Cece poses for a moment in the garden.

The paper umbrellas were a big hit at the wedding.  Not only did they help everyone keep cool, but they were great props for the pictures!

What a cutie!

This is a family portrait of the Cotton side of the family at Tim’s and Stephanie’s wedding.

The wedding was held at Avon Gardens.

Clearly, it is important to be careful with beans.

At this time of year, Rennes gets close to 18 hours of day light. I took advantage of this by getting up early in the morning to take a walk, and even before 6 in the morning on a cloudy day, I was able to take decent photographs. Plus, due to the early hour, I had the streets almost to myself.

I’m not particularly nostalgic about living in Rennes, but this view of a quiet, narrow street at dawn reminds me of what I did like about living there.

A view down Rue Saint-Milaine from the east end

Carissa with a paper umbrella.

Mommy and Sadie

CeCe on a foot bridge.

Sandi and I

The valley is, unfortunately, another one of those places where photography is not allowed. Or at least, it is currently not allowed. The numerous pictures I’ve seen on the internet of the valley suggests to me that the ban on photography is recent or only randomly enforced.

It was certainly being enforced when we were there. Carissa and I decided to go into King Tut’s tomb, which has a separate admission fee from the rest of the valley. While we were inside the tomb, I got the wise idea to post to Facebook a status update about where I was — I had seen earlier that, surprisingly, cell reception was very good in the valley.

I had no sooner taken my phone out of my pocket and turned it on when a man guarding the tomb walked up and demanded my phone. the phone has a camera built in, and apparently even the presence of the camera was not allowed, regardless of the fact that I wasn’t using the camera.

So I had to follow the man out of the tomb to the office of the director. The director wanted to see what pictures were on my phone and said that I would have to delete any pictures taken in the tomb. Well, there weren’t any picture of the tomb on my camera — I hadn’t been trying to take any. Unfortunately for me, the phone locked up when I was trying to open the photo application. This was not making the director happy because it seemed like I was trying to hide something. I eventually had to reboot the phone, which takes forever even in the best of circumstances but is absolutely excruciating when you are under pressure.

I think Einstein once used a similar analogy to help people understand how to think about how time slows down as the speed of an object approaches the speed of light. It’s like trying to sit on a hot stove. Time seems to move really slowly.

Eventually, the director told me to leave the phone with him, and I should come back when I was done visiting the other tombs. After I rejoined the group, our tour guide went back to the office and retrieved my phone.

No harm, no foul, I guess. I have to say that I was a little freaked out by the experience, though.

So obviously, I’m not going to be able to post any pictures of this part of the tour that were taken by us.

The really odd thing is that I can’t even tell you for sure which tombs we visited other than KV62. The tombs opened for tourists are rotated all of the time (except for KV62, which is almost always open). As I understand it, there are about 10 tombs that have been set up to be visited safely by tourists, and on any given day, 3 of those tombs are open. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down which ones we were going into at the time, so now I’ve completely forgotten.

Looking at the atlas from the Theban Mapping Project, I guess that we went to:

KV6 — Rameses IX. This one seems to be in the right location to be the first one we went into.
KV11 — Rameses III. This one seems likely to be the tomb we visited in this area as it seems to only be partially accessible, and one of the tombs we visited was only partially accessible in this same way.
KV16 — Rameses I. I think this was the last tomb we went into. The pictures of the burial chamber look familiar.

And of course:

KV62 — King Tutankhamen

Part of my confusion is that in some ways, the tombs are hard to tell apart. The burial rituals and the information written on the walls for the king to use when he is resurrected are very similar in style amongst all of the tombs. There really is a sense that once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Obviously, that isn’t really true, but as an amateur without any real skills in decoding the contents of the walls, it is very easy for everything you see to blur together.

KV62 was more memorable, though, partly because it was put together in haste when the boy king died at an early age. The tomb is very small but contains a beautiful mural on the back wall of the burial chamber that was unlike anything else we saw in the valley.

