Temple Town

Everything I know about the ancient Egyptians is contained in the sentence you just read.

No, really. I know they drew "hieroglyphics" on "papyrus", and built "pyramids" that stored "mummies", and that their gods had the heads of local wildlife. And according to the Bible, at some point the Egyptians enslaved the Jews... and some Egyptians today would probably like to enslave them again.

Fortunately, I am shameless and vengeful enough to have stolen a Lonely Planet Egypt guidebook from a fellow traveler in Luxor, which I lifted out of his bag while he was taking a piss. (He had the gall to wake me up the previous night to inform me that I was snoring too loudly.)

Luxor was established as the capital of Egypt by the Pharaohs of the New Kingdom (1550 BC- 332 BC), during ancient Egypt's pinnacle of power. With the exception of the Pyramids, every ruin of note today was built during this period.

Just to give you a little idea of the longevity of the Old Time Egyptian civilization: a legendary Pharaoh named Narmer first united the two rival kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt in 3100 BC. The first 6 dynasties were known as the Old Kingdom, during which the Pyramids at Giza were built. After a short warring period between rival powers, there was a Middle Kingdom (2055-1650), followed by another intermediate period in which Egypt was conquered by a Semetic people called the Hyksos.

After a century, Ahmose chased the Hyksos from the Nile, and established the New Kingdom, which finally fell 1200 years later to a succession of foreign powers, including the Persians, Alexander the Great, (his general Ptolemy became Pharaoh after Alexander's death, whose descendant was the Cleopatra), and the Roman Empire. Every single one of these conquerers became Egyptianized, adopting the local gods, dress, and culture... with one exception: the Romans. When Christianity became the state religion of the Empire, the Romans "converted" pagan temples and practices across their dominion, and Pharaonic Egypt finally ground to a halt.

Lies. Arab lies.

Luxor, or Al-Uqsur in Arabic, means "Place of Palaces". It should really be called "Place of Tourist Shops", filled with the usual kitschy treasure trove of Pharaonic whatzits and thingamabobs. Pyramids! Pharaoh heads! Sphinxes! King Tut's death mask in shrink wrap! And creepy little pot-bellied idols with huge, erect penises, which the Lonely Planet urges you to take home and nail to the wall as coat hangers...

"Alabaster Factories". They carve alabaster from the local mountains into little busts and figurines to sell to whitey. There are dozens of them, each named after a pharaoh or god/goddess. Tutenkhamen Alabaster Factory. Ramses Alabaster. Horus Alabaster. Hathor Alabaster. Amun-Ra Alabaster. There's even an "Opera Aida Alabaster Factory".

Not to mention the "Babyrus Factories" a little further up the street. (Clue: Egyptians cannot pronounce "P", and the closest Arabic consonant is "B".)

And now, are you ready for some ruins? Pharaonic overload!

In 1798, the Ottomans ruled Egypt. Then came Napoleon. He faced off against the Turks at the Pyramids, and pointing at them, he declared to his soldiers: "Men, forty centuries of history look down upon you!" The French annihilated the Ottomans in under an hour- though, to be fair, it was gunpowder against swords.

Napoleon ruled for three years before another great man, Horatio Nelson (and the British fleet), chased him out. But in that time, his administration introduced new crops, a new measuring system, reformed the government and legal system (the latter of which still runs according to the French system of law), built public works, compiled a 24-volume encyclopedia of Egyptian history, culture, and ecology, and carried one of the Obelisks at Luxor Temple back to what is now Concorde Square in Paris- the twin of which is pictured above.

Can you believe that this guy was French?

Medinat Habu, or the Funerary Temple of Ramses III, one of the last warrior-kings, built at the zenith of ancient Egypt's power. Probably my favorite of all the sites.

The inner courtyard. I managed to beat the morning rush by getting to Medinat Habu at 9am in the morning, so I had the place to myself. First and last time.

Awww...
...wweee...
...soooooome.

Apparently, somewhere on one of these walls, there was a huge carven depiction of the scribes of Ramses III counting out the enemy dead from one of his battles by sorting their ears and genitals into baskets. I only learned about this after I left, so, as the Bible says: "Too bad, motherfucker!"

Most of the pictures I have of Ramses III's temple carvings are of him making offerings to the gods: Anubis and Osiris, gods of the dead, prominent among them.

The Temple of Hapshepsut, built into a cliff face. She married her half-brother the Pharaoh, and after his death became Pharaoh herself- one of Egypt's few female rulers. After her death, her successor, Tutmosis III, who was not her son, jealously defaced her temple.

Really, really crowded. Not quite Tenth-Circle-of-Hell-crowded... but at least Seventh. In 1997, terrorists from an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood gunned down 58 tourists here. I fantasized about doing the same.

Egyptian schoolkids. Every site was filled chock-a-block with cheeky little kids in brightly colored shawls (for the girls) and soccer jerseys of the Egyptian national team (for the dudes). Every single one of them took the opportunity to practice their English lessons on the tourists, in an exuberant chorus of "Wa-zyo-name! Wa-zyo-name!" Some found this charming and adorable. I did not.

These primary school field trips are (unless they grow up to be Egyptologists or camel guides) the only exposure an Egyptian will ever have to his Pharaonic "heritage". I use quotation marks because the average Egyptian is no more descended from Narmer and Ramses than the average Jew is descended from Moses, or the average Greek from Plato and Leonidas.

It's really frustrating to hear a greasy, gap-toothed camel driver proudly tell you he is descended from the Pharaohs, and therefore not like Saudis, Syrians, or Palestinians. First, it asserts something that plainly isn't true.

Ethnically, the original Egyptians have interbred with every conquering power, from the Macedonians to the Arabs. And as a society, Egyptians are just Arabs: a monochrome Islam, typical of most Arab Muslim societies in that it is undynamic, uninnovative, and inward-looking, fervently religious, unpenetrated by the Enlightenment, and locked in by a calcified bureaucracy and an undefinable cultural malaise.

Secondly, this braggadocio is absurd because it's so disingenuous. The Egyptians don't have the faintest cultural conception of what it means to "be Pharaonic"... nor do they want to. They're comfortably Arab by culture and Muslim by religion, and have been so for fourteen centuries. They only hold to the pharaohs, pyramids, and papyrus as a crutch to their fragile national psyche, which needs to differentiate itself from all the other Arab, Muslim peoples of the Mid East.

Being "Pharaonic" is a way of (1) associating themselves with a greatness and uniqueness that their staid, same-same-but different Arab nation doesn't have, and (2) using their "heritage" as a cash cow for the tourist economy.

Lies! Lies! Damned Arab lies!

The usual tourist chicanery.

This is on shortcut trail that leads up from the Temple of Hapshepsut into the surrounding heights, runs above and behind the Temple along a ridge of bone-bare hills, then drops down into the midst of the Valley of the Kings a short kilometer away. As you can probably deduce, I climbed it. 35 degree heat. No water. Too expensive at $2 a bottle.

Why hike a mountain ridge in the desert? (1) I'm a masochist, (2) the cabs were asking $10 to drive the 4 km from Hapshepsut to the Valley of the Kings, and (3) I wanted to take photos.

So all in all, I got some great pictures, whipped myself a little closer to being in shape, and prevented some greedy cabbie from feeding his kids. Great day.

The Valley of the Kings.

During the Old Kingdom, the kings were buried under piles of bricks that- as you can tell from the great pyramids- just kept getting bigger and taller. There was then still enough space along the banks of the Nile to build gargantuan tombs. But by the time the New Kingdom had come about thousands of years later, Pharaohs found it more economical to hollow tombs out into the hills inland of the river. The Valleys of the Kings, Queens, and Nobles at Luxor are the result- built on the West Bank of the Nile, as the sun setting in the west was symbolic of Ra, the Sun god, descending nightly into the underworld domain of Osiris, shepherding the souls that would be reborn at the following dawn.

The tomb of Tutmosis III, desecrater of Hapshepsut's temple, but worthy in his own right as the Pharaonic Napoleon... one of the New Kingdom's great conquerer-kings. His tomb was interesting for two reasons.

1) Tutmosis went to a lot of effort to design his tomb to waylay grave-robbers. While most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings are laid out in a standard format of descending chambers and corridors that finally led to a funerary chamber with the sarcophagus and organ-jars, Tutmosis' was rife with right-angles, dead ends, and steep, narrow drops. In addition, it was probably the most inaccessible of all the tombs, isolated and buried atop a steep cliff that can today only be climbed because of a modern metal stairway bolted into the rock-face.

2) No carvings. The hieroglyphics were simplistic stick-figures that looked like they were drawn on with Magic Marker. Compare this to the elaborate, lavish carvings of Ramses at Medinat Habu. Tutmosis was of the 18th Dynasty, and Ramses III of the 20th... great difference a couple of hundred years makes...

But Tutmosis' tomb was apparently the first appearance of the pictographs from a number of important funerary texts: the Book of the Dead, the Book of Caverns, the Book of Gates, the Litany of Ra, the Books of Days and Nights, and a host of other tomes with equally enigmatic and sorcerous names.

Apparently: the night of the underworld is divided into hourly "gates" at which demigods await to assail the souls of the dead. Guided by Ra, these souls must know the rites and passwords to pass the trials of the guardian at each gate, so that they might be emerge into the afterlife. This knowledge is contained in the various "Books"... which is why they were prominently carved into the walls of every tomb.

Tawosret (another female Pharaoh)'s tomb wasn't desecrated by her successor. Instead, Pharaoh Sethnakht simply took it for himself. Above is a bizarre carving of Ra as a winged, ram-headed creature bursting from the darkness of the underworld.

Sarcophagus. No photography was allowed in any of the tombs, so I only took about twenty pictures.

The Colossi of Memnon. The Greeks named them, saying that the big guy is Memnon, a king slain by Achilles in the Trojan War.

Why the "Colossi" of Memnon? Because there's two of them. The other is undergoing a facelift.

The Temples of Karnak, one of the great "composite" temples of Luxor- built not by a single Pharaoh or even a single dynasty, or dedicated to a single god, but to a whole pantheon of gods, constantly elaborated upon for almost 2000 years by a host of dynasties from 1965 BC during the Middle Kingdom past the fall of the last native Egyptian dynasty in ~300 BC. Alexander the Great's general Ptolemy added to it when he became Pharaoh, as did his Greek successors. Even the Christians added to the complex.

During Ramses III's reign, eighty thousand people worked in, around, and on the Temples of Karnak.

A gauntlet of ram-headed sphinxes guard the entrance.

I think this is Ramses II. Or is it Ramses III? Maybe it's Hohemreb, or Amunhotep III. Seti I? Seti II? Or is that Amunhotep IV? Tutmosis? Osmosis? Mitosis?

The entrance to the Great Hypostyle Hall: 134 columns, carved to resemble the stem and flower of the papyrus. Biggest fucking flowers I've ever seen.

The columns.

Here are some German tourists for scale.

Each of the figures in this picture are taller than I am.

You know what Luxor most reminded me of? Diablo II. For the uninitiated, it's an incredibly popular computer game- part of which is set in a vast desert realm of decaying ruins and underground catacombs, populated by scarabs that spout lightning bolts, humanoid vipers and panthers, and lurching mummies with the heads of jackals.

I spent hours in Karnak wandering the Great Hypostyle Hall, mentally slaying hordes of undead (read: tourists) with frost novas, fireballs, and sweeps of my flaming sword. Yes, I am almost 25.