot a young man in a dark gray galabeya carrying a young white kid down the road amidst the gun-toting guards, the traffic, the watermelon sellers. I fear the kid was being taken to market.
So, what’s with all the rebar (above) sticking out the top of all the unfinished houses? It’s so they can add an upper floor when the son marries and moves in upstairs with his bride. Windows might be installed when the family has money for them. Until then, if there’s a breeze, they get it. Also all the dust, and there is a lot of dust. Homes may be handmade with handmade mud bricks. The roofs in rural areas and small towns are often a layer of palm fronds covered with a layer of clay covered with a layer of straw. There are no mortgages in Egypt, so families complete houses as they have the money to do so.
An hotel? Apartment block? Interesting architecture.
Women in black: The more conservative Muslim women wear black all the time, with head scarves and long sleeves. Some even veil their faces. Less conservative women wear black for one year after the death of a husband or other relative. You have to look closely at the two photos below: from my seat up in the bus, I could see over the striped ‘screen’ and grabbed my camera as fast as I could. The black figures in the lower right are two women dressed all in black.
One woman left the enclosure, where more than a dozen black-clad women were seated on the ground. I am guessing that this is a permissible way for them to get together socially. There are women on the streets, usually toting children or market bags... but they are far outnumbered by men.
The Temple of Karnak
Okay. We’re done with the short subjects and we’re ready for the main feature.
This fabulous temple complex was built over 2,000 years, between 2056 BC and 100 AD to worship, among many others, Ra, the Sun god, who later ‘fused’ with Amin and became Amin-Ra. It competes with Angkor Wat for the title of largest religious monument in the world. Temples built on the east bank of the Nile were for the living. The west side of the Nile was reserved for funereal or mortuary temples — where the pharaohs are buried. Ten cathedrals would fit into the area occupied by the original complex, which might have looked like this model:
The Avenue of Sphinxes once contained 2000 statues of these ram-headed, lion-bodied animals, dedicated to Rameses II and reaching from Luxor to Karnak. Restoration of the ‘avenue’ is going on now...
I was most impressed by this area with its mammoth columns.
How to read hieroglyphics. Right to left? Or left to right? That depends: If all the figures in a line of glyphs face right, you read the line left to right. But if they all face to the left, you read the line right to left. (Don’t try with the example below!) This was also a spoken language — but there is no way to know what it sounded like. You’ll recognize the ankh below, the Egyptian key, or cross, of life. The color of this one was preserved better than others because this down-facing stone was less subject to weather.
Pharaoh Ramesses II, also called Ramesses the Great, with his tiny wife, Queen Nefertari... yes, -tari, not -titi.
More of the line of ram-headed sphinxes.
Following Karnak, we finally saw the Nile, the longest river in the world (4,135 miles). After a buffet lunch at a resort hotel, I had a photo op with the local band... and Bob Marley.
Valley of the Kings, including Tut
We arrived in mid-afternoon, in the middle of hot rocky hills at the hottest time of the day: the temperature was over 100, in the beating sun. One older woman fainted; she’s okay. One somewhat-younger man fell and broke his shoulder; he has left the ship to fly home for surgery. Don’t ask — I have lost count.
The tomb of King Tutankhamun (purloined photo above), one of 62 tombs unearthed so far, was discovered by Britain’s Howard Carter, with the financial and political support of England’s Lord Carnarvon (you know, the guy who lives in the real Downton Abbey). Carter began excavating in 1917 and finally revealed the Tut tomb in 1922. His first words upon breaking into the chamber were, ‘I see beautiful things ... Lots of gold.’ Tut’s mummy is also on display in an adjacent room of this tomb.
I would have had to buy a ticket to use my camera outside and inside the three tombs we visited, and I opted out. Except for this one showing how we were transported to the area of the major tombs.
Corruption
This is a country with 90 political parties, of which 20 are strong. Currently, it is headed by Field Marshall Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi, the sixth and incumbent president. He got 97% of the votes. Suspicious, that.
Corruption is rampant. E.g., cotton farmers could get in an extra harvest if they stopped growing the long-fiber cotton that Egypt is famous for and substituted short-fiber, which is inferior. The government passed a law last year that the farmers must grow long-fiber cotton.
To end (finally!), some miscellaneous road shots... as the light dimmed or my attention wavered, some got a bit blurry, tho’ I prefer to call them impressionistic. #