Luxor was the home to the capital of the New Kingdom, when it was known as “Waset”. It is home to several famous temples, as well as the Valley of the Kings. As is traditional in ancient Egypt, the monuments are divided between those for the living on the east side of the river and those for the dead on the west. We spent the morning on the west side, then moved to the east side in the afternoon.

It’s impossible in such a short time to get anything but a brief survey of Luxor. One could easily spend weeks there without seeing everything.

One of the interesting things we noticed during our brief time is the huge differences in the state of preservation of various monuments. Some things we saw were virtually destroyed, some had undergone extensive reconstruction efforts, and some had survived thousands of years without tremendous damage.

The Colossi of Memnon are a good example of the nearly destroyed state. The Colossi are two tall statues of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, and were originally set beside the entrance of his memorial temple on the west bank. Today, there is hardly any part of the temple left beyond the statues and the statues themselves have suffer extensive damage. In fact, it seems that the temple may have been gone for a long time because the Greeks are the ones who rechristened the statues with the name “Memnon”, meaning “Ruler of the Dawn” and the statues seem to have been mostly freestanding even at that time. The name choice may be related to the alleged “voice” of one of the the statues which was reported in antiquity after the statues sustained damage in an earthquake in 27 BCE. The voice was believed to have oracular powers, and always occurred near dawn when the wind was blowing in just the right way. For the record, the voice has long been silenced, possibly due to a reconstruction attempt by the Romans.

The Colossi of Memnon. The statue on the right is the one the used to “sing”. The layers of rock you can see on the top half of that statue are parts of the Roman reconstruction. The statue is currently under going some additional repair work.

Here is one of the videos Carissa made:

I’ve always appreciated these little kiosks as fun little souvenirs you can send to yourself of your adventures. I imagine we will one day look back at these as the really bad postcards of the early 21st century.

Sandi, Cece and Sadie have been in Europe for the past two weeks on a trip with Sandi’s Aunt Joyce. This is the trip we promised the girls after we decided it was going to be too expensive for all five of us to go to Egypt. Carissa and I haven’t had much contact with them except for a few days when they were staying with Sandi’s friend Karen in Rothenburg.

It seems like the trip has been going well, with one small problem: the memory card that Sandi used to take pictures of Sadie in front of the house where she was born has died. I think Sandi was going to try to go back to Niedereschach to try again before they had to be back in Zurich last night for their flight back to the states this morning.

With any luck, they should be back in Indy before 9 tonight.

Carissa and I have been holding down the fort here at home except for a long Memorial Day weekend trip to New York City. Carissa and I had enjoyed the few days we spent there at the end of our Egypt trip and I found cheap air tickets to go back. Actually, we did most of the trip on the cheap: we stayed in a hostel, we ate breakfast in the room most mornings, and we bought 7-day subway passes that we practically wore out. It wasn’t necessarily the kind of trip Sandi would have wanted to take to NYC (particularly the part about staying in a hostel), but for Carissa and me, it worked out great.

I hope to get back making more regular updates to the blog after today. We’ve got tons of stuff in the queue that we can post about, we just need time to get to it. I still have 15 or so potential posts about Egypt and Petra left, plus now we have all the new stuff from NYC and Europe!

Producing a halfway decent video takes a lot of effort, even if you know what you are doing.  It’s not always clear that we do.

We had to take a lot of short cuts to get this done by today.  We edited out huge unfinished sections (it’s still 32 minutes long!).  We split up the team between writing, layout and recording and tried to stitch it together in the editing room.  We switched the format of the video from HD to SD so that our tools could run at a reasonable speed.  We left in a handful of  <ahem> mistakes in the audio, including some pretty weird issues such as too much bass being present on Carissa’s narration track.

We won’t make the mistake of listening to the movie using a subwoofer again, if you know what I mean.  It’s strange to think you can get blown out of the room by Carissa’s voice, but you can.

The next step will be to make  a “director’s cut” to restore the unfinished segments, fix the audio, go back to HD video and so on.  It needed to be done today, though, so we got it done today.  I have vaguely been considering adding bumpers (where they tell you what they are going to show you after the break) to each of the segments so that the video looks more like something you’d see on the Discovery channel.  I think it would be sort of funny, but it would actually make the video more annoying.  I might change my mind if I can find some Arabic McDonald’s and Coke commercials to splice in.

