For our last day of visiting tourist sites we drove out to the Valley of the Kings. Fun fact: all of the ancient burial sites are on the west side of the Nile, to accommodate someone [understood to be the Pharoah or his queen or someone from his court] in his journey to the afterlife. The east side of the Nile was for the living. We know a great deal about ancient Egypt from burial sites because those can be and have been excavated, but we know far less about ordinary Egyptian life because the living used, demolished, and rebuilt in the land of the living.
That's a fairly rough version, I know, but it is a useful starting point.
Nagy had told us to meet in the hotel restaurant for breakfast at 8, which we did, being compliant folks by nature. The most notable thing about this breakfast was hibiscus juice, which is a deep red color and not sweet. We ate, drank our coffee, compared notes with the others on our team while we waited for Nagy to show up, which he did about 8:45. Tourists were already baking in the sun around the outdoor pool just beyond the glass wall. Temperatures during our days in Cairo were in the low 90s. Here they were in the low 100s.
In Luxor we had both a new driver and a new tour guide, Jacob. Jacob, an accomplished guitarist on the worship team where his good friend Jimi is pastor, taught himself English and Mandarin Chinese in order to obtain certification as a tour guide. His English is clear and accomplished. Here he is waiting with Danil and the rest of our team for instructions to board the van. The Valley of the Kings is about as dry and desolate as Giza, where the Great Pyramids stand, only here one is among mountains consisting entirely of rock and sand. The tombs are located on both sides of a fairly large ravine (the Valley), and there are many of them. Some have not yet been excavated.
Our tickets allowed us to visit three tombs of our choosing. Jacob suggested which of the tombs we might like the most, so we followed his advice. As is often the case in sites like this, unschooled visitors can only take in just so much, so three tombs was certainly sufficient for a first visit.
In Giza it was the overwhelming presence of the Pyramids that literally impressed itself on us as we drew close. In the Valley of the Kings it's all about the detail.
Everywhere -- floors, ceilings, walls, insets and recesses, the surface of every object -- these tombs are covered with some kind of art work: hieroglyphics, figures in relief, paintings, picture stories. And every detail was designed to carry meaning. As with the pyramids everything suggests enormous labor; but here above and beyond the engineering brilliance and the brute force necessary for digging and hauling stone, labor is of a different sort.
Excavated entryways to the tombs, now lighted and in some places lined with plexi-glass to keep hands from rubbing the carved surfaces reveal a need to cover all available space with something.
Any blank areas on the face of walls and ceilings indicate something has crumbled or deteriorated beyond repair in the thousands of years since their creation. Or something had been damaged by tomb robbers. The total absence of ground water due to the total absence of rain, of course, is the biggest factor in preserving these tombs. The restoration process has simply filled in the missing areas with some kind of plaster rather than rebuilding what is missing.
The plexiglass is approximately six feet high, to give you some sense of scale. These are not openings anyone has to crawl through; and for those interested in hieroglyphics the walls are an endless source of astonishment and wonder.
Additionally, in most areas the colors remain vivid and true. Scarabs, pictured twice here, are quite common in ancient artwork. Commonly known as dung beetles, these scarab beetles are associated with the sun god Ra. We often see them depicted as pushing the sun across the sky in the same way that they push huge balls of dung along the ground in everyday life.
They were thought to bring or to ensure good luck.
While I tend to be quite squeemish about closed-in spaces, particularly underground spaces, I was fine with these tunnels. Part of it was the size of the hallways themselves. Part, too, was that the tomb tunnels are reasonably cool. Oddly, the only place during our entire visit that I had to stop for a moment to catch my breath was coming up out of one of these tombs in which the ramp was particularly long and steep.
When we got out, the sun was still burning brightly in the sky, and it was still 102 degrees. And it was time to move on.
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