Valley of Kings, Egypt

...bus took us to the Valley of the Kings. This isn´t done any more, a bridge was built 7 km downstream 10 years ago and now it´s a bus ride all the way.

A bridge, what else is new? Luxor had 30 000 inhabitants when we were there in 1975, now it has 350 000. (Later in Cairo, a man told us that Luxor was a mere village; seen from Africa´s biggest city with an assumed population of 18 to 20 million [nobody knows the precise number] this ...
...guard the entrance of the Valley of the Kings, one of UNESCO´s cultural heritage sites, but they used to guard the entrance of a temple which has now disappeared. Ancient Greek travellers (tourism is an old phenomenon in Egypt!) believed the statues resembled their God of the Dawn, Memnon. At sunrise the northern statue would emit a haunting musical sound, according to the Greeks it was Memnon greeting his mother; modern prosaic people claim the ... more

Salaam, hi and hello!

When we were in Luxor in Upper Egypt 28 years ago, we crossed the Nile by ferryboat to get to the West bank (called Thebes by the ancient Greeks) from where a bus took us to the Valley of the Kings. This isn´t done any more, a bridge was built 7 km downstream 10 years ago and now it´s a bus ride all the way.

A bridge, what else is new? Luxor had 30 000 inhabitants when we were there in 1975, now it has 350 000. (Later in Cairo, a man told us that Luxor was a mere village; seen from Africa´s biggest city with an assumed population of 18 to 20 million [nobody knows the precise number] this statement can´t surprise) We passed some (real) villages, saw children on their way to school (10 years are obligatory, nearly all children do go to school according to our Egyptian guide), in the canal taking water from the Nile to the fields people did not wash their clothes, dishes and themselves any more, the many new houses and the remaining mud huts were covered with satellite dishes. Aswan with the High Dam is not far and there´s electricity in abundance. Private cars still seem to be rare in rural Egypt, we saw lots of share-a-ride taxis for the people and donkey-drawn carts for the transport of goods.

The first stop was at the two colossi of Memnon which look as if they guard the entrance of the Valley of the Kings, one of UNESCO´s cultural heritage sites, but they used to guard the entrance of a temple which has now disappeared. Ancient Greek travellers (tourism is an old phenomenon in Egypt!) believed the statues resembled their God of the Dawn, Memnon. At sunrise the northern statue would emit a haunting musical sound, according to the Greeks it was Memnon greeting his mother; modern prosaic people claim the phenomenon was produced by the early morning change in temperature. Be it as it may, after a well-meaning Roman governor repaired the statue in 2 AD the voice was never heard again.

We arrived at our destination at 9 am, too late to experience what we liked so much on our first visit, namely, the wonderful early morning air, the finest air imaginable, completely dry (it never rains in Upper Egypt)! The Brits knew that already more than a century ago, responsible for the beginning of mass tourism was Thomas Cook who, in 1869, led a small English group of travellers through Egypt; 20 years later the Cook organisation was capable of organising a visit of Egypt for 1 000 tourists simultaneously, rich people suffering from asthma and rheumatism were happy about this.

We left the bus at the bus station with a small bazaar and a restaurant which hadn´t been there the last time and changed into a taff-taff, an engine pulling some wagons up to the entrances of the tombs, completely superfluous, tourists could walk the short distance and a first class air pollutant, but what can we say, quite a lot of people have got a job there now.

Tourists don´t normally go to the Valley of the Queens nearby although there are 75 tombs (in contrast to the 64 in the Valley of the Kings), but they´re smaller and only a few are open to the public. Why are there so many tombs at all in this part of the country? The pyramids near Cairo were built much earlier, later the pharaohs discovered that some of the hills near Thebes had the shape of pyramids and decided to get buried there, the tombs could be hidden and wouldn´t be discovered and robbed (or so they thought). The whole area looks like a Swiss cheese what with all the openings scattered irregularly over the hillsides. All tombs have been discovered by chance up to now, how many there are all in all nobody knows.

