Travel, Law and Life Considered

Inside the first pylon was theGreat Courtwhich is the largest area of the Enclosure. On one corner of the Court were the three chapels that held the sacred barques (boats) of Amun, Mut, and Khonsu, used during the Opet Festival which was the main religious annual event held in the Temple. “TheKarnakTemplefollowed the basic design of other temples of ancientEgypt,” our guide said. There was a processional way that passed through a series of courts and led to the sanctuary. After the second pylon we saw a statue of that pylon’s builder Pharaoh Ramses II, in the typical pose of arms crossed at the wrist. Between his legs and on his feet stood a smaller statue of his daughter, Bent’anta. We walked to a great hall with many papyrus-shaped stone pillars. “There are 134 of them,” the guide said. This Hypostyle Hall (with a flat ceiling) symbolized a papyrus swamp, which were common along theNile. “When theNileflooded, during summer, this hall with its columns was submerged under water.” On the back of the third pylon there was a freeze of the pharaoh sailing the sacred barque during the Opet Festival that took place in theNile’s inundation season.  In other freezes scenes of “victories over enemies, Lebanese, Canaanites,” were depicted. In the court after the fourth pylon, the famous female Egyptian Pharaoh Hatshepsut had erected two obelisks in honor of Amun. Thirty meters high, these monoliths fromAswanwere the tallest obelisks at the time; and the one still standing is the tallest surviving obelisk in Egypt. Its survival is paradoxically due to the efforts of her stepson and successor pharaoh, TuthmosisIII, who wished to eradicate all signs of her reign. He “wanted to destroy her obelisk but the God said no, so he had a sandstone wall built around it and that has preserved it,” our guide said. This obelisk, nevertheless, showed signs of partial obliteration of Hatshepsut’s images. The guide showed us the other Hatshepsut obelisk that was on the ground. This obelisk had several carvings of Amun. In one a pharaoh was kneeling before him. “That is Hatshepsut in the double-crown of Pharaohs, and Amun is crowning her” our guide said. In another, Amun was depicted holding Hatshepsut who was wearing the “white crown” this time. “Note that Hatshepsut is wearing a false beard and the kilt that male pharaohs wore; she was trying to enhance her legitimacy as a king since Egyptian kings were commonly male” the guide said. She added “and note that the beard is straight which means that the person depicted here is alive, while the dead pharaohs were depicted with curled beard”. Further, past the sixth pylon we came to two huge statues of Amun and the goddess Amunet. She was an early consort of Amun who was later overshadowed by Mut, but “remained locally important inThebesas a protector of the pharaoh,” our guide said. We were now at the entrance to “the Sacred Barque Sanctuary,” the very core of the temple where the Amun resided. It has since been redecorated by the Greek Philip Arrhidaeus (323-317), Alexander the Great’s half-brother, and successor inEgypt. Behind the sanctuary was a huge “Festival Hall” with carved stone columns patterned after tent poles  and beyond that was the “Botanical Garden,” so called because its walls were covered with of reliefs of fauna and flora that the pharaohs found in Syria and Palestine. Freezes of lotus, symbolizingLower Egypt, and papyrus, symbolizingUpper Egypt, were on the walls throughout the temple. The Botanical Garden was followed by the SacredLakewhere the priests of the temple bathed daily for ritual purity. On the bank of the lake we saw a giant stone sculpture of a scarab. The dung beetle was considered sacred by ancient Egyptians as the earthly symbol of heavenly cycle. “They believed it pushed the sun through the sky in the same way it pushed a ball of dung on the ground,” our guide said. She pointed out a small crowd of tourists gathered around the stone scarab. “They go around (yutoof) it because some guides tell them this brings good luck.” That evening I joined the throng that watched an extravaganza of light and sound aboutThebesstaged in an amphitheater setting beyond theSacredLake. As entertainment it was kitsch. As a learning experience it was disappointing. Like many tourists I had come many miles toLuxor. I searched for at least a rudimentary understanding of ancientEgypt. TheKarnakTempleproved that the task would be tedious. My notes seemed pedantic. I could see no alternative, however, but to continue. Incomplete and disjointed as my observations would turn out to be, they reflected on the shreds of the past that existed before me. They opened a door even if they might fail adequately to explain the contents of the room. My studied impression of what I would see had a distinct value not available except through this on-site visit.  

