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On February 17 we flew down to Luxor, the ancient Thebes. It’s a short flight, just under an hour. We couldn’t get into the Nefertiti but booked the hotel next door. This used to be the Suzanne, but now has the slightly unfortunate name of the S. S. Luxor. Just like the Carlton in Cairo, the only coffee provided at breakfast is Nescafe. For real coffee you have to pay extra and even then there’s not much coffee in it. The lift is more modern than the Carlton in that it has a door, and you can buy a beer in the lobby. (Warning: Sakara King Beer is 10%, more than twice as strong as in Britain, but they also do Stella at 4.5% a bit stronger than the UK.)
The S. S. Luxor has the same wonderful view of Luxor Temple and the avenue of the Sphinxes which goes all the way to the Karnak complex, 2.7 k away. The temple is remarkably well preserved, with most of the first pylon intact (the wall-like structure with a ‘v’ shape in the middle referencing the slot cut in a cliff by a waterfall. Only one obelisk remains to guard it – the missing right-hand one is now at the place de la Concorde in Paris. Some large statues have been moved there to replace the missing ones. It would be nice if they replaced the brightly coloured banners that once flew from the niches.
As the S. S. Luxor does not do food other than breakfast our first move was to go to the Winter Palace, the luxury hotel facing the Nile where Howard Carter, Lord Carnarvon and other archaeologists and aristos stayed in the twenties and where the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 was first announced to the world’s press. We ate in the garden. Such luxury.
Next day we started our explorations gently by visiting the Luxor temple, just across the street. After passing through the first pylon, you enter the Great Court of Rameses II where the 74 columns still show their origins as bundled papyrus with bud capitals and there are a couple of huge statues of him. Then come pairs of open-flower papyrus columns which still have their architrave blocks followed by another court of papyrus columns. The huge size and scale of it all is overwhelming, partly because of its great age. It was built by Amenhotep III (1390-52 BC, finished by Tutankhamun (1336-27 BC then added to by Rameses II (1279-1213 BC, died at the age of 90 or 91). Much of the colour is still there, also, preserved in the dry desert climate.
One key thing for British travellers is, of course, the provision of alcohol. International hotels are fine but not surprisingly most restaurants serving Egyptian food do not sell wine or beer. It is not difficult to get a drink in Cairo but in a small town like Luxor it becomes more problematic. The Lantern is one of the highly recommended restaurants in this respect as it’s English run. It’s never going to get a Michelin star but the food is okay. The washing dripped on me as we walked in.
Karnak is one of the wonders of the world. You could spend a month there and still not see all the carvings and colours. You enter in it down an avenue of sphinxes with ram’s heads. As I described it in great detail in this blog just a year ago I won’t repeat myself except to ID the pictures.
It seemed as if this visit there were far more fashion shoots than before and young Oriental women in particular had dressed the part as spirits of the Nile or some idealised goddesses, sometimes great groups of them. We returned twice to the pleasant café out by the side of the sacred lake which tourists didn’t seem to find. We saw the giant scarab and the wall of Egyptian bureaucracy; the accounting of offerings literally carved in stone.
When Theo and I were there we did not have time to find the precinct of Mut which is situated some distance from the main temple complex in the direction of the avenue of the sphinxes. You pass where they terminate, in a wasteland of barely uncovered ruins, and finally reach a large wooden gate. Here an old retainer spent a great deal of time examining our tickets before unlocking it and letting us in. We were the only visitors. All four sides of a courtyard once held row of statues of the goddess Sekhmet, who I must have mentioned before as she’s my favourite goddess. And in the centre, jumbled lines of Sekhmet body parts, rows of feet, rows of heads, rows of torsos await future archaeologists’ attention. Presumably modern computer science would be able to scan them and fit them all back together. The British Museum has some superb examples of Sekhmet taken from this very place. It had not occurred to me that they were probably broken when they acquired them as they look in beautiful condition now. There is one large Sekhmet in the precinct, intact except for her sun-disk and she allowed me to hold her ankh while Suzy took a picture.
I awoke with the call to prayer the next morning and saw the hot air balloons ascending over the Nile. This is one of the local attractions and does look spectacular. Trouble is, they lift off at 6am.
The 20th was Valley of the Kings day and we first went to Seti I’s tomb, (KV17) my favourite, which has the unfinished preparatory drawings on some of the columns as there was not enough time to complete the tomb when Seti died in 1279 BC. There is a looseness and openness about them that you don’t get in the beautifully finished works. You can relate more fully to the original artist, standing where you are, drawing on the white plaster almost three and half thousand years before. I particularly like the last picture, of Seti (on the left) with the god Atum.
We made a quick stop at the Colossi of Memnon (1350 BC), two giant statues of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III which once guarded the entrance to his mortuary temple, now gone. We continued to the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut. My friend Egyptologist Tom Hardwich is appalled by the restauration of this temple by a Polish team which has virtually recreated the building but to the layman it now provides an almost magical experience. When I returned to London, I dug out my father’s photo album which I hadn’t looked at in decades, but which contains family snaps and pictures taken by him. He was based in Cairo during the war and took part in the Battle of Al Alamain in 1942 in the desert close to Cairo. As well as pictures of tanks roaring across the desert, taken with a Brownie box camera, I was astonished to find a photograph of Hatshepsut’s temple, taken by him. He never spoke about his wartime experience, and I had no idea that he was ever in Luxor as the British forces were concentrated mostly in Cairo and Port Said.
