Panoramic views of Egypt

This will be my final post on my recent travels to Egypt. During my short stay, I visited Cairo, Abydos, Balyana, Luxor, Thebes, Karnak, Giza, & Sakkara. I shot many panoramic images on my digital camera, which I stitched together by hand in Photoshop (with the exception of one image that Photoshop automatically stitched). In my previous posts, I already published some of these images, but I've completed a few more that have not yet been published, so here they are, all in one place.

Click on any image to see it full-size for much better detail. The files are not that big, but they are larger than typical Internet files, so please be patient while they load.

The Village of Abydos along the edge of the desert.

The front courtyard of the Dig House at Abydos.

The Dig House's "backyard," where the mudbricks are made and pottery sherds are stored.

A view of the various intersecting landscapes on the desert horizon at Abydos.

A mudbrick funerary chapel alongside a stone temple for Ramses II.
(This is the image that was auto-stitched in Photoshop.)

A view of the interior of the Shunet el-Zabib from atop the Northern wall.

Work inside the Shuneh, from right to left: excavation, worksite photo documentation, transporting buckets of excavated sand, surveying the site, and men sifting excavated sand on top of the dune.

A full view of the Eastern side of the Luxor Temple.

Wide view of the Medinat Habu on the horizon in Thebes (West Luxor).

The Pyramids of Giza, from left to right: Khufu (Great Pyramid), Khafre, Menkaure and the smaller Pyramids of Queens.

Abydos: Excavation Progress

When we arrived in Abydos, the project team began a couple of excavations at the Shunet el-Zabib. Some substantial progress had been made by the time I left a week later. During my stay, I was able to get some pictures documenting one of the excavations.

Below is a close-up view of the inside of the Eastern interior wall of the Shuneh. These mudbrick walls were so thick that after the structure was abandoned, Coptic monks carved out cells in the walls to create various rooms (living quarters, kitchens, etc.). What you are looking at in the following picture is a small, partially exposed view inside one of these Coptic cells.

After a couple of days of digging, the majority of the cell is visible. The white plastered recess that the archaeologist is standing next to would be for displaying some sort of religious icon.

In the next picture, the excavation has not yet reached the floor, but most of the cell is exposed. You can see the top of a built-in bench running along the wall on the left, still mostly covered in sand.

On top of the unexcavated bench, there was a segment of some kind of potted vessel.

Here's a closer look at the recessed icon display area.

Finally, here's a shot of the completed excavation. The cell has been dug out all the way down to the floor. The bench on the left hand side is actually pretty low. There are a few other recessed cavities in the wall, and there is even a hole that goes all the way through to the other side in the lower right corner of the rear wall. I'm pretty sure that hole is the recent result of a fox burrowing in the wall.
I left shortly after this cell was completely excavated, but the work at this particular site was still far from done. The drawer has to hand draw plans and elevations of every detail and brick making up the cell and it's contents. The surveyors have to take points of the site so that it can be exactly located on the computerized map, and linked to the drawings and photographic documentation, as well as other geographic data. Finally, in order to preserve the structural integrity of the wall, the excavated cell needs to be filled back in. This process consists of covering the exposed cell with a thin layer of sterile sand and then rebuilding the wall using modern mudbricks made to imitate the original structure. The sand protects the cell from being cemented to the new mudbrick. Once the new mudbrick clears the height of the cell, the rebuilt wall is bonded directly to the original wall. In the meantime, the excavators move onto the next section of the wall to start the process all over again.

The Dig House at Abydos

Coincidental to my recent trip: Expedition, an archaeological journal from the University of Pennsylvania Museum has an article about the mudbrick dig house where I stayed in Abydos. The article focuses on the house and the various stages of construction and improvements it has undergone over the years. It includes some historical construction photos:
Download the PDF in order to read the full article.

Temples, Tombs, Museums & Pyramids

A panoramic view of the Giza Plateau. Click image for a closer look.

I'm back in NYC. Here's how I spent my last 3 days in Egypt:

Day 1 - Luxor, East Bank
- Karnak Temple
- Luxor Museum
- Luxor Temple
- Mummification Museum

Day 2 - Luxor, West Bank
Rented a bicycle and visited:
- Colossi of Memnon
- Medinat Habu
- Valley of the Kings
- Tombs of the Nobles

Day 3 - Cairo
- Pyramids of Giza
- The Great Sphinx
- Step Pyramid of Zoser

Everything was amazing, but the Mummification Museum was a waste of time and I should have skipped the Tombs of the Nobles because I was too burned out by the time I got there. Last week, when I was at the dig site at Abydos, I imagined I would post lots of pictures of all the sites I visited, but now that I'm going through my 1000+ pictures, I'm realizing that some serious editing is called for. It's already tedious enough to look at someone else's vacation photos.

There are simply too many pictures of the temples, and they are almost entirely details. If I posted any of those pictures, I wouldn't be able to adequately explain exactly what you're looking at. Both the Karnak and Luxor temples are too large to be captured on the ground with a point and shoot camera. I didn't take any photos inside any of the tombs or museums. That just leaves the pyramids, and everybody has already seen pictures of those. So here's a very small sample of some of my more interesting photographs of the Pyramids at Giza and Saqqara:

Details of the Great Pyramid of Khufu

Pyramid of Khafre
Detail of Khafre's original glistening limestone exterior which would have once covered the entire pyramid.

Pyramid of Mankaure

The Great Sphinx with the Pyramid of Khufu in the background.

Step Pyramid of Zoser, as seen during a violent dust storm in Saqqara.