Temple of Luxor

Man-faced sphinxes protected the two sides of the nearly ten- meters wide, straight road that connected the Temple of Karnak to the Temple of Luxor three kilometers away. The entrance to the Temple of Luxor was flanked by two huge standing and one seated statues of Ramses II (1279-1213 B.C.), who added this part to the temple, which was begun by AmenhotepIII(1386-1349 B.C.). An even taller obelisk  stood like a sentry to the left. The obelisk, with a design — maximum height for minimum base — calculated to catch the first ray of the rising sun was meant to dramatize the illuminating and life-giving power of the sun-god Ra. It marked this place as a temple of Amun-Ra. (The Luxor obelisk once had a pair on the right side of the entrance to the Temple. That is now standing in Place de la Concorde inParis, following a tradition that went back to the early Roman Emperors. As devotes of Mithraism, those new solar rulers of the Mediterranean moved ancient Egyptian obelisks and erected more of their own in Alexandria and Rome,  including one in theVatican’s St. Peter square.) The first court in the Temple of Luxorhad walls with reliefs depicting scenes of the pharaoh “making offerings to the gods.” As your attention was drawn to the lotus capitals of the court’s rows of double columns you noticed an incongruous structure. It was the 12^th century Mosque of Abu al-Haqqaq jutting up on the southern side. As soon became apparent, this was not the only foreign intrusion into the Temple’s ancient Egyptian architecture. Beyond a colonnade of papyrus columns, there were walls on the left side with reliefs dating from 1400 B.C., depicting in detail the procession in the Opet festival. The pharaoh was shown joined by nobles and common people. There were even acrobats  and drummers  among them. Next was a court with a flat ceiling supported by four rows of eight columns each. This lead to the core rooms of the temple. The first chamber had been the sanctuary of Amun, but the Romans had since painted it over with the images of their own leaders . On either side of it were the chapels of Mut and Khonsu. After a four column antechamber, where offerings were made, one could see the “Barque Shrine of Amun. Alexander the Great had since rebuilt this one. Reliefs on the walls portrayed him as an Egyptian pharaoh, receiving the “double crown” of unified, Upper and Lower,Egypt. The Temple of Luxor was developed as Amun’s southern ipet (harem), his private quarters. It was the abode of Amenemopet, the ithyphallic Amun of the Opet, as his image with an erect penis indicates. It served as a central focus of the Opet celebration, when the statues of Amun, Mut and Khonsu were transported here from their home in theTemple ofKarnak to be reunited with the statue of Amun of Opet, to symbolize fertility and rejuvenation.  This entailed an elaborate procession that took two to four weeks during theNile’s flooding season. The priests carried the cult images of the three gods on their shoulders along the Avenue of Sphinxes. The pharaoh was the high priest and the ceremony reaffirmed his close ties with Amun and thus enhanced his authority. My guide pointed out other evidence of the pharaohs’ efforts to associate themselves with Amun: their names. Thus, “Tutankhamun’s name which contains Amun means ‘the living image of Amun’; and his grandfather’s name Amenhotep II means ‘Amun is content’.” Names were important. The majority of the hieroglyphic inscriptions which you see in these temples are basically repetitions of the names and titles of gods and the pharaohs,” our guide said. “The loss of one’s name meant elimination from history. So the Pharaohs went to great lengths to protect their names. They wrote their names in a rectangular fortress wall known as serekh. This later evolved into the oval-shaped cartouche, which is French for cartridge.” She pointed to a rare set of statues of Tutankhamun and his child bride and said “Ramses I erased Tutankhamun’s name and replaced it with his own cartouche.” The names of those Pharaohs have long lost their aura of divinity and power. A part of their Opet ceremony, however, survives in Islamic Luxor. It is reenacted during the moulid (birthday celebration) of Abu al-Haggag, the holy man who brought Islam here eight centuries ago. A highlight of this three day festival is pulling a felucca boat through town and around the Mosque in theTemple ofLuxor.

Colossal

The Governor of Luxor sent a van to take us to the pharaohs’ Funerary Temples and Tombs on theWest Bankof theNile. The few miles we drove by the river to the bridge that crossed over from theWest Bankwere surprisingly verdant .  The driver and Mohamed, from the governor’s public relations office who accompanied him, were disciplined. Both refused our repeated attempts to tip them.  They were not tour guides. We picked up a staff of the antiquities office at the ruins of the first funerary temple we visited. He barked some disjointed references to the “Memnon” and left us soon, seemingly as frustrated as we were with our inability to communicate with each other. His exact role remained undefined. What we were seeing were the Colossi of Memnon, the two largest monolithic statues ever carved, each from a single block of stone fifty feet high and weighing nearly one thousand tons. They were so called by the ancient Greeks who mistook them as belonging to the legendary African king, Memnon, who was slain by Achilles during the Trojan War. In fact they were only part of the largest funerary temple ever built by a pharaoh. AmenhotepIII(1390-1352) who developed theLuxorTemplefor worshiping the god Amun, constructed this funerary temple as a place where he himself would be worshiped after death. Over time the adobe material used in the temple dissolved as it was flooded every year, and its stones were removed by later pharaohs for their own projects. Both of the Colossi are statues of AmenhotepIII, but figures of his wife and mother are carved in front of his throne along his legs. Excavation, which we saw was still continuing, has revealed the existence of six sets of other massive statues, and also, behind this temple, theTempleofMerenptahwho became Pharaoh in 1213 B.C. It is here that the “Israel Stele” was found. Back in the van, we were stopped by an American woman, riding her bicycle on that hot road, who asked directions to an antiquities site. Mohamed pointed to some houses on the hills across the road. In broken English, he explained that they were mostly 300 year old structures which might have to be removed eventually since they had been built on top of the Tombs of the Nobles, so as to uncover those relics of antiquities. This was a controversial project as the current residents of those homes complained that their community would thus be broken even though they were promised better housing in the new settlement several miles away. Like the biker, we continued the rest of our visit that day without a tour guide. We were now in an area so secluded that the early Christians founded a monastery here. Deir al-Bahri (the Monastery of the North) was also where Pharaoh Montuhotep II (2055-2004), had built the first funerary temple in this region. What attracts tourists today, however, is another funerary temple which it inspired: the majestic Temple of Hatshepsut, built five hundred years later. One reason for the attraction is the dramatic setting. The backdrop for the temple is the lion-colored limestone cliffs that rise about 1000 feet from the desert plain. They hug a monument partly carved from the cliffs that oddly appears contemporary today. This, however, was the work of ancient Egyptians who called it Djeser-djeseru (Most Holy of Holies). Located at the site of an old shrine to Hathor (the Goddess of Love), it directly faces theTemple ofAmun atKarnak across the Nile. The legend about the Pharaoh who built this as a funerary memorial to herself is no less dramatic. She isEgypt’s only female pharaoh, unless one counts the Macedonian Cleopatra who took the throne one thousand years later. After the death of her husband, who was also her stepbrother, Hatshepsut became the regent of his only surviving son, a minor, from another wife. In fact, however, she ruled as a Pharaoh herself for thirty years even after her stepson reached majority, now as his co-Pharaoh. This she could do because of her royal lineage, on her mother’s side, from past pharaohs. The lineage, however, is believed to be also responsible for the decision by her stepson, TuthmosisIII, to order that all references to her be wiped out after her death, so as to ensure the succession by his own descendants who did not have the same royal lineage. Hatshepsut’s names and images had been erased in this temple; as they were also in the Templeof Karnak. The Christians’ defacing of the “pagan” reliefs has caused additional damage. What remains in the Templeof Hatshepsut, however, is still impressive and informative. Some statues of her stood at the pillar of the Temple A custodian in the traditional galabeya dress who spoke no English took me to see Hatshepsut’s disfigured image, standing next to her husband Tuthmosis II in the Chapel of Anubis (the jackal-faced god who protected the dead), at the end of the north colonnade on the first floor. Other reliefs here showed Hatshepsut’s divine birth. In one Hathor was depicted as a cow with a crown of horns and sun’s disc (in her guise as the sun god’s daughter)  licking Hatshepsut’s hand [50]. In another Hatshepsut was shown drinking directly from Hathor’s udder. In yet another relief Hatshepsut was in the presence of Horus, the god of the sky, who was depicted as a man with a falcon head. On the left side of the entrance we saw reliefs of men carrying myrrh trees for incense used in temple ceremonies. The trees were from Punt, a land whose exact location is still not known. “This is a scene of celebration because people were able to bring henna fromSomaliaand make money by selling it,” a fellow tourist who said he had studied these and adjacent reliefs told us. There were more recognizable scenes in the other reliefs nearby:  a pair of obelisk was being transported, from the quarry inAswan.