Next day, the 21st, we visited the Habu temple. It is decorated largely with celebrations of military triumph: massive wall carvings showing soldiers piling up hands, severed from their enemies. It’s all rather gruesome, but the low reliefs show a degree of animation unusual in Egyptian art. The Habu temple has a pleasant outdoor café located behind the first pylon which I recommend to visitors.
My friend the writer Maria Golia invited us to lunch. She lives in a house that she built herself next to the south wall of the Habu temple so it was just around the corner. She has no address, as such, so there was a bit of a problem finding her as I couldn’t quite remember how to find her house even though there are only about a dozen houses in the settlement. She welcomed us and showed us around – her rooftop view is astounding. It was my birthday, so she produced a candle and turned an apple crumble into a birthday cake! It was very kind of her and a delightful meal. I didn’t want to leave. Next day we flew back to Cairo for our final excursion, this time to Saqqara.
Back at the Carlton, in a better room this time with a proper shower, it felt like coming home. Ramadan posed less of a problem in the big city: during Ramadan no restaurant is allowed to serve alcohol, and no Egyptians are permitted to drink alcohol in public, even in a hotel. We had Egyptian guests over for a drink, only to find they had to drink lemonade or peppermint tea when they would normally have enjoyed a glass of Omar Khayyam. The regime micro-controls its citizens. Naturally the Carlton ran out of wine on our last evening; we should have bought supplies and kept emergency rations in our rooms.
We saw Mira Shihadeh when we were first in Cairo and had drinks at the Café Riche. This time we went to her house in Maadi. Maadi is a leafy suburb, about 12 kilometres upriver from the Downtown area, a drive that is best avoided in rush hour. It is a low-rise area filled with trees and gardens, and, like the equally upmarket Zamalek area, it is home to several dozen embassies as well as up-market restaurants and shops. As usual, we couldn’t find her house. In fact the Uber driver had dropped us very close, but she was a little further up the street, so we wandered around for a half hour before managing to contact her on the phone. It should have been easy because her Palestinian flag was easily visible from the street, and she was responsible for the Palestinian graffiti at the end of the block. The watermelon is used as a symbol because the Israelis prohibited the use of the Palestinian flag within the Zionist colony and a watermelon has the same colours.
Mira showed us around the house. We looked at her paintings which are inspired by yoga and ballet poses – she taught yoga for 20 years – and by the protesters during the 2011 Revolution. We sat for a while on her terrace, then went to visit the local Diwan bookshop. Both Suzy and I had read Nadia Wassef’s autobiography Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller, so it was great to find that Mira actually knew her. Diwan sells English language and Arab books. The shop could not have been in greater contrast to most of Cairo. A clean sunny area out front where people sat drinking coffee or snacks from the shop café with no beggars and very little passing traffic. It houses a selection of books, mostly in English, concentrating on the arts and self-help. The contrast between the stock and staff in places like this is hard to ignore. Statutory minimum wage for this type of work is EGP 7,000 a month (£103.92) and the average monthly salary in Cairo is EGP 9,780 (£145.19), so it’s unlikely that Diwan pays much more than that, whereas an art book can easily cost EGP 1,000 (£14.85) or more. No wonder Wassef complains of constant theft in her book. There is no solution to this, short of making the shops into collectives and somehow paying back the capital but then why not start their own? It’s unlikely that there are government loans or incentives for this kind of trade. Mira sent a picture of us all waving to Nadia Wassef. Then to the Villa Belle Epoque for a meal in the garden. But for the fact that they don’t serve alcohol, we could have been in Provence.
We hired a car for the day and set off to Saqqara. This is a huge site, and new discoveries seem to be made every few months. However, we concentrated on the highlights, of which the Stepped Pyramid of Djoser is the star. It is the first ever pyramid and was built between 2670 and 2650 BC, in the Third Dynasty for the Pharaoh Djoser. (Oddly enough, it is almost exactly contemporary with the pyramids at Caral-Supe in Peru which date to 2627 BC). It’s big, it was originally 62.5 meters tall (205 feet) and covered in polished white limestone. Sixteen other kings built their pyramids at Saqqara, which are in various states of preservation and are mostly closed and some of which are dangerous to explore. They dot the horizon. When Rosemary and I first visited Saqqara ten years ago with Tom Hardwick, the Stepped Pyramid was still undergoing its 14-year restoration, and one side was covered with scaffolding. But now the work is complete and the site looks wonderful. The restoration is sensitive and the surrounding archaeological site clean and well laid out. The site includes a temple structure with the usual row of columns and a wall. There’s a good Wikipedia article about it.
One of the most extraordinary sites at Saqqara is the Serapeum where they buried the sacred bulls of the Apis Cult. The Apis bulls were thought to be the incarnations of the God Ptah who, when they died became immortal as Osiris-Apis. The cult was in existence for about 1400 years but the ones in the Serapeum are from the late period, ending around 30 BC. The bulls are buried in tombs lining long underground galleries. Each Apis sarcophagi weighs about 40 tons and they have lids weighing in at about 25 tons. The oldest sarcophagi here is from 550 BC. The labour involved in excavating these catacombs is mind-boggling. There are two dozen sarcophagi in the Serapeum, all but two of which were robbed in antiquity and all the grave goods stolen. Older burials have isolated tombs dotted around the area. The Serapeum was once approached by an avenue of 370 to 380 sphinxes, but they have all been removed with some in the Louvre and most of them in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna. Looking across what is now a flat piece of desert you would never know a funerary complex once stood there or that these amazing tombs lie beneath the sand.