And you know what?  It’s not bad.  So I’ve decided to go ahead and post what we’ve got.  When we get the final version finished (which could very well be months from now), I may replace this version.

Much like the video we did several years ago for our trip to Italy, one of my favorite parts is the music used throughout.  I’m a little self-conscious about posting the video publicly to the web though because we don’t speak Arabic, and most of the time it’s been very difficult to find even translations of the titles, much less the lyrics.  So it’s entirely possible that the some of the music choices will seem bizarre to any passing Arabic speakers who somehow happen to view the video.

Without further ado, here is the video of our trip to Egypt and Jordan:

For some reason I don’t fully understand, the video won’t play back on Chrome (IE, Safari, and Firefox work fine). As a workaround, here is a link to download the video: Egypt 2010

The download version will also play back in higher resolution, so you might want to download it even if you can watch it above.

Reading all of the books was preparation for participating in a challenge where they compete against other teams to answer questions about the books.  The moderator alternates asking questions to each team, then the team tries to answer with the name of the book (one point) and the author (one point).  If a team answers the question incorrectly, the other team gets an opportunity to “steal” by naming the correct book for one point.  The first team to 20 wins, as long as they are ahead by at least 2 points… otherwise it goes back and forth like a tennis match.

Carissa’s team won a 4-team tournament to represent her school, Westlake Elementary, a few weeks ago.  Today was the township tournament.  9 schools participated in a single elimination tournament.

Carissa’s first match today against Chapelwood was pretty scary.  Her team missed a question early in the game (and the other team stole a point as a result) and so our girls were behind for several rounds.  Cece looked like she was going to cry if her sister didn’t win.  Sadie said afterwards that her heart was pounding really fast.  But in the second half of the game, the other team missed 3 questions and the girls managed to catch up and win.

In the second round against Chapel Glen, the two teams traded a few missed questions here and there, but the match reached 20 points all tied up.  After a few more rounds, the other team missed a question and the Westlake team pulled ahead for the win.

So Carissa’s team made it to the finals against Rhoades Elementary.  This was a very tight match.  Both teams knew the books well, and it showed.  Round after round both team answered question after question correctly, but somewhere in the high twenties, the Rhoades team got a question they didn’t know… and the Westlake team was already ahead.

Each girl on the team got a $25 Barnes and Noble gift card and bragging rights for the school until next year.  This is the fourth year for the tournament and the team is already talking about preparing for next year!

Here is the winning team, wearing the t-shirts we had made with the team name on them: G.R.E.A.T — Girls Reading, Educating, Achieving Together.  From left to right: Lizzy, Maddi, Abby, Carissa, Ms. Klinker and Jessica.

For the record, here is the tournament bracket.

Looking at this image of the temple again reminded me of one other fact I learned about the temple.  There is an inscription on the temple saying that it was designed by Imhotep, whom I mentioned in passing on the post about the step pyramid.  Since the step pyramid was built around 2600 B.C.E. and Edfu was not stated until about 200 B.C.E., it’s not likely that it was the same guy, and it’s also not likely that he left papyrus blueprints lying around for his successors to use.  Instead, by this time, Imhotep was worshipped as a god in his own right, and it is likely that the inscription really means that the plan for the temple was inspired by Imhotep, the god of architecture.

As it turns out, though, one of the other enduring traits of Imhotep is that he is credited with writing the first true medical text, in that sense that it doesn’t resort to magic for diagnosis or healing but contains practical information describing diseases, injuries and treatments.  The earliest known version of the text dates from about 14 centuries after Imhotep’s death, so it isn’t really clear that Imhotep really wrote the text or if it was attributed to him because he was considered to be so smart that he had to have written it.

Of course, since he was so smart and did so many impressive things, his reputation grew over time (even long after his death) until finally the Egyptians raised him to the status of god — and then they promptly started praying to him for acts of magic to heal them.  Kinda ironic, no?

