Nag el Hamdulab

Rock carvings!
These were first identified and photographed in the 30s or so by an Egyptian Egyptologist, Labib Habachi. The photos were stored in the Chicago House at Luxor. Maria Catto has been working at this site in Aswan and reconstructed the images because, since Habachi photographed them, some IDIOTS have scratched at them and almost destroyed them. Probably in a fit of religious piety, thinking they were an affront to god.
These scenes were carved into the rock a little over 5,000 years ago. They date to around 3500 BCE, to the time between the Scorpion King and Narmer, and they show a mixture of royal festival iconography that bridges the differences in the early examples of these scenes. The earliest focused on boats while slightly later ones focused on the king and beasts. This one has both. The king with a dog and retainers carrying flags and boats.
So some lame-ass religious zealot almost erased a fascinating and potentially important part of history, out of misguided religious duty. This is one reason why I don't like religion.

Giza with Sayed

We went to Giza to the pyramids!!!! It was Sayed's first trip there but it was my 4th so I felt like an expert :) But we did go into the burial chamber of the Khafra pyramid - something I had never dared to do before. We wanted to go into the Khufu pyramid but they ran out of tickets while we were waiting in line.
But the BEST part about this trip to the pyramids was that we had out marriage papers and I got to pay the EGYPTIAN price to get in. It rocked my world. 5EGP instead of 60EGP.

Dendara set 4

These scenes are from one of the little rooms upstairs at the temple and narrate the mummification and resurrection of Osiris in an endearing little combination of bestiality and necrophilia :)
See, the story goes...
Osiris and Isis and Seth and Nepthys are all siblings, but Osiris is the king of the gods. Seth is a total bad-ass and kills Osiris so that he can be king of the gods. But, Osiris's wife (their sister) Isis is an even BIGGER bad-ass and takes all Osiris's dismembered parts and wraps them back up together again (the first mummy) and then she takes the form of a kite (like a falcon) and does a bird lap-dance for the dead Osiris and is able to get him to impregnate her with his own spirit so he gets born again as his son/himself Horus.
This cycle gets re-told in a different way with Nut, who, as the sky, is impregnated with the sun, gestates it throughout the night and gives birth to it again every morning. The sun is Osiris at night and Horus in the day.
It gets complicated.
But never boring.
;)

Dendara set 3

Nut on the ceiling.
Pronounced Noot like toot, not "nut" like Tut.
She is the sky goddess, sister of Geb the earth god.Born from air and moisture (daughter of Shu the air god and Tefnut the moister goddess).
The sky goddess was all over the ceilings of this place. Beautiful.
But it was very hard to get a picture of it because it is very big and you can't get further away than the floor. My camera doesn't have a wide-angle setting, so I could only get one section of Nut's body at a time.
I walked to the roof before my little group and when I got there I was the only one there so I walked through a rope barrier and tried to climb up onto the very top. But of course a guard saw me and yelled at me so I had to come back down.
But I made him take cool pictures of me on the roof. And he didn't even get me with my eyes closed. Maybe I should've traded AJ for him?
I could have stayed here all day I think.
I added the paranormal label to these pictures because there is something really divine about this place.

Dendara set 2

The Hathor-columns in this hall are just gorgeous. And I tried to get lots of pictures with me looking cool in here, but it's hard to do because the columns are so tall you can't quite get a close up of a person and still get the full size of the columns. The paint is original and they are in the process of cleaning and restoring this whole temple. There weren't all that many people here when we came and I wonder if it ever gets many tourists? I hope so.
They are renovating, or maybe building for the first time, a reception area with vendors and a cafe and all. I don't really like this "improvement." I think it displaces a lot of people who probably really need the few bucks they can get from selling some beads to tourists, because now the vendors will have to have the money to pay for a booth. They did this in Mexico you know. In Tepoztlan. Before the revolution. You had to belong to the PRI to get a space for your puesto to sell shit.
Anyway, I'd rather deal with hordes of itinerant vendors than asshole shopkeepers. But that's just me. I'm sure normal people would rather have some semblance of order so I guess the new set-up will have fans.

