Day 4 - Tel Amarna and Akhenaten

Day 4 – Whew. Today is one of those travel days that reminds me that not all travel is glamorous. More on that later…….We left the hotel at 9am after a breakfast of eggs, pita bread, juice and coffee. We picked up an armed (with machine guns) escort right outside the hotel and drove towards Tel Amarna. Tel Amarna is where King Akhenaten ruled. Before him, all of Egypt was poly-theistic, which means they worshipped many gods – Amun, Aten, Ra, etc. When Akhenaten came into power, he decided to move the capital city from Thebes (now known as Luxor) and start worshipping only one god, Aten (from ancient Egyptian mythology, Aten is the rays of the sun with little hands on the end). Amarna is also on the East side of the Nile but he decided to also change the custom of building tombs on the west bank and started building tombs in Amarna, on the east bank. The other thing that was different was the false doors of the tombs. All the other false doors of all of the kings look identical. Akhenaten’s was different.

All of Akhenaten’s Amarna was built in 11 years. He died after only 11 years in Amarna. Many of the tombs were left incomplete because when he died, everything went back to Thebes. This was mostly spearheaded by Aye, Akenaten's uncle and chief advisor as well as the Commander General of the army. He was advising King Tutankhamun (King Tut) because Tut was the son of Akhenaten but he was very young and really couldn’t assume the responsibility for ruling the country. Aye actually became King and when he died, Tut took over.

We visited the Great Temple of Aten at Amarna where Akhenaten worshiped Aten. I'll try to send some pictures to Mrs. Parisi. We visited the Northern Tombs, Southern Tombs, and the Royal Tombs where the daughter of Akhenaten was thought to have been buried. The scenes on the walls seem to indicate that the entire family was to be buried there but the 2nd daughter was the only family member to die while Akhenaten was still in power. There are 2 videos that show the landscape of the tomb area and us walking towards one of the tombs. All the tombs in this area were built into the side of the mountain range.



Cameras were not allowed in any of the tombs today but we were able to “grease some palms” and get some photos inside but no videos. Sorry!

Let me describe the adventuresome travel we had getting to and from Amarna today. As I said, we left the hotel and drove, with escort, to a ferry dock. This took about 45 minutes. We were going about 90mph down bad roads filled with other, slower drivers as well as donkeys and bulls, people walking and people on bicycles. We were zipping all around the road in an effort to get to wherever we were going as fast as possible. A good example of the driving here would be coming out of the parking garage after a Colts game and speeding down Meridian Street at 90 mph with all of the lanes full of slower cars.

We arrived at the dock and waited for the ferry with a bunch of locals. Some children came up to our van trying to get us to give them money. We were told that they are basically “hired” by adults to take money from tourists. The children don’t get to keep the money. We saw a family washing clothes by the river (see picture below). The little girl kept waving at us. Her mother didn’t like that and kept scolding her.



We drove the van onto the ferry and went across the river – about 10 minutes. Once on the other side, we repeated the fast driving and arrived at the Temple and Tombs of Akhenaten at Amarna.

Almost 10 years ago, there was a bad incident with some tourists in Egypt. Tourism is really the main industry in Egypt so the President decided to install Tourist Police everywhere in the country. Tourists are now given very high priority. I think I might have mentioned earlier that tourism vans have no speed limits. We can get to wherever we want to, at any speed. Now, when tourists are in some of the more desolate areas, like Amarna, they have to be accompanied by these Tourist Police. They carry around machine guns and escort the tourist everywhere. We have found that they don’t really follow any rules and just wait for money handouts. An example is when they say we can’t take pictures in the tombs but for $1, they will turn their backs.

The last part of our day was spent at the home of the uncle of our driver, Josef. He owns an orange grove where they also grow peppers and eggplants. We came into the grove and walked to a canopy type area and sat on the ground with our guides and the armed security guards. There’s nothing like a picnic with machine guns!! We were served grilled chicken, rice, fresh tomatoes, oranges, potatoes and a very thin pancake that tasted like pita bread. It was a wonderful experience to eat like the locals. See the video of the food spread.

We arrived back at the hotel to clean the sand out of our shoes at about 5pm. We are still cleaning!

More later….

Phone Call

We enjoyed seeing and talking with you all. We will check our schedule for next week and make sure we are at a place with Internet access. There are also Wikipedia links for many of the places I've mentioned, so you can click on any of them in the blog for additional information and pictures. Have a great week and enjoy the videos!

Day 3

Day 3 in Egypt – I’m right now going 150km/hr down a desert highway, passing cars right and left; not staying in any lane. We have been escorted by armed police guards for about an hour. Every 15 minutes we stop at a check point and get handed off to another set of 4 or 5 young men that escort us to the next stop. Our guides are giving the escorts money at every point along the way. We have been also handing out fruit and water that we have picked up during the drive so far. I have since found out that there is no speed limit for tourist vans. We can go as fast as we want but everyone else has to follow the speed limit.

Here’s what we’ve done today….We checked out of the hotel in Giza and drove to the necropolis at Saqqara. It’s a large complex that houses the pyramid built by King Djoser (also referenced as Zhoser and Zoser) of the 3rd Dynasty. Surrounding the pyramid are tombs of nobles and workers that are currently being excavated. There is a courtyard area where the Hep-Sed Festival took place. This festival was typically done every 30 years of reign where the king would wrestle a bull to prove he was still strong and able to rule the country. Sometimes the festival would be at other yearly intervals. The Djoser Pyramid is in good shape but the other areas are deeply ruined. You can view this interactive illustration as well as the short video below:



We then drove to Memphis. Memphis used to be the capital of Lower Egypt (which is really the Northern capital). A very large statue of Ramses II was found there by farmers. Other items have been found but basically Memphis is now a farming community. There is a small museum that was built to house the statue of Ramses II. Farmers own the land now in Memphis and some of them have excavated on their land and found gold items and statues that they have sold to build nice homes.

We had lunch at an orange grove. We were served pita bread with hummus, cheese sauce (like queso), cucumber sauce (for Gyros), and spicy, marinated eggplant. This was excellent. We were serenaded by 3 men playing Egyptian music. The rest of the group decided to dance with them.

We then drove to Dashur where the pyramids of Sneferu are located. Sneferu is the father of Cheops, or Khufu. Sneferu is credited as building the first, stable pyramid in Egypt. The first one is the called the bent pyramid because he started building it at a 54 degree angle but realized about ½ way through that the pyramid would be too tall so he changed the angle to 43 degrees. It’s 101 meters tall and 188 meters wide.

Sneferu decided to try again and built the Red Pyramid about ½ mile away. This one was bigger at 220 meters wide and 99 meters high. The angle of the pyramid is 43.7 degrees.

As I said at the beginning of this entry, we are driving south to Minya in order to go to Tel Amarna where Akhenaten ruled. More on him tomorrow.

Your Questions

Hello again. Can you all post some of your questions on the blog so that I can answer them? I'll try to answer as many as I can during the Monday phone calls but I can start researching them beforehand. I have some answers to some of your questions already and hopefully I'll get to speak with you tomorrow. Bye again!

First Days in Egypt

Hello everyone. Scott and I arrived in Cairo, via Greensboro and New York on Friday afternoon. We had a few delays but nothing that held us up too much. We spent the afternoon walking around our hotel and buying some bottled water. We were told to avoid tap water so we need lots of bottled water for drinking and brushing our teeth. Our friend, John and Leslie, from Washington DC came in a few hours later than us and met us at our hotel. We are at the Hotel Zoser. It says it's 4 stars but that might be Egyptian stars and not US stars.

Day 1 of our official tour began on Saturday. We met our tour guides - Mr. Abdo and Osama in the lobby as well as our driver, Tony Stewart. Just kidding. His name is Josef but he could be a NASCAR driver anyday of the week. There are no lanes on the roads and people drive very crazy. I will try to stick the video camera out of the window in the next few days to try to give you an idea of how scary it is. People honk horns and flash their lights and drive wherever they want.

Our first top was the Great Pyramids. We are actually staying in Giza which is right outside of Cairo. It's sort of like how Westfield is right outside of Indianapolis. The pyramids are only about 10 minutes down the same road as our hotel. You can see from one of the videos how close Giza is to the actual pyramids. The "Great Pyramid" is the biggest and was built by Cheops (aka Khufu) in 2600 BC during the 4th dynasty. There is a false door that the builders make on all the pyramids to fool tomb robbers. It leads no where. The actually doorway is usually underground. We could not go inside the Great Pyramid. You can see it in the video below:



The 2nd pyramid (Khafre's Pyramid) was built by Cheop's son, Khafre. We did go down into a tomb in this pyramid but we were not able to bring our cameras. We went down a long, narrow, short stairway that was about 100 steps. We had to bend down considerably to make the downward descent. It was dark and very scary and very claustrophobic. At the bottom, we could stand up and walk about 25 feet until we came to stairs leading up. We climbed another narrow, short corridor up another 100 feet and finally got into the tomb. It was a 2 story, open room about 15'X8' with a place in the ground for a sarcophagus. It was empty and there was no writing on the walls except for where the excavator signed his name and the date.

We drove by the third pyramid (Menkaure's Pyramid - built by another pharaoh, Menhaura) to a bunch of camels. We got on a camel and took a ride around the desert for about 10 minutes. It was very interesting and hard to stay on the camel. You can view the video below and maybe see what I mean:



After the pyramids, we went about 5 minutes to look at the Great Sphinx. You can actually see the back of the sphinx from the pyramids. The sphinx is the guardian of the Giza Plateau and was built in what most egyptologist think is 2500 BC, around the time of Cheops. It is the body of a lion and the face of a man (thought to be Cheops). It is 66 feet high and solid so we could not enter inside. They are doing some renovation work on it so we couldn't get very near. The nose and the false beard have fallen off due to erosion. Part of the false beard is in a back closet of the Egyptian Museum and the other part is in the British Museum in London. It's a very sandy color.



After driving by the Mosque of Mohammed Ali (the king, not the boxer!), we headed back to the hotel.

Day 2 was spent mostly at the Egyptian Museum. The Egyptian Museum does not allow cameras. When we got there, we went straight to the second floor which houses all of the items found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun (King Tut). He was only king for less than 10 years and died when he was about 19 years old. He was definitely not a very significant ruler in Egypt. He is famous though because his is the only tomb that was found intact by Englishman Howard Carter. There were 3 rooms plus the room where his burial tomb was located. Some of the items in the tomb where an umbrella, 4 jars with all his internal organs, 4 beds, sandals, clothes, staffs, and more than 365 small sarcophagi to protect him into the next world. Most of the hieroglyphs in the tomb describe different things that would protect the King and take him to the next world.

The next area on the 2nd floor was the mummies. We saw the mummies of 9 different Kings and Queens. The mummies were all wrapped in linen from head to neck. The head and arms were showing and were shrunken and wrinkled black, brown and sand colored skin. Some had hair still and some had their teeth sticking out of their mouth. You could see some fingernails on some. Each of the royal mummies has their hands crossed on their chest signifying royalty. I think dressing up like a mummy would be a great idea for Halloween.

We also saw animal mummies. Egyptians mummified their pets to take with them into the next world when they died. Some had their own sarcophagi and some were put into their owner’s. They mummified dogs, cats, cows, bulls, crocodiles, donkeys, elephants, fish, gazelle, horse, ibis, lion, lizard, monkey, ram raptor, scarab, shrew and snakes.

After the museum, we went to the Khan El-Khalili Bazaar. It's basically a section of downtown Cairo that sells a lot of souvenirs and has a lot of coffee and tea shops. There is a video that shows us walking down the streets of the bazaar.

Once we left the bazaar, we went back to the hotel for dinner.

Tomorrow we will be at the following coordinates: 29degrees 51'24.55"North, 31degrees, 14'59.23" East. Can you figure out where we will be?

I hope to speak with all of you Monday afternoon but I'm not sure of the internet situation at the hotel where we will be.