5/13 – 5/14/15. Luxor, Egypt
I ate an early breakfast on my hotel’s rooftop terrace, looking eagerly across the Nile toward the towering red hills that sheltered the Theban Necropolis. Setting out with the guide I had arranged the night before, I crossed the river and wound through a series of farming villages until, with dramatic suddenness, two massive statues loomed from a field by the side of the road.
These were the so-called the Colossi of Memnon, enormous (over 100 tons each) and monolithic representations of the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep III. Originally guardians of the king’s massive mortuary complex, they now stand alone amid a flat plain of melted mud brick. After a great earthquake in 27 BC, a crack developed in the right-hand statue, which, when heated by the first rays of the sun, caused the stone to emit an eerie cry. This became a famous attraction for Roman tourists, who came down the Nile by the boatload to hear the miracle of “Memnon’s song.” Many of these visitors – including several members of the emperor Hadrian’s entourage – left inscriptions on the statue’s legs and feet, which are still covered with a patchwork of Greek and Latin graffiti.
Our next stop was the Medinet Habu, the massive mortuary temple of Ramses III. The layout, as in most New Kingdom temples, was a fairly straightforward series of pylons (monumental gates) and colonnaded courtyards, culminating in a shrine that once housed the image of Amun-Ra, chief of the gods and guardian of pharaohs. The scale, however, was incredible: the first pylon was more than seventy feet tall, and the columns lining the first courtyard were eight feet thick.
More impressive still was the remarkable preservation of the temple’s decoration, which depicted Ramses’ military exploits in rather lurid detail; several reliefs, for example, showed scribes counting heaps of hands and genitals cut from enemy dead. A gallery on the adjoining wall, still beautifully colored, presented the less ferocious spectacle of Ramses in the company of the Theban Triad (Amun-Ra, Mut, Khonsu) and the gods associated with death and immortality (Thoth, Horus, Anubis, etc.).
After taking dozens of pictures in the evocative half-light of the colonnades, I drove with my guide to the famous Deir al-Bahari, the mortuary temple of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Although I knew the building from guidebooks and postcards, reproductions do no justice to the drama of the temple’s site at the base of a thousand foot rose red cliff.
Ascending the flights of broad steps that connect the temple’s three terraces, I was repeatedly struck by the symmetry and visual unity of the design. Although every image of Hatshepsut herself has vanished, scratched off the walls by her resentful stepson and successor Thutmosis III, the surviving components of the temple’s artistic program were nearly as impressive as its design. As a female Pharaoh, Hatshepsut had a lot to prove. The paintings along the colonnades of her temple, accordingly, emphasized the bases of her claim to rule: her divine descent from Amun-Ra himself and the fantastic success of her trade expedition to Punt (modern Somolia). The reliefs from the so-called Punt colonnade were particularly fascinating, depicting Egyptians negotiating with the queen of Punt (depicted as a pygmy), weighing out merchandise, and returning in ships laden with cargoes of exotic spices and animals.
After a brief stop at one of the multitudinous local alabaster factories (where, guilted by a truly desperate salesman, I bought a few souvenirs at what was claimed as a vast discount), we proceeded to the highlight of the day: the fabled Valley of the Kings. Driving an empty blacktop road that emanated waves of heat, we passed beneath silent and towering limestone crags, climbing toward the summit of a pyramid-shaped mountain. A turn brought us to a vast and virtually deserted parking lot, where I bought my tickets (receiving a student discount only after convincing the teller that the University of Michigan was a real school). And then we were in the Valley itself, a long defile bounded by eroded cliffs.
Thanks to the season and heat, we had the place virtually to ourselves; I was the only tourist in each of the tombs I entered. My guide (having no wish, apparently, to spend money on tickets for himself) described the general themes of tomb decoration and went off to nap in the shade of a wooden shelter. Thus turned loose, I saw four tombs, all dating to the twentieth dynasty: Ramses III, VI, IX, and Tausert-Setnakht. Of these, that of Ramses VI (actually a double burial with his brother Ramses V) was the most impressive, largely for reasons of sheer scale. My impressions of the tombs, however, are muddled – not least because they shared the same basic design and iconography. All four were long corridors carved straight into the mountainside, broadening occasionally into rectangular treasure rooms and terminating in the relatively large chamber that held the sarcophagus. Their walls, likewise, were uniformly covered with texts from the Book of the Dead and representations of the soul’s journey through the twelve hours of night. I was particularly struck by the ceilings, many of which depicted the heavens, the image of eternity, as a field of cobalt blue gilded with ranks of protective deities. Above all, however, it is the feel of the tombs that I want to remember – the seeping heat of the corridors, the half-felt weight of a million tons of stone above, lines of reliefs fading to darkness in every direction.
The highlight of my visit, however, was not the tombs, but a portion of the Valley itself. Having convinced my guide (and the driver) to take us down a rough gravel track, and having bribed the site guard (on my guide’s advice) to let us pass, I spent twenty minutes walking in the awesome silence of the Western Valley, a seldom-visited branch of the main necropolis. All but one of the tombs here is closed to visitors, but I was more interested in the vision of red cliffs rising sheer hundreds of feet from a rubble-strewn wadi. In the hundred degree heat of mid-afternoon, it seemed a landscape beaten and tormented by the hammering might of the sun. Feeling the same weight, I admired, but did not linger.
