Luxor

Before going to Egypt several friends – Udo Breger in Basel and Honey Hoffman in Santa Fe – had said I should contact Maria Golia in Luxor. Then I realised that I had already read two of her books, prior to my previous visit to Cairo: Photography and Egypt and her deep insightful portrait of Cairo called Cairo: City of Sand which I then re-read for this trip. At the party Tom Hardwick threw for us on arrival it turned out that Tom was also an old friend of hers, and that half the people at the party seemed to know her. She had lived in downtown Cairo for 30 years and no-one could understand what made her re-locate to Luxor where, many of them thought, she would be bored to tears. She lived on the West Bank of the Nile, close to the Habu Temple, in the desert. ‘We don’t really have an address’ she explained; she had to speak to our driver on the phone to direct him. 

Maria had built the house, bit by bit, over a ten-year period during visits to Luxor. Then when Cairo finally because too much, too noisy and too expensive, especially in terms of rent, she realised that she already had a house to live in. In Luxor. It has large cool rooms, guestrooms, a garden and a roof terrace, in a small hamlet just outside the Habu walls. The view of the nearby rock-strewn hills from her roof is not too much obstructed by her neighbours’ illegal buildings. For anyone in the Shakespeare Squad, as Burroughs called it, it is a perfect spot to work. I can see why she is there. Peace. No distractions. 

I travel a lot, and the travel experience is always ten times better if you have a contact in the place you are visiting. In this instance we had many friends in common, and the more we spoke, the more mutual friends there were. But the great beauty of such meetings, is that you get an insiders’ view of the place, and in this case, one of the best-informed views possible. She is presently writing a concise history of Egypt. She is a Jersey girl, not from Texas as I first thought. I loved her wry humour. I did not take any photographs so I hope she forgives me from using one from her website. Anyone planning on visiting Luxor should first read her A Short History of Tomb Raiding: The Epic Hunt for Egypt’s Treasures, which is not that short – 304 pages – and sets the whole subject in context. I wish I’d read it before going there, it makes everything so much more understandable. 

She had a house guest, Mira Shiha, a Palestinian artist living in Cairo, so the visit was even more rewarding. Back in the Sixties I was a member of one of the forerunners of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. I forget the exact name of the group but our meetings were held in the House of Commons, courtesy of one of the members. I have always supported the Palestinian cause to regain possession of their country but it had been decades since I met an actual Palestinian, so it was a great pleasure to meet Mira. She is an artist using the anti-Zionist struggle as her subject matter. https://www.mirashihadeh.com  We were to see her again in Cairo on our way back to London.

On our day to visit the Valley of the Kings we stopped first at the Colossi of Memnon, two giant statues of Amenhotep III from 1350 BC that once stood guard before the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III. They are badly damaged but were originally identical except for their carvings. The temple, the biggest in Egypt, larger even than Karnak, occupied 35 hectares (86 hectares) but has almost completely disappeared. This is partly because the annual flooding of the Nile caused it to decay but mostly because it suffered an enormous earthquake in 1200 BC. Hundreds of statues have been found, including fragments of colossi, buried in the deep mud that swallowed much of it. What remained was carted off to build other temples. The same earthquake damaged the colossi of Memnon (erroneously named after a mythological Greek king).

At last I saw the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut (c1500-1458 BC). I have always been fascinated by this particular structure. Back in March 1967 in London, my friends Michael English and Nigel Waymouth were visiting. They had just formed a design team called Jacob and the Coloured Coat to make psychedelic posters, and I was showing them a book containing photographs of her temple and the frieze depicting her legendary journey to the Land of Punt. (I think the book was Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs by Barbara Mertz.) They loved Queen Hatshepsut, but it was a hard name to pronounce. Nonetheless, they decided to change the name of their design team after her, and so became Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, the greatest of all the European psychedelic poster designers. Such was the sixties. 

Most archaeologists hate the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut because it has been so over-restored (“Ugh!” said Tom Hardwick) but this does make it understandable to the layman (and woman). From a distance it looks like a three-story building, but up close it is seen to be three very distinct levels reached by a long sloping staircase. I would not want to visit in the summer heat as it is so spread out. The long porticoes house the famous reliefs depicting her journey to the Land of Punt and to her divine birth. In fact, they are a lot easier to see in books than in real life, though it is great to have seen their actual scale. I couldn’t get close enough to it to see the detail (It’s all ochre and I probably need new glasses). If I remember correctly, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has a cast that is easier to see, or it was back in the seventies. The Land of Punt was probably located in modern day eastern Sudan and western Eritrea.

The Egyptians seem to have had a problem with a woman being the King. Certainly, twenty years after her death (from cancer), Tutmose III attempted to erase her memory from the building and history by scratching out female prefixes in carvings, chiselling away her image or otherwise damaging it, and most seriously, dragging away her statues and breaking them to pieces in a pit. It can hardly have been a personal grudge, (she was his regent) or he wouldn’t have waited 20 years. No-one really knows his reasoning.  Fortunately, Amenhotep II ascended the throne only two years after the erasure campaign started so much of her imagery was spared or left half-completed. An earthquake in the 9th century AD did further damage to the site as did the Coptic Christians who built a monastery there. To get the full picture of this beautiful site, here’s a Wikipedia aerial view taken at sunrise.