The day a pharaoh was crowned work on his tomb was begun. Assuming that life in the Hereafter would be longer than in the Here indescribable effort went into the preparation for the afterlife. It took two years to dig and cut a tomb into the sandstone and decorate it; we know all this because hieroglyphic texts describe the procedure. The tombs are approximately 5m high and 3m wide, the longest is 200m long, I didn´t get an attack of claustrophobia although many visitors were inside. I´ve got photos from the drawings on the wall from our first visit, now taking photos is forbidden because the flashes are harmful to the colours, in some tombs there´s a glass panel in front of the walls. Good! The Egyptians should have introduced these measures long ago!

The drawings and reliefs on the walls show the pharaoh in question, the gods he believed in and worshipped, his family and his servants doing what they used to do in the daily life of the Here, the hieroglyphics describe his life and heroic deeds. The hieroglyphics are like the letters of the alphabet, my favourite one is a snake with a fat belly, head raised, sporting two hare-like ears (in one temple I saw mouse-like ears, maybe the craftsman was dyslexic, heehee), it represents the letter F. With advancing age I´ve noticed a dwindling interest in historical details in me, to be honest I don´t care too much which Rameses did what and when and why, I enjoy the atmosphere, see the architectural achievements as works of art and admire the craftsmanship. You can find me standing in front of a wall imagining a worker 3 500 years ago sitting on a scaffold chisel and hammer ready to 'tell' (Who? When the tombs had been finished they were sealed never to be opened again) what people imagined would happen after death. We see the gods weighing a heart, monsters - head of a crocodile, body of a lion, back of a hippo - waiting in case the heart will be found too light, decapitated figures who didn´t make it walking feet up, bleeding stumps hanging down under a line dividing this world from the underworld.

But not everything was grim in the Here as the following inscription shows : ´How beautiful is the Temple of Amun when the day passes with festivities like an intoxicated woman sitting outside in front of her room, her loose hair on her beautiful bosom.´

Sadly, tourists destroy what they come for, breathing and perspiration make the walls of the tombs damp and favour the development of algae and mildew destroying the paintings. Archaeologists have found out that before a tomb is opened in the morning humidity is 5%, late in the afternoon after thousands of tourists have passed through, it´s 74%. They demand a temporal closure and a rotating system so that the tombs can ´recover´, however, up to now this sensible idea hasn´t been realised yet. Will people abstain from visiting King Tut´s tomb, the only one ever discovered intact which contains one of the three gold sarcophagi (the others are in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo)?

The last time we crossed a hill on foot after visiting the tombs to get to the temple of Hatshepsut, one of the few female pharaohs, but this isn't permitted any more after the terrorist attack in 1997 in which 57 tourists from different countries and three Egyptians died. Now there are armed soldiers everywhere, not only near the temple, they´re everywhere in Egypt. Do tourists feel safe because of their presence? Not really, but what else can the government do? The season after 9/11 was dead and the country´s economy suffered severely, but surely they is no guarantee that terrorists won´t strike again. We went there by bus and tuff-tuff (again) and admired the terraced temple, one of ancient Egypt´s finest monuments, 3 500-year-old, partly carved into the limestone cliff, the temple itself and the surrounding hillside have a warm yellow-brown colour, wonderful against the deep blue sky. The temple has been reconstructed by Polish specialists, purists say all reconstructions are bad and should be forbidden, I´m grateful for them, though, my imagination isn´t vivid enough to built a complete virtual temple out of some fragments of columns.

Of course it's possible to travel in Egypt individually but most tourists go there in organised groups, we did so, too. Because of this I'm unable to tell you the entrance prices as everything was paid by our guide. The prices can't be high, though, nothing is really pricey in Egypt, even if tourists have to pay higher prices than Egyptians (which I find OK considering the wages we and they get).

On our way back to Luxor we visited an alabaster factory and saw the craftsmen working with the material. I´m not a great buyer of souvenirs I am, but I bought a beautiful, simple vase which I got home to Germany safely and which is now standing in the living-room reminding me of our visit to Egypt.

Shookran for reading.

 

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