Valley of the Kings

As he erased signs of Hatshepsut’s reign, Thutmosis IIIwas making sure that he would be well taken care of after his own death. His tomb down the road from his late stepmother’s funerary temple is one of the most elaborate in the Valley of the Kings. Thutmosis has remained in good company there. The tombs of 63 Pharaohs have been discovered in the Valley so far. On the day I went there, these tombs had many guests. We boarded the tuf-tuf (windowless little electric cabins) to go from the visitors’ center to the tombs which were on both sides of the Valley, a dry canyon enclosed by limestone hills. The Al-Qurn (the Horn) mountain peak dominated the area. One could visualize the sun setting behind it, making this the appropriate site associated with the afterlife in the imagination of ancient Egyptians. The other appeal of the isolated and narrow Valley was that the tombs and their valuable contents could thus be better protected, especially against the thieves. To that end, ThutmosisIII, who was among the pioneers here, chose a nearly inaccessible location for his tomb. The design of his tomb was also exemplary in attempting to thwart would be thieves. We walked on a path off the main road that cut through sharp limestone rocks, climbed a steep staircase, and crossed a deep ravine to reach the entrance to the tomb. Inside there was a long passageway with a series of angles ending in a bridge of planks, over a steep ditch, at the other end of which was the antechamber of the tomb. Behind this was the oval burial chamber. It contained a cartouche-shaped quartzite. This was ThutmosisIII’s sarcophagus. His mummy was not here; it had been moved toCairo’sEgyptianMuseum. Instead we were greeted by a custodian. He was now spending most of his life in this 150 feet deep hole. He was friendly and in good spirit. A fan was moving the otherwise stagnant air. The walls in the corridors and chambers of the tomb were decorated with scenes from the imagined underworld of the afterlife and the pharaoh’s existence in it. There were boats, musicians, and images of gods and demigods. The blue color of the ceiling in a chamber recalled the sky. These decorations depicted what was described in the ancient Egyptians’ Book of the Dead, a collection of works that included The Book of Gates, The Book of Amduat (that which is in the underworld), and The Litany of Ra. This collection was about the journey of the dead souls who accompanied the sun god on his “sacred barque” through the darkness of the night (the land of the god Osiris), with each segment of the time guarded by a separate demigod. To reach rebirth at dawn, the pharaoh had to know the demigods’ names to get past them. The decorations we saw were to provide the pharaoh with visual help toward such knowledge. The pharaoh’s tombs were also stocked with food, drinks, provisions, and treasures which they would need in the underworld. None of that was left in Thutmosis III’s tomb or the tombs of two other pharaohs I visited in the Valley of the King, Ramses IIIand Ramses IX. The explanation for this was provided as early as the eleventh century by Nasir Khusraw, the Persian traveler from Marv, Central Asia, in his book Safarnameb (The Book of Travels), who among other places inEgypt visited Qus, nearLuxor, in 1050:

“The Sultan had a servant  … who was the commander of the mutalebiyan and was very rich and wealthy. Mutalebiyan are those who search for treasures and buried treasures in the holes of Egypt. People come from the Maqreb (Islamic countries west of Egypt), and the lands of Syria and Egypt and everyone toils in those holes and rubble of Egypt and spend fortunes. And there were many who found treasures and buried treasures, and many who incurred great expenses and did not find anything. For they say that in these locations the pharaoh’s wealth are buried. And if one finds something there, he must pay one-fifth to the Sultan and the rest will be his.”

The fabled treasures of Tutankhamun were found in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings in the twentieth century, but they have been taken to Cairo’s Egyptian Museum. His mummy was left in its coffin in situ, but Tutankhamun’s tomb is not remarkable otherwise, our guide assured us. We could not see for ourselves as that day Tutankhamun’s tomb was among those “being serviced for maintenance” based on a rotating program. Instead we went to see the house of the famous archeologist who discovered Tutankhamun’s treasures in 1922. It was a few miles away. In the middle of barren land a pleasant garden hosted a domed one-story adobe . Howard Carter lived here. He spent six years searching and digging for the tomb of Tutankhamun. The man who financed his work, Lord Carnarvon , almost gave up on him. Carter did not give up. He found what he sought in a last attempt. Tutankhamun’s tomb was in the only hitherto unexplored area, covered by his crew’s hut. I sat  behind Carter’s desk in his house marveling at man’s dedication to discovery. _________________________________________________________________ This article, entitled “ The Museum that is Luxor”, was published on the following website of Iranian.com on February 28, 2011, with related pictures: http://www.iranian.com/main/2011/feb/museum-luxor