Walk like an Egyptian

My work in Egypt is done, so I've left Abydos. But I'm not leaving yet. I still have 3 days to see the sights: Thursday & Friday in Luxor and Saturday in Cairo, before my return home to NYC on Sunday if I make it home alive. It really seems as if there is no law enforcement here with regards to traffic regulation. You can drive at night with no headlights, pedestrians routinely walk in the street instead of the sidewalk, EVERYONE honks their horns ALL THE TIME, and it's not completely uncommon to see a car going the wrong way down a one way street.

I shot this short little video while standing on the corner of a busy intersection in Cairo on my first day in Egypt. I was exploring the city by foot, and when I got to this highway, that was the boundary of my exploration since I was scared to cross the street. If you watch, you'll see a couple of Egyptian pedestrians walking through the heavy traffic with seemingly little regard for their safety. Now, after being here for a week and a half and having seen much worse in that time, this seems pretty tame.



I've since found much better examples of how crazy the traffic is, and I'll post a couple of those videos here, but I realize that none of these videos do any justice to the experience of actually trying to cross these streets in real life.





While in Luxor & Cairo, I have a lot on my agenda: the temples and museums of East Luxor, the tombs of West Luxor, and the Pyramids of Giza in Cairo. I will no longer have Internet access, so updates on the final part of my trip will be postponed until either Monday or Tuesday next week after I return home.

Abydos: Intersecting Landscapes

One of the first things that struck me about the Abydos landscape is how surreal it is. It's basically an intersection of various landscapes: ancient, modern, village, desert, agricultural, spiritual, and some hints of the industrial. Imagine waking up in the morning at 4:30 AM and the sound of the villagers call to prayer is projected through the desert air via megaphone. To a non-Arabic speaker, it sounds like chanting and moaning and it drones on for over an hour. Then it happens 4 more times throughout the day.

Then, when the sun comes up on a dusty morning, it doesn't look like any sun you've ever seen before. It's small, but very bright, although covered in clouds, and actually looks more like the moon.  But I watched it throughout the day, I can assure you that this is the morning sun:
When we first went out to see the excavation sites, I had the chance to climb on top of one of the tall walls of the Shunet el-Zabib.  From that great height, I was able to see an amazing example of the intersection of the various landscapes.  First, I had a clear view of the Valley to the Underworld:

Then, while looking westward just to the right side of the valley, this panoramic view stretches across the horizon (click on the image to enlarge):

First, in the foreground you can see part of the mudbrick wall of the funerary enclosure on which I was standing when I was viewing the landscape. Panning to the right, there is lush green argicultural land, forcibly placed into the desert. There are cattle grazing and men working in the farms. The land was heavily irrigated, but it's still the desert and the land is destined to last no longer than a few years before the sand siphons out all the water and turns it into salt.  Sticking out among all this are electrical towers and power lines.

Then, continuing on towards the north, one sees a large Coptic cemetary:

At the edge of the cemetary, stands an ancient mudbrick ruin, behind which is the village of Abydos, just on the edge of the desert. In this next panoramic view, you can see the village along the horizon line, just beyond the desert. Once again, click to enlarge.

Here's a closer look at some of the village apartment buildings:

While walking around the desert, one is aware of the variety just by looking at the sand. Sherds of ancient pottery are broken and scattered about everywhere. Modern relics are left behind as well, usually accumulated in certain areas in the form of plastic bottles and other small pieces of garbage. And more than occasionally, animal bones and skulls appear as a reminder of the roughness of the desert and despite its beauty and nearby oases, in some ways it is still a dangerous place.

Abydos: Funerary Chapel & Temple of King Ramses II

Here's part two of my tour of the Abydos project's excavation site. I know significantly less about these monuments, so it will just be a few pictures and very brief explanations.

This is a mudbrick funerary chapel. The best explanation I can come up with is it's sort of like gravestones, but without the tombs. There were no people buried here, but rather monuments to specific dead people. None of the monuments are here -- they were all stolen -- so it's just a bunch of constructed holes in the ground.

As more and more important people started to have bigger and bigger monuments erected in their memory, eventually King Ramses II came along and trumped all their little mudbrick structures with his elaborate stone temple, right next door.

This is an engraved stone column from the temple. You might be able to see some of the gold detail still on the column, near the 2 triangular engravings, indicating that it was once painted.

Some heiroglyphics, which I believe spell out the name of King Ramses II, engraved in the stone. The animal figure in the center is a baboon.  Here are some details of the heiroglyphics:



And here's a panoramic view of the entire site, with the mudbrick funerary chapel on the left and the stone temple on the right. Click to view the image in closer detail.

Wall Drawings Inside Egyptian Train

Here's two drawings I saw on the interior walls of a train while I was traveling through Egypt. I can't read the signature, but right below it, it says "Cordoba '91."

Happy New Year! 新年快樂！

Happy Chinese New Year!
It's the Year of the Ox (牛 níu = cow; ox in the Chinese zodiac).

Since I'm still in Egypt, I thought these Egyptian representations of oxen would be an appropriate way to recognize the new year:



In Ancient Egypt, the ox basically served 3 separate functions:
1. They were used for their strength as agricultural draught animals.
2. For food purposes, they were kept for milk and slaughtered for meat.
3. Finally, there was a spiritual side, most notably represented by the Apis Bull. I don't fully understand the mythology behind it, so I'll leave the explanation to the collective wisdom of Wikipedia.

The Apis Bull, an incarnation of the god Ptah:




The ox as draught animal in Egypt:



And so that we don't stray too far from the Lunar New Year, here's a traditional Chinese representation of the ox: