The Quest For the Tomb of the Aga Khan

The stranger, staring with bloodshot eyes, clawed with failing strength at my collar. Black nails raked my flesh, and he pressed his mouth, rimmed with yellow teeth, to my face. His breath was stale with decay and his voice a rattling whisper, and with the fevered urgency of the doomed, he gasped his last words to my unwilling and horrified ears:

"Seek out the tomb! The tomb of the Aga Khan!"

This didn't really happen. But I did read in the Lonely Planet about a mausoleum on the other side of the Nile that contains the bones of Muhammad Shah, the 48th Aga Khan, descendant of the Prophet (Peace be upon him!), and former head of the obscure but wealthy Ismaili sect of Shi'ite Islam.

He died in 1957, and was interred in a stern-looking tomb on the rocky heights peering down on the Nile and the green riverlands of Aswan, where the old man had spent all his winters. His wife outlived him by more than four decades, passing away in 2000. Every morning until the day of her death, she climbed the hill to the sarcophagus of her husband, and there placed a red rose.

C'est l'amour, non?

This isn't what made me decide to take up the Quest for the Tomb of the Aga Khan. I just really wanted to go to a place that sounds like the "boss" dungeon of a video game.

I took the ferry across the Nile early the next morning. On the other side, a whole caravan of camel drivers bargained for my patronage, offering to deposit me at the tomb's doorstep for 20 pounds after a half hour ride through the desert.

This confused me. According to the Lying Planet's attached map, the tomb was 30m from the riverbank, 400m down the Nile from the ferry drop off. All I had to do was walk along the shore till I stubbed my toe on the front gate, right?

The camel drivers disagreed vigorously. It's too hot! There is no path! There are swamps! The police will stop you! They swore by the beard of Allah and the wounds of Christ that it would be easier to rent a camel and take a roundabout 2-3km jaunt through the desert before coming up behind the tomb.

Nubians. As it turned out, there was a shit-littered path (certainly one less traveled), there were no swamps, and there were no police. But they did tell the truth about one thing.

It was very, very, very hot.

I passed the Tombs of the Nobles along the way. But at that point I was undergoing severe Pharaonic overload and just wasn't up for more hieroglyphery/mummery. I was also rather daunted by the fence- though not half as much as I was by the admission price.

I guess this is the "swamp". Some small stretches of the shore were cultivated. Once or twice I passed tiny plots of land; long and thin, and a Nubian bent over in the dry heat checking on his crops.

The shore was a schizoid hiking trail. On one side, the crystalline Nile, with stretches of golden-tufted reeds and tall, grassy groves. Further out was a large island converted by a former British governor into a botanical garden, ringing with the shouts of visiting schoolchildren, as lateen-sailed feluccas drifted idly by.

On the other side (I literally took this shot by twisting my body from left to right 180 degrees) were the rocky wastes of the western desert.

Thar she blows! Only a little further...

But first, I had to run a gauntlet of camel-mounted Nubians- all of whom wanted to take me back to the ferry for 20 pounds, and none of whom seemed capable of understanding that I had just come from there and had no intention of returning without seeing the tomb of the Aga Khan.

So I ran the black blockade into the tomb compound. The Nubians followed with a shout, clawing at my shoulders and arms and dragging me backwards, and this was the closest I've ever come to punching someone on my travels.

As it turns out, non-Ismailis are barred from entering the compound, which the Nubians were trying to warn me about (so that I would decide to go back to the ferry... on one of their camels.)

I was pissed. Did I just trek through the burning sands- and get sunburned for the first time since I was a 7 year old snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef- to get turned away at the gate?

You know what? I think Muslims should be banned from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and all the Christian holy sites that are also open as tourist attraction to people of all faiths. You heard me. If Christians aren't allowed to enter the Dome of the Rock or the city of Mecca or the Tomb of the Aga Khan, then let's have some tit for tat.

As Kieran says: "It's Notre Dame, not Votre Dame." If I can't go into your mosque or your tomb, stay the fuck out of my church. Jesus!

I gave some serious thought to jumping the wall. Kieran and I have an old tradition of doing this: whenever we see a sign saying we shouldn't do something- pass a certain barrier, or climb a certain monument/ruin- we say: "That sign's in Italian", and then proceed to ignore its warnings. (This started on our first trip to southern Europe a few years ago, when, on the banks of some Italian coastal town, a sign warned us not to pass a metal chain- in Italian. One of us turned to the other and pronounced: "I can't read this sign. It's in Italian." Then we hopped the chain.)

I did not jump the wall this time. The sign isn't always in Italian.

All this way for nuthin'.

The sands beyond the tomb were littered with shards of red pottery. I have no idea where they came from.

Off in the distance, you can see a small line of camels convoying some sweating whiteys back to the ferry. This is the route I would have taken had I rented a camel-ride. The tourists are returning from St. Michael's Monastery, a brick-walled, Coptic monastery a few hundred meters away, long destroyed or abandoned. You can see it to the left of the stone hut in the foreground, off in the distance at the top of the black, pebbly slope.

For lack of anything better to do, I took a jaunt up to the monastery. By this point, I was about as Christianed out as I was Pharaohed out, but anything was better than having to head down that hill and tax my patience (and my wallet) by haggling over the price of a camel-ride with some slack-jawed Nubian.

Ho! The gatekeepers were slumbering. I tried to tiptoe past them, and got about as far as the door on the opposite side before the guy on the left jerked awake- and from the commotion he then made, you'd think I'd raped his mother.

Faced with the choice of (1) a dignified retreat without gaining access to the monastery, and (2) paying an exorbitant admission fee while enduring a self-righteous dressing-down by some sour-mouthed Nubian... wait, that's not much of a choice at all.

So I tried to sneak around the back and jump the wall. There, I encountered a policeman, dressed in a slouch-shouldered, ill-fitting uniform, barefoot, and groggy from the heat. He was huddling unseen in the shadows under a shack made from stones and driftwood, where a coffee pot and a kerosene lamp hung from haywire hooks. I'd thought it was an abandoned bumshack, and was halfway up the wall, when this disheveled figure barreled out of his one-man slum and scared me half to death. I took off down the road, stopping only to wave at him and take a photo.

At least I got a nice view of Aswan from the high dunes.

As I descended the slope to the camel camp, another dozen camel drivers drove their beasts out to greet me, and in a fit of disgust, I hustled away so quickly and instinctively that I plain forgot that I'd intended to ride a camel back to the ferry.

Aswan

Aswan is down the Nile from Luxor. In Pharaonic times, Aswan marked the end of Egypt Proper and the beginning of Nubia, the stretch of riverine land stretching south from Aswan along the Nile to what is today Khartoum in the Sudan.

Nubia is to Egypt what Ireland is to England- over its long history, the region, with a distinct African ethnicity and culture, has been a rival kingdom, an unequal partner, or a vassal province of Pharaonic Egypt, depending on the strength of the kings in Thebes (Luxor). Aswan is still a stronghold of the Egyptian Nubians, whose numbers were bolstered since the 1960s when several Nubian communities migrated north to Aswan from their traditional lands- which were being drowned by the building of the Aswan High Dam.

More on this in later posts. In fact, most of Egyptian Nubia now lies under Lake Nasser, the huge reservoir created by the Dam. Google "Three Gorges Dam" for a similar tale taking place in China.

Arab Egyptians look on the Nubians in the same way the English still look upon the Irish. Most Arabs in the Nubian region go to great pains to make visitors understand that they are not Nubians, who are implicitly indicated to exist a few rungs lower down on the hierarchy of races.

Lies. Lies. Lies.

Aswan contained a Nubian museum displaying artifacts from its drowned lands, and a cultural center where you could watch traditional dances and get your hands and feet encircled in henna patterns. But I made absolutely no attempt to explore Nubian culture, yielding instead to a heat-induced apathy, and spent most of my time in Aswan at the local sheesha parlor waiting for the sun to set.