Edfu is probably the best preserved of the remaining ancient Egyptian temples.  Stylistically, it looks a lot like Philae.  It is surrounded by a large mud brick wall that is at least partly modern, but our guide assured us that the wall had been used since antiquity to reduce the occurrence of flooding in the temple.

The temple dates to the 3rd century B.C.E. and was built over the course of the following two centuries.  I’m not sure when the temple fell into disuse, but by 1860, only a fraction of the temple was visible above the sand when the decision was taken to unearth it.

David Robert’s 1860 lithograph of Edfu temple

Here is how that same section of the temple looks today.

I’m not sure why the Egyptians have decided to hang Horus, the god of the temple.  Maybe it has something to do with the birth ritual that is supposed to be held in front of the temple every year that celebrates the rebirth of Horus.  I guess for him to be reborn, somebody has to off him first.  

A close up of the columns.

As we have discovered elsewhere, paint on the ceilings survives better than paint anywhere else on the temple.  It would have been really magnificent to see this temple during the time it was used.  On the front facade of the temple, there are holes in the wall that were likely used to hold standards.  The ancient Egyptians saw this temple much differently than the shell we see today.

A cartouche spelling the name of Cleopatra.  Carissa and Anna spent a fair amount of time looking at hieroglyphs on the walls of the temple and this is one of the ones they learned pretty quickly to identify by sight.  There are many examples of Cleopatra’s name on the walls, written inside the royal cartouche, and the name of her father, Ptolemy, appears many times as well within the temple.  The royalty of Egypt went to great lengths to remind everyone who was in charge.

For an explanation of how to decode the cartouche take a look here.  Note that this cartouche reads from right to left… The Egyptians write text both directions.  You can tell which direction to read by looking at which way the hieroglyphs face — characters facing right mean read from the right, and characters facing left mean read from the left.

She’s a little hard to make out, but the oddly shaped woman whose arms run down the left side and whose legs run down the right is the Egyptian goddess of the sky, Nut.

The light blue represents the day sky and the dark blue represents night.  If you look closely at the dark blue, you can see a star pattern on it.

This rather awkward depiction is typical of how the goddess was portrayed.  I think the idea was to show that she completely surrounded the world in some odd, two-dimensional way.

Here are some other examples of how Nut is depicted:

This carving is known as the offering of Uha, and represents a series of devices that are probably medical or surgical in nature.  The carving is one piece of evidence that medicine was practiced at a relatively high level of advancement compared to contemporary civilizations, and, for that matter, to many subsequent civilizations up until the modern age.  The existence of tantalizing bits of evidence like this has led to lots of wild speculation about ancient Egypt, mostly from the same crowd that believes that the pyramids are actually some sort of untapped perpetual power source, the likes of which you will start to encounter if you spend very much time researching Egypt on the Internet.   There seems to be a fair number of people that believe that the pharaoh’s medicine could have been more advanced than ours.

I’ve always been fascinated by ancient Egypt, but always just in the sense of wanting to understand the facts of Egyptian history, not imagining that these people were actually super-powered aliens with magical technology.  This carving seems to be one of the jumping off points to that kind of thinking for some people.

For what it’s worth, here is a site that explores what the evidence we have about medicine in ancient Egypt probably means.  While this interpretation is not as fantastical as some explanations you can find, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t fascinating.

Here’s another interesting panel from the temple.  This depicts what is probably a stethoscope, which didn’t enter into modern medicine until the 1800′s.  Again, there is a school of thought that takes a piece of evidence like this and says, “Look how advanced the Egyptians were.  If we can find such things in the parts of the record that survive, just imagine what things they must have had for which we have no record!”

For myself on the other hand, I think, “Wow, just imagine if that technology hadn’t gotten lost for a couple millennia.”

Now if an archeologist digs up an ancient MRI with a plug that connects to the Giza pyramid mains, I will be happy to change my mind about how advanced the Egyptians were.  :)

If you look at the front of the temple, the left side is dedicated to Sobek, usually depicted in human form but with the head of a crocodile. Sobek seems to have a varied history in the pantheon of Egyptian gods. He is variously feared as the god of the crocodiles, worshipped as the protector from same (very important if your job involved standing in or near the river!), depicted as one of the creators of the world, and, along with Hathor, viewed as a fertility god. Dude gets around.

