Our trip to Egypt was a last minute decision. Quince had always wanted to see the pyramids. I missed seeing the Grateful Dead play there in 1979 when I was an exchange student in Rome. The closest I’d ever gotten was the King Tut exhibit at the National Gallery in Washington DC as a senior in high school. A number of us dropped Orange Sunshine which gave the field trip a literal meaning and perhaps explains why I’ve forgotten so much about it with the exception of the sarcophagi within sarcophagi and his amazing mask of gold with blue stripe inlays. At a dinner our first week in Paris we’d heard about sailing trips down the Nile. A quick search led us to a British outfit called Wild Frontiers. Since the revolution in 2013, tourism to Egypt has plummeted, which might explain why seats were still available.
We joined our group in Luxor, formerly the ancient city of Thebes, capital of Upper Egypt, which is actually in the south because the Nile starts lower down in the heart of Africa and flows north through Sudan to the Mediterranean Sea. Luxor is the gateway to Nile river boat cruises, numerous temples, and the Valley of the Kings, where Tutankhamun’s and other tombs were uncovered. Our guide was a middle aged man named Mohammed. He was a charming person with dark hair and mustache, a big belly, a balding pate and brown prayer spot on his forehead. Pointer in hand, Mohammed shuffled quickly across the sandstone as he led us from columns to pylons to temple interiors. He regaled us with jazz like monologues about gods and kings and queens and dynasties and solar orientations and former grandeur, deciphering the history carved into stone walls and obelisks like giant comic strips.
“Well my friend,” each of Mohammed’s mini lectures began. Once wound up, off he went. But somehow he would always arrive at a singular destination. Egypt was the proverbial trunk of the tree of human civilization, the watershed from which every major innovation that we depend on today originally flowed. You name it, the Egyptians started it, from the Caesarian section, to the mastery of eclipses, dentistry, astrology, hospitals, the calendar, paper production and modern written language. Mohammed had a ready grasp of English idioms and a unique way of pluralizing words. “Wingses, birdses, beamses, streetses,” even emphasizing the -es when he happened to get it right. Every tour stop ended with his signature sign off. “And that’s it.”
Temple of Hathor at Dendera, Qena, Egypt
Soon Mohamed’s exceptional gift for guiding had us recognizing hieroglyphics as we journeyed between temples and tombs. There was Horus, the Falcon headed god, whose mind was kept in a cage by his wife Hathor, so he wouldn’t stray too far. You could recognize a god or goddess from a king or queen by the presence of a cobra on their heads. There were careful accountings of the pharaohs’ bounteous gifts to the gods, scenes of human sacrifices and domination of rival armies, and frequent appearances by deities like Ibis, god of Wisdom, with his small bird head and thin curved beak. Scarab beetles lifted up the sunrise and brought down the sunset. There was Amen Men, the one armed male god of fertility with his large, circumcised boner. Yes, the Egyptians apparently invented circumcision.
As in Western countries, both entrances and exits of temples and museums transit through a mini bazaar of hustlers hawking a variety of textiles, guidebooks, statues, and other handicrafts mostly now made in China. Walking the gauntlet would proceed something like this.
“Hello. Where you from? England?”
“America.”
“America. Welcome to Alaska!” Thousands of Egyptians have this one liner in their repertoire.
“You want shirt?” Waves it in your face. It’s short sleeved, collared, something someone who works in a hotel might wear. “Just 50 Egyptian dollars.” You quickly divide by 20 even though you don’t want it.
“No thanks, but thank you.”
“Okay 25.”
“No thank you, really.”
“Okay, five Egyptian dollars, you see, it has beautiful cartouch embroidery. What’s your name?”
“Dan.”
“Okay, Mr. Dan, one Egyptian dollar. One Egyptian dollar! You come to see me when you are done. My name is Mohamed from Stall number 3. I will wait for you.”
Mohamed is indeed waiting when I return from the temple. “Mr. Dan, remember me?” And it starts all over again.
Ancient city of Thebes, Luxor, Egypt
Our tour included a four day trip from Luxor to Aswan on a dahabiya, a wooden two-masted sail boat with nine rooms below and a large deck above, with shaded lounging and dining areas. On Christmas eve, after a turkey dinner, the crew cranked up the music on the upper deck, lighted a disco ball, and promptly formed a dance circle. With Arabic pop music blaring, drums and horns holding the rhythm and melody for the heavy male droning vocals, the all male crew began clapping and tapping and dancing within the circle. The Egyptian men first took turns soloing. The captain with his long gray gallabiyya robe and turban headdress, the rolly polly cook with white chef hat and jacket, the skinny hipped first mate with red button down shirt and black peg leg jeans. What followed was some serious gyrating, shoulder shimmying, knee knocking showmanship. The captain took off his headdress and brandished the scarf as if flying, wrapped it playfully around another dancer’s neck, twirled with it like a dance partner. The crew took turns dancing with the women, dancing with the men, dancing among themselves. They formed human chains, made sure everyone participated. They sang along to the call and response lyrical structure of most songs, clapping as the music rose up to meet the half moon in the crisp December night. The party rolled on in a frenzy of Shakespearean androgyny, with provocative belly dancer moves and line dancing and leg kicking shuffles. Clearly they had done this before. Perhaps it has always been so.
Navigating the Nile on the dahabiya.
On Christmas day we journeyed up river and stopped for one of our daily village visits. Egypt is a country of 90 million people that live in massive cities as well as along the cultivated ribbons of land on its East and West banks, and sometimes on rather sizable islands in between, made habitable since the 1970s by the dam at Aswan. How wide those East and West banks are at any given moment is largely determined by the topography of the hills and desert never far away, and the extent to which the Nile’s waters have been brought inland to transform those lands for productive agriculture. On either bank we found complex farming areas, with plots divided by raised soil buffers into small quadrants that could be flood irrigated by pumping from the river, the water washed across the land. There was an intricate diversity of crops. Orchards of mango, date palm, citrus and banana, often intermixed, garden-like plantings of alfalfa and forage (for animals), wheat, onions, cucumbers, watermelons, and the ubiquitous sugar cane. Away from the sandy islands and river banks, the soil was dark. The fronds of palms punctuated the skyline like little fireworks. It was obvious that Egypt’s agriculture was donkey and human powered. Upon every field was written and woven the trial of sweat and toil and subsistence.
Intensive beds farmed on an island in the Nile.
The village homes were simply made of mud brick or white or red baked brick with concrete beam construction. Roofs and fences and corrals were cobbled together with anything at hand, often bound by a mixture of mud and straw, a technique similar to wattle and daub. We visited many people’s homes, which were clean and humble, always with a common room filled with comfortable chairs where people sat and talked and drank tea. The Egyptian village home seemed to be in a perpetual state of incompletion. The top floors were often only half built. The tell tale sign was feathers of rebar sticking straight up from the corner cement beams. The rebar was there, poised for the time when the money to construct yet another floor became available, or perhaps to signal to the tax collector that the project remained unfinished. On one open air unfinished floor we found a bread oven, chickens, geese, goats and a laundry line. One day it would become an apartment for one of the farmer’s soon to be wed sons, perhaps with yet another unfinished terrace above it. “This man’s fortunes are improving,” Mohamed said of the farmer, who he had been visiting for many years.
Bread oven on the open roofed top floor of a village home.
Some things were harder to accept. Plastic garbage was strewn everywhere, along the roadsides and in the towns, across the beaches and banks of irrigation canals. Plastic bags, water bottles and all types of discarded packaging, the windblown symbols of a civilization predicated on disposable waste, waste that will potentially be around for as long as the monuments we were studying.
There was also the wholesale destruction of ancient art. The extent to which the figures carved on so many temple walls had been defaced by previous generations — the faces of the figures literally scratched and chiseled out — was another tragic shock. It is hard to comprehend what cultural threats would drive generations to devalue and chisel away the history of the ancient Egyptians. Fortunately some of the temple artwork and much of the the hieroglyphics have survived. And with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by a Frenchman in the 1820s, which simultaneously translated a single story into Egyptian, Greek and Arabic, the key to understanding the intriguing symbols and cartouches carved into sandstone and granite by the Pharaonic civilization along the Nile, is available to us, and certainly remain worthy of our wonder and contemplation.
<< to be continued >>
