Luxor

I went to Luxor this weekend to finish my brief foray into Egyptology and ancient Egyptian history. Luxor is certainly the place to do this, as it sits on top of the ancient capital city of Thebes (literally on top in some places). As a result the area's rife with temples and tombs and statues and people trying to sell you things (these aren't original from Thebes, but I can't imagine they've changed much since then).



A chunk of Luxor, viewed from the roof of a hotel. The biggest difference between US and Egyptian skylines is all the minarets. That and the palm trees, I guess.

The Westernized name Luxor is actually a transliteration of the Arabic name for the city, الاقصور, which translates to 'the palaces'. Supposedly the new city was named this after the ancient temples throughout the area, though really at the time it would have been more accurate to name the city 'the half-submerged pillars sticking out of the garbage and sand'. Perhaps they were being optimistic. Today all of the temples have been dug up from their half-submerged state and some have been restored to something resembling their original grandeur. The extent of the ruins really brings home the extent of surplus resources and manpower possessed by the pharaohs that got swallowed up in massive bureaucracies and make-work projects. Or maybe it just shows how badly they mismanaged their budget, devoting colossal amounts of money and manpower to unnecessary public works. Fortunately neither of these problems is one faced by Egypt today.

I did not make these observations to our tour guide. He presented a very interesting version of ancient Egypt that can be summed up as follows: The ancient Egyptians were all fabulously wealthy and lived a life of luxury. Everyone was happy. However, this lifestyle consumed all of the resources of Egypt, making the Egyptian populace today universally poor. This version of history conveniently omits the slave system that made the luxurious lifestyle of a tiny percentage of Egyptians possible, and avoids talking about the (ironically enough) pyramid-shaped social structure Egypt had then and continues to have today.



Here's an example of unnecessary public works. You see the sphinxes lining the path behind me? This is outside the temple at Karnak. There's a similar set outside the temple at Luxor, some 5 miles away. Originally there would have been an avenue connecting the two with intricately hand-carved sphinxes lining the entire distance.



This is also from Karnak. Nothing particular to say about it, but man! Look at those columns! Those are big.



From somewhere in the grounds of Karnak Temple, looking at the main mass of ruins. The entire temple covers a square mile.



The Luxor Temple. You'll notice that one of the obelisks outside is very conspicuously missing. This is, of course, the one that got taken to France and is now in the Place de la Concorde. Our tour guide was very vocal about this sort of thing as well. Any Egyptian artifact that left the country was referred to as "stolen" by the Europeans, though most were eventually "recovered and returned to their rightful owner." The obelisk in France was a bit of a sore point for him.



I mentioned earlier that the modern Luxor had been built very literally on top of the original Thebes. The above is a mosque that was built into the Luxor Temple. Pretty cool.



The Romans, having no sense of history or preserving archeological finds, painted over a chunk of the Luxor Temple.



More defacing of ancient monuments by those bloody Romans (1), though in this case more recent generations don't appear to have learned anything about proper archeology. A more recent graffiti artist was Jollois (2), who is presumably Jean-Baptiste Prosper Jollois, one of the scientists accompanying Napoleon's army and one of the writers of the Description de l'Egypte. Still more recent was Becky(3). Becky has yet to get her name into any history books, but she's still hoping.



The Valley of the Kings. The white cliffs surrounding it reflect heat down onto the floor of the valley, raising the temperature to truly ungodly levels. By law no one has to work if the temperature rises above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, which it pretty much always is, so the government does not release temperature information for Luxor during the summer. Word on the street, however, is that it was about 120 degrees the day we were there.

Up to this point in the summer I've been following my father's high-impact tourism practice of taking a rock or other memento from memorable locations I visit: a rock from the necropolis at Giza, a shell from the Mediterranean, coral from the Red Sea, etc. Here, however, I decided that enough was enough - it was time to give something back. So, undoubtedly helped along by some bad kushari that I'd eaten the night before, I threw up in the tomb of Ramses IV. Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by the 120 degree heat.



The temple of Hatshepsut, which is being restored to resemble its original appearance. Hatshepsut's actual body was thought to be lost, but a few days after we got back from Luxor they found it. Figures. Our tour guide was a big fan of Hatshepsut, and went into great detail about how evil her step-son (who was also her nephew and son-in-law) was for deposing her. His greatest praise, however, was for Akhenaten, who tried to convert the Egyptian polytheistic system to a monotheistic system of sun-worship, or, as our guide put it, "was the first Egyptian to believe in God."

And that's all I have to say about Luxor.