The other side of the temple is dedicated to the falcon-god Horus. Horus has his own checkered past and appears in myth as the god of war, the god of the sky or the god of protection. In modern times, he is mostly remembered as the god of protection thanks to the popularity of new age symbolism. The eye of Horus is a common symbol that can be purchased almost anywhere in Egypt (not to mention the rest of the world). Carissa bought a small eye of Horus charm in Cairo that she is jokingly using to ward off the “mummy’s curse”, which we’ve had plenty of opportunity to trigger already, and certainly will tempt the fates again in the Valley of the Kings.

The eyes of Horus.  Usually you get just one to serve as a charm.

The temple, which was restored in 1893, has suffered fairly extensive damage through flooding, defacement by the Copts, and by people reappropriating stones for other building projects (much like the outer covering of the Giza pyramids).

The front of the Temple.

A closer view of the top of the temple.  Notice the traces of paint that suggest how magnificent the temple must have looked in its heyday.

More columns with traces of bright colors.

A picture of the ceiling in part of the temple.  Click on the picture to see the close up of the detail.  It’s worth it.

Here is an interesting stereogram I made near the entrance to the temple.

Between Aswan and Luxor, the primary tourist transport mode is cruise ship. We see them everywhere along the river, each carrying a hundred or more passengers — sometime much more. We, however, did not go from Aswan to Luxor this way. The main reason is that it is very difficult to get triple accommodations on the ships, but also because it adds several days to the trip. Most cruise ships seem to overnight at either Kom Ombo or Edfu, the two main tourist strops between Aswan and Luxor, and some overnight at both.

We left Aswan and by the afternoon, we were in Luxor. This included stops at both Kom Ombo and Edfu. Trust me, this is a much better choice with kids. The other nice aspect of this trip is that we got to see a bit of the Egyptian country side. We saw lots of things up close that we probably wouldn’t have from the deck of a ship.

Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I kept sticking our camera out the window and taking pictures of things we saw as we drove.

Egypt grows a lot of sugar cane in this region.  We saw a field like this nearly every where the green zone around the Nile was wide enough to support it.

Sugar cane is harvested and transported by any means available.  In addition to this donkey cart, we saw it being transported by truck and by bicycle.

This odd little tricycle is used as a taxi.

Garlic is also a very common harvest at this time of year.  One of our guides told us that if it wasn’t for garlic, Egyptians wouldn’t be able to eat.

This is a great example of how quickly fertile land can turn into desert in Egypt.  The small boat in the foreground with the distinctive sail is a felucca.

A minor traffic jam in BF, Egypt.  I don’t know what kind of car that is, but it looks like it came from eastern Europe.  we’ve seen several others like this during the trip.

I apologize for the blurriness of this one, but it’s actually motion blur, not a focus issue.  This vehicle passed us at a pretty high rate of speed, and unbelievably, there are people hanging on with just one hand.  We have been very impressed by how common a mode of transportation this is in Egypt.

Here are some of the sights we saw along the way.

View of the Nile with our hotel on Elephantine Island in the background. Lonely Planet describes our hotel’s tower as “architecturally insensitive” in the text of their Egypt guide book.

Carissa and Sandi, sailing on the Nile.

The captain of a felucca that passed near ours.

After my colleagues and I finished our meeting, we tried unsuccessfully to change our tickets to an earlier flight, so we ended up with a few hours to kill.  It turned out that the historic section of Philadelphia was only a mile or so from the location of our meeting, so we decided to walk there to take a short look around.

We arrived just short of 5PM, which is when most of the sights around Independence Square shut down, but we did get a brief opportunity to see the Liberty Bell.

It’s actually smaller than I expected.  Although, in retrospect, I don’t know why I thought it would be large.  Probably, I just assumed it must be big due to its legendary status.

For dinner, we ate at the nearby City Tavern, which was established in 1773 and continues to serve food in the style of the revolutionary era.  It’s definitely worth a visit if you find yourself in the area.