Dendara set 1

I should give this post an alternative title of "Why does AJ always take my pictures with my eyes closed?"
Alas, it's too late now to fix that.
We rented a car and drove to Abydos one day. On the way to the Anubis temple there, we stopped at the Hathor Temple at Dendera. This is one of the best places in the world. I will post too many pictures from here.
Briefly, here is what remains of the first pylon entryway to the temple complex. It looks like a portal to another time, huh?
Then we have a picture of me pretending to be Hathor. Ana ba'ra!
Then me looking cool at the columns in front and, again, me looking particularly cool in a Charlie's Angels pose at the entrance.

Medinet Habu Part II

Some scenes from Medinet Habu. Sorry I don't have good commentary from this temple. I'm just trying to get these pictures posted as quickly as I can.

Medinet Habu Temple Part I

We went one afternoon to Medinet Habu Temple. Well, Dani and Katja came to our house fro lunch and then we all went to the temple. It was a good excursion. The temple is pretty and the surrounding area is interesting because of the contrast between desert and ultra-green farmland. We walked the perimeter before we went into the temple and these pictures are from that recon mission. The town I am in front of is no longer a living town, that was one of the villages that got moved. The government built new houses but didn't actually pay people to compensate for losing their family homes (or their traditional livelihood from tunneling under their houses to pilfer tombs). Kind of sad. But life is change.

Valley of the Kings

So AJ and I left work one day and bicycled to the Valley of the Kings. As you can see from the balloon picture, our digs at the Casa Italia overlooked the desert beside the VK so we were already right there in the hood. The freaky thing is that the road into the VK is uphill the entire way, but it looks like it is downhill. See the picture of me riding on the bike? It looks like I am facing downhill, right? But NO!!!! I am pedaling UPHILL. The whole place is an optical illusion. Like the laws of physics stop working there at the place where the kings were buried. And the mountains look alive.
Anyway, after leaving and riding downhill all the way, we wanted junk food. So we pedaled to a circle K (or the local equivalent) and bought chocolate and diet coke and made friends with the cashier who said his name was David Beckham :)
I took one illegal picture in one of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, when the guard wasn't looking, so I posted it here. It is not all that great, but for an illicit photo taken on the sly from hip level while walking it's ok.

Tomb Work

So, what we have been doing is organizing and recording all of the pieces of walls and columns that were recovered in the excavations of this tomb and trying to find where they fit together and where they fit on the walls. This is really fun work. I can't find anything to complain about. Except that tomorrow is our last day.
We were able to find a lot of the North wall and here I am with a really nice piece from the entryway to the second pillared hall.
Oh, I wish I'd been able to photograph the mummy head in the box in the corridor. I can complain about that. It was so cool. There are apparently loads of mummies in Egyptian tombs. Like tons of them. They are everywhere. And our tomb has pieces and bits and all, but the excavation team has pretty much put them all in boxes and they are stored in the surrounding corridors of the tomb. So when Mariam was showing us around the first day, AJ found a box with a mummy head in it and the box was labeled "mummy". It was just too cool. But we can't take pictures of it. Alas. This is not an open tomb so it is not supposed to be photographed. Fuckity, fuckity, fuck. Well. Anyway. The work itself is totally fun and I will really miss the smell of tomb in the mornings.
I soooooo hope we get to do this again next year!!!!!

Opening the tomb

Our inspector Mahmoud was finally able to meet us and open our tomb. Here he is with Ganawy, the guy that is supposed to help us with the heavy stuff, and some other guy who hasn't come back since so I don't know him.
The opening of the tomb was pretty cool in a very low-key sort of way. The locks had actually been sealed from when it was closed when the Italians left not long ago, so they had to break the seals. Cool.

Queen of Punt

Now I could complain forever about the lack of concensus, but that's probably what makes Egyptology fun :)
Anyway, here is the queen of Punt from the Cairo Museum, originally from Hatshepsut's Temple. As you can see, her back is curved and her body is fat. People go to great lengths to argue what this means. Some people say she has a disease, like elephantiasis. Some people say it is a way to make her look less beautiful than Hatshepsut. Nobody knows. But it is a rarity in Egyptian art for any woman to be depicted like this, therefor it must mean something. Maybe it was just how she looked, sort of. I mean, there's nothing wrong with being fat and lots of cultures find it attractive. So maybe the queen of Punt was just normal or even really cool for her culture?