He Tales # 14 - Egypt
At the base of a large statue of Ramses II in the mighty ruins of Luxor Temple, nearly lost among the endless procession of gods, pharaohs and cartouches chiseled into every surface of the temple, is a small panel showing the gods Habbi and Ra-Hor-Akhty standing on each side of a vertical stripe representing the Nile river. At the bottom of the stripe, a small apple shaped area split by the river represents a set of lungs. The gods each have one foot on a lung, pumping it. The artist who carved this scene for Ramses II over 3,200 years ago understood the essence of this land, for the breath of life in Egypt is the Nile.

This morning, as the sun slowly burned its way into the hazy sky of this valley, our minivan bounced along over rich freshly tilled soil, as we cut between rows of cabbages and corn, ready for our adventure. Ahead of us, boys on mules and men dressed in long cotton robes called galabiyyas surrounded the basket of a huge green and yellow hot air balloon (for 19 people!), inflated and ready. As the massive jets baked the air in the balloon and the riders in the basket, we slowly rose from the fields, joining the African Hoopoes and Magpies flying over the farmers as they harvested their crops.

Spiraling into the air, stark contrasts became visible on the ground below. To the East, sparkling in the morning sun, was the mighty Nile. Along the river, a strip of lush green farmland rich with date palms and farmer’s shacks stretched North and South, disappearing into the haze. To the West, beyond the reach of pipes and channels, lay the desert, barren to the horizon, without a single sign of life except one small fox, running after the shadow of our balloon. In the desert below lie some of the most famous monuments in the world - the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, and the temple of Hatshepsut among them; but these temples would not be here, in what was once the capital of Egypt known as Thebes (now Luxor), without the gift of the river’s liquid breath.

We came to Egypt because Kimberly “wanted to see the pyramids”. That dream is now a wonderful memory, which I’ll save for her to share. I’d like to share a few other memorable places, that combine to make this such an amazing country.

CAIRO

Cairo is an urban disaster that could only happen in Egypt. With 16 million people, Cairo is the 2nd largest city in the world. It is crowded, loud, polluted and can drive you crazy in ten seconds flat. Every street corner is an obstacle course, with taxis honking, buses swerving, and at least a dozen young men crying out “hello my friend”, “Where are you from”, and “come into my shop”. The pollution is so bad, you feel it in your lungs as the brown haze settles over the city. As you jostle down the sidewalk, smells of exhaust and filth mix with food stands and perfume shops to repulse your nose. Walking any distance requires a great deal of patience, and more than once Kimberly almost killed me because I opted to walk rather than argue with a cab driver about how much he wanted to overcharge me.

Cairo also gave us an eye-opening introduction to how women are treated in this Arab land. On the metro, the first two cars are reserved solely for women, as I found out after boarding one. The doors shut, then a policeman began tapping on the glass looking straight at me as a carload of schoolgirls giggled at my naivete. Unfortunately, women here need this small protection. While I hate to stereotype, our experiences with the vast majority of Egyptian men have shown me how deep the cultural divide is between Egypt and “western” countries in treating women with respect. Kimberly has a few sharper words in mind on this point, and she is not wrong. However, we chose to visit this land, so we have kept a low profile and Kimberly has simply ignored most of the behavior.

For all of that, I am ecstatic to have come here. This is my second trip to Africa, and I have a love of this continent that I cannot explain but that settles my soul.