In fact, the only thing I discovered of note about the Nubians is that they lie with greater ease and frequency that the Arabs. This did nothing to debunk my Racial Scale of Untrustworthiness, in which, using quantitative evidence garnered from four continents and a dozen countries, I hypothesize that the number of lies told by the average person is positively correlated with the darkness of his skin.

Nubians are just as proud as Arabs to distingush their separateness as a culture, but any assertion I heard to this effect was in the context of tourist touting. A Nubian vendor would respond to accusations of lying or cheating with: "But, sir! I am a Nubian!"- which is akin to saying; "But sir, I am a Nazi!" to a charge of anti-semetism.

This is something called "caster". It is probably the greatest thing that has happened to me since I discovered Irish punk. It's a pastry made of cream and flour, doused with a layer of sugar, and then drowned in hot milk.

A week ago, I read on the BBC that there were angry murmurs on the Egyptian street about the rising cost of bread. The cost of grain is rising worldwide, due to, among other things, rising demand resulting from ethanol-based fuels, rising global population, and folk in rising developing economies like China and India having more funds to buy bread. The average Egyptian's purchasing power is decreasing because of Egypt's stagnant economy, and there is huge pressure on the government to keep the price of bread heavily subsidized.

The result: bread line-ups that hand out pita-shaped loaves at a government-sponsored price. Every town's lower-income population will wait in line every morning, buying as much as they can, because the price is only going to rise here on out. People waddle away from the lines carrying reed trays stacked with bread balanced on their heads.

This is the Unfinished Obelisk- the largest piece of stone ever quarried by human hands. It weighs 1168 tons, and is 42m long- a mute testament to an ancient engineering genius we can only guess at. God alone know what it would have been used for- except that when three out of four sides had been cut, the masons discovered a fault running through the stone, rendering the monstrosity useless.

Elephantine Island, home to a couple of small Nubian villages, water-level measurers from pharaonic times, and... oh what? You can't see it? There's a cruise ship in the way.

You're telling me.

Every time something like this happens, I have this internal shouting match about the pros and cons of accessible, cheap, mass tourism ruining pristine natural areas with huge ecological or cultural significance. I hate having thousands of gringos ruin my romanticized musings at the Pyramids- except that I'm one of them. I hate seeing a dozen cruise ships block my view of the Nile's sapphire sheen- except that the rules that permit their presence also allow mine.

If the Valley of the Kings was allowed only to archaeologists and Aswan only to cultural anthropologists (and locals), those areas would retain their mystical solitudes, preserved solely for those for whom their existences are a vocation or a heritage. On the other hand, the vast majority of us would never have the chance to experience or learn about these wonders, however shallowly or fleetingly.

There has to be a balance between the two.

I had intended to put a hair-raising rant about the hassling that occured on Aswan waterfront involving 16 Nubians in a 400m stretch of pavement attempting to lure, cajole, plead, demand, and infuriate me into boarding their boats- or "feluccas"- for a "sunset cruise to Elephantine! I give you good price! I am Nubian! Sir! Why you walk away? Why you angry? WHY YOU ANGRY!"

But that would be flogging a long-dead horse.

This is Ferial Gardens at the end of the waterfront, the city's one concession to an unobstructed view of the Nile and its environs without having to pay for a cruise ship or board a felucca.

At the entrance, I put down a 20 pound bill to pay the 5 pound entrance fee. The Nubian at the gate surruptitiously shut a drawer containing wads of change and informed me in broken English: "No change. You give me 20 pounds now, and I give you change later."

My response involved the phrase "You shit-colored worm", and ended with me pulling the drawer of change open, changing my own money, and then walking in.

Tree.


Boat.

Boats.

The boat on the bottom right is actually two boats sailing side by side, filled with tourists. Aboard, the Nubian crews led their passengers in a rousing chorus of drum-driven Nubian music, which unlike the undulating tones of Arab "Habibi" ballads, are lively, rhythmic, major-scale African numbers, full of foot-stomping, hand-clapping, and "Ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya!" chants that drifted up raucously from the twilit waters.

Sunset.

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.