The monastery was originally dedicated to a local saint Anba Hedra (or Hadra), who left his fiancee on his wedding day to become a monk.  When it was rebuilt, it was rededicated to St. Simeon, who lived at the monastery.

According to legend, the dark spot in the picture above was where a hanger was located from which St. Simeon used to hang his beard in order to prevent himself from nodding off during his extremely long sessions of prayer.

Very little remains of the monastery’s artwork, but there are visible traces here and there.  This picture is of the remains of the chapel’s ceiling, and you can just barely make out a few figures if you look closely.

For Carissa, the best part of the trip to St. Simeon’s was getting to ride a camel again.  The camels here were much smaller than the ones at Giza and were much easier to ride.

As I mentioned in my earlier post about the Nubian village near Philae, recent Egyptian history has not been very kind to Nubian culture.  This museum tries to document some of what has disappeared and what remains.

This is a model of a troop of Nubian archers.  We’ve seen several of these models.  Most (all?) have been recovered from the tombs of dignitaries.  There is a definite style to these models.  There are usually 40 warriors and all are modelled individually.  We’ve also seen some similar models where all of the warriors appear to be of Arabic descent instead of Nubian.

This statue was recovered from Karnak and depicts a high priest of Amun from the 25th dynasty.

This model of a Nubian village shows typical clothing and some of the interesting design work on the houses.  While the man in the picture is wearing white, traditionally, all of the women wear black.

The statue below is a modern copy of a statue that we saw in the Egyptian Museum.  He’s standing near the departure gates at the Aswan airport.  I didn’t have very much else to do at 4 in the morning, so I took opportunity to make a stereogram.

Because of its shape and open structure, it makes a nice stereogram.

Here is an example, from the facade of the main gate:

As it turns out, Philae has sustained this damage due the the various uses it has served over the centuries to many cultures.  The damage to the art is the work of generations of iconoclasts beginning with the Coptic Christians who have gone to great lengths to deface the temple’s portrayals of gods (and pharaohs as well, at least when they are dressed as gods).  By contrast, the images of mortals are (normally) not damaged, as you can see in the lower right corner of the picture above.

There are other cases of intentional damage as well such as places where the walls have been worn down by Greek soldiers sharpening their swords during the Ptolemaic period.

Marks made by Greeks while sharpening there swords — as well as a bit of Greek graffiti.

The damage continues inside the temple as well.  This is a literal defacement of the goddess Hathor.  All it needs now is the hole to be opened up on the other side so that tourists can stick their heads through and get their pictures taken.     I actually started to photoshop my face in there, but it was just too creepy–especially since Hathor is suckling the pharaoh.

During the Egyptian period, the temple was dedicated to Isis, and in fact remained in use for this purpose all the way up until the 6th century AD.  It was the last pagan-era temple still in use at the time.  For some time afterwards, the temple was used as a Christian church until the 7th century, when it was shut down by muslim invaders.

The altar from the 6th century church.

A Greek inscription near the altar wherein the author takes credit for destroying some of the Egyptian carvings.

There is one other type of destructive force that the temple has had to endure: once the first Aswan dam was built by the British in 1902, the temple spent about half the year at least partially submerged.  This has had the effect of removing nearly all of the color from the site.

This is how the temple looked in 1848, according to the artist David Roberts:

Even if you assume Mr. Roberts is over emphasizing the colors, it is still very impressive.

Here is how representative columns look today:

It is still posible to see hints of color here and there, but by and large, the color has washed away with the Nile.

There is an interesting story at this site about how the temple was moved, including a picture of the temple partially submerged and a choice quote from Winston Churchill about how he regarded the loss of Philae under the Nile.

At least 80,000 Nubians were relocated due to the creation of Lake Nasser and some estimates indicate that hundreds of thousands more were displaced without being officially relocated.  Many Nubians are now part of the tourism industry around Aswan, and the boats used to reach the Temple of Philae are all operated by people of Nubian descent.  In fact, many of the boat operators live in the small village just beside the boat docks.