Cairo is home to the pyramids of Giza. True it is the world’s oldest tourist trap, but it is the only remaining wonder of the ancient world. The city is also home to the Cairo museum. This is one of the coolest buildings I’ve ever seen. Imagine a large archeology museum, full of statues and wall paintings, stone reliefs and sarcophogi, pottery and hand tools. Now imagine another one, and then two more. Put the whole lot together in a smaller building and you have the Cairo Museum. Everywhere you look, some artifact has been stuffed into a niche. Hallways are lined with stone carvings, unlabeled masterpieces lost under the weight of history. As our guide threads us through the labyrinth of cases and exhibits, she seemingly stops at random. In a hallway upstairs are the chariots of Tut-ankh-amon; downstairs in a back room lies the smallest statue in the building, of Pharoah Cheops, the only remaining treasure from the largest of the pyramids; and just inside the entrance lies the Mummy of Ramses I, returned by the United States just last week and proudly at home once again in Egypt. The place is so overloaded, they literally stack priceless treasures in the storage vaults below the museum. A running joke here says that when the new larger museum gets built, they’ll have to send in archaeologists to excavate this one, just to sort it all out.

TEMPLES and TOMBS

Kimberly and I have collected a scrapbook full of entrance ticket stubs in Egypt. From Abu Simbel in the South to Saqqara in the North, from the West Bank tombs of the Valley of the Kings to the East Bank Temples of Luxor and Karnak, we have overloaded on the world of the Pharaohs. Each monument could fill a he tales, so instead, let me bring you to just one Pharaoh, Ramses II, and how he carved his way into immortality.

Ramses II was perhaps the greatest ruler Egypt ever had. He ruled for 67 years, and had almost 200 children and more than 30 wives, several of whom were his daughters. But being the longest reigning and most prolific pharaoh was not enough; he wanted immortality. Along the Nile at Abu Simbel in the South, Ramses II carved two great monuments out of solid rock. The first was for himself, and is fronted by four statues of the pharaoh that are each 20 meters high, carved out of a wall of solid limestone. The second was for his wife Nefertari. It is only temple in Egypt dedicated to the wife of a pharaoh, and was a measure of how much Ramses II thought of Nefertari. Perhaps that made up for the 29 other wives. The two together welcomed all travelers coming down the Nile from Sudan, letting them know they had entered Egypt.

The most impressive aspect of Abu Simbel is that you can see it at all. In the 1960’s, Egypt built a large dam at Aswan, 260km downstream, that created Lake Nasser and flooded the sites of 14 ancient temples. A UNESCO rescue effort raised $40 million to move these temples. Of these, Abu Simbel was by far the most challenging, as it was carved as a single block from the side of a mountain slope. Pictures in the visitor center tell the tale, showing how men with saws and cranes carved this mountainside into more than 2,000 blocks, reconstructing it under a new “concrete dome mountainside” higher up the embankment. Here at least, the reign of Ramses II will continue for many centuries to come.

Ramses II also left his mark on many of the most famous temples of Egypt. During the pharaonic period, temples were constantly being enlarged, rebuilt, and recarved to suit the desires of the reigning pharaoh. Ramses II built new additions to Karnak and Luxor temples, and began the practice of “erasing” the cartouches of earlier rulers and carving his name into their statues and temples, carving so deeply future rulers could not erase his reign lightly. Large statues of him were also found throughout Egypt, including two large granite figures, one now in Memphis, the other in downtown Cairo in the middle of the chaos that marks the entrance to the Ramses train station.

But for all of these lasting monuments, the statue of Ramses II that most interested me is famous for its decay. The statue of crumbled blocks of pink granite lies in the first court of Ramses II’s funerary temple, called the Ramesseum. In 9th grade, I read the poem “Ozymandias” by Shelley. Although I never knew what it referred to, I always remembered the poem:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains, Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

As I toured Luxor’s West Bank, walking through the fabulous ruins of the Ramesseum, I learned that each Pharaoh was given five names. One of the lesser known names of Ramses II was Usermare, and the crumbled pink granite statue of Usermare, which you now know as Ozymandias, showed me that even the greatest ruler of Ancient Egypt could not grasp the most elusive dream of the pharaohs, immortality. Some day, the floodwaters of the Nile and the shifting sands of the Egyptian desert will wipe away all traces of Ramses II. For now, however, he lives on, etched into Egypt and into our memories of our visit to this ancient land.