I returned to my hotel satisfied, and arranged for another west bank tour the following day. After waiting out the worst of the afternoon heat, I made the hundred yard walk from my hotel to the gates of Luxor Temple, a beautiful and well-preserved sanctuary of Amun-Ra. The temple’s impressive first pylon, decorated with scenes of Ramses II’s victory over the Hittites at Kadesh, was approached along an avenue lined with hundreds of sphinxes. After pausing for a few pictures of this picturesque axis, I proceeded to the first courtyard, remarkable for both the excellent preservation of its colonnade and for the twelfth-century mosque built into one of its corners. Far more imposing, however, was the adjoining processional hall, the double line of massive 60-foot columns that connected the first courtyard with the second.
The inner sanctuary itself interested me particularly on account of its reuse in the third century AD as a sanctuary for the standards of a Roman legion; in one corner, the remnants of a fresco showing officials making obeisance to the emperors still clung to a wall that was already more than a millennium old when they were painted. I lingered in the temple until well after dusk, waiting until the last tourists had left, and walked again along the grand processional axis from the sphinxes to the holy of holies as floodlights sprang to life along the walls and columns.
5-14
The next day, I hired the same guide for a second crack at the Theban necropolis. At my request, we concentrated on the less-visited parts of the west bank – so successfully, in fact, that I did not see a single other tourist all morning. We began with the so-called Deir al-Madina, the village inhabited by the workers who constructed the pharaohs’ vast projects. The remnants of this complex’s streets and houses were fascinating, but the real highlights were the associated tombs.
The most important craftsmen were wealthy and socially important enough to be buried in miniature versions of the tombs they designed for their kings. Instead, however, of staid funerary texts and scenes of judgment, they decorated the walls and ceilings of their final resting places with vivid scenes from daily life. The artistic programs are correspondingly rich and varied. I visited the tombs of two chief craftsmen, and was struck both times by the remarkable color and animation of the programs – a testament to both the brilliance of their conception and to a relative lack of visitors breathing on and touching them. The reliefs of the nearby temple of Hathor, a small sanctuary constructed in the Ptolemaic period, were similarly pristine.
We next walked through the rubble of a recently demolished village, purchased and levelled by the Egyptian government to clear land for the excavation of more tombs. Skirting a line of men carrying baskets of earth, we paused to peer into a newly-uncovered chamber tomb, one of several dozen discovered in the past few years. Hundreds more became visible as pockmarks in the cliffs above as we walked towards the most important of the “Tombs of the Nobles” – the name collectively applied to the vast complex of tombs housing non-royal members of the pharaohs’ courts. I began with the famous tomb of Pashedu, grand vizier of Thuthmosis III, accurately called “our most important source for daily life in ancient Egypt.” Every surface of Pashedu’s tomb is covered with depictions of his duties as overseer of domestic and foreign policy, providing insight into activities as diverse as the counting of enemy hostages, the erection of monuments, and the arrangement of funerary feasts. The other three tombs I saw were nearly as impressive; I was particularly struck by the grapevine ceiling in the Tomb of Nakht and the beautiful hunting scene in the Tomb of Mena, which the obliging custodian allowed me (for a modest consideration) to duck under a railing and inspect up close. In general, though executed on a much smaller scale, the richness of their iconography made the noble tombs a worthy complement to their counterparts in the Valley of the Kings.
Our last stop on the west bank was the Ramesseum, the badly ruined mortuary temple of Ramses II. The most impressive component of this complex was the massive broken statue of Ramses that inspired Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” a monolith weighing well over 100 tons.
My afternoon was spent on the east bank, in the overwhelming temple complex of Karnak. The temples at Karnak, which together comprise the largest religious structure in the history of architecture, were dedicated to the Theban triad of Amun-Ra, his wife Mut, and their son Khonsu. Beginning as humble shrines in the Middle Kingdom, the temples grew with the power and wealth of their royal patrons, eventually becoming the greatest single showplace of pharaonic power at its peak.
To give some idea of the complex’s eventual scale, the first pylon is more than 140 feet tall, and the famous hypostyle hall alone is bigger than St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s combined. I spent the better part of the afternoon exploring the seemingly endless passages and courtyards, returning again and again to the ineffable majesty of the Hypostyle hall, a forest of Redwood-sized columns rising to a roof of immense stone slabs. Even the obelisk of Hatshepsut in the third court– at 250 tons, the largest ever erected –paled by comparison.
I walked the mile and a half back to my hotel along the Nile. The river – perhaps a half-mile across here – flowed with a swift but smooth current, broken only by a few clusters of local boys swimming near the shore. On the west bank, the jagged mass of the Theban hills was brilliantly illuminated by the late afternoon sun, the Deir al-Bahari just visible below the highest peak.