Our guide wasn’t clear if this village was built before or after the dam, but he did say that from an architectural viewpoint, it was representative of many villages that are now submerged.  The buildings are generally very square with bright colors.  Blue and gold are very common, as are murals painted on the walls.  The structures certainly seem more lively than many of the others we saw in the Aswan area, which seem to be the same color as the dirt or sand on which they sit.

The temple is only accessible by boat, so part of the experience is the boat ride to the temple during which we got to see long panoramic views of the temple from the lake.

Here is the first panorama I shot of the temple.  Photoshop wasn’t thrilled about stitching this one together as the two shots were taken while moving.  Fortunately, the shift in perspective is small.

This painting is filled with symbolic papyrus flowers.  The cow on the boat is the goddess Hathor.

The figure in the center here is Nefertari, wearing a head dress symbolic of Hathor.

More papyrus, more Hathoric head dreasses.  There is definitely a theme here.

Another portrait of the queen.

I believe, but I’m not 100% sure, that this last scene is in the Small Temple.  It might be in the Great temple, but based on the fact that the scene portrayed is peaceful, it seems likely that it is in the Small Temple.

The main hall inside the Small temple.  The layout is very similar to the Great temple with an alter at the back.  I was impressed the the depth of the color still visible on the walls.

This is a close up of one of the pillars in the main entrance of the temple.  It is much less imposing than the statues inside the Great temple.  The face at the top is that of Hathor, the goddess of motherhood.  In general, the small temple seems to be designed to be more peaceful than the Great temple.  There are only a few scenes of Ramses II slaughtering his enemies.  :)

Along one of the outside walls, this scene depicts Ramses II burning incense in a ritual in front of the sacred boat of Amun Ra.

Another ritual showing Ramses II standing between Isis and Min.  In case you were wondering, Min is a fertility god.  Just when you think the ancient Egyptians are all worship and no fun…

Much of the rest of the temple is ornamented with examples of Ramses war exploits in Kadash.

Rameses II mercilessly slaughters one of his enemies.

The implication of the paintings is that Ramses II single handedly defeated the Hittites, but the odd thing is that he celebrated his victory by offering a peace treaty to them.  My guide says that archeologist believe that this means his victory is somewhat overstated.

Another ritualistic painting designed to show Rameses II in the company of other gods.

Disclaimer: The pictures I got aren’t labelled or ordered in any way, so I’m having to research the details about the different views as I go.  Some of the pictures I am not completely sure of the locations, and so it is entirely possible that I have confused a picture from one temple with the other.

This is the main entry of the Great Temple.  It looked a lot like this when I saw it, except it was packed pillar-to-pillar with other tourists like me.  :)

A better view of two of the statues of Ramses II in the entryway.  I believe these are the two back statues on the left hand side in the first picture. (The pink streaks are a printing error.)

These statues are at the very back of the temple in the sacrarium.  From left to right, the statues represent Ptah (god of darkness), Amun Ra (king of all gods), Ramses II, and Harmakhis (god of the rising sun).  The position of Ramses II is intended to indicate that he is among equals.

The layout of the temple is designed such that the three statues on the right are fully illuminated by the sun on two specific days of the year, six months apart.  The two dates are the day of Ramses II’s birth, and the day of his coronation.  Ptah, the god of darkness, is never directly illuminated by the sun.

Abu Simbel is an optional part of most tours.  It’s very out of the way, nearly at the border with Sudan, and there isn’t much else nearby to see. What is there, however, are two of the most impressive ancient temple ruins in Egypt.’

The larger of the two temples is dedicated to Ramses II, and the other is dedicated to his favorite wife, Nefertari.  This second temple is unique in Egypt in being dedicated to a consort of the Pharaoh.

The temples, which were carved into the rock face of a mountain, were completed sometime around 1265 BC, and then sometime afterward lost under the shifting sand of the desert.

The Swiss explorer John Louis Burkhardt rediscovered the two temples of Abu Simbel in 1812.  At the time of his discovery, only the the heads of the pharaoh Rameses II were visible above the sand.

The sand was excavated five years later by Giovanni Belzoni, who was the first European to enter the temple. There are sketches (one of which is above) drawn in 1838 by David Roberts, that show the sand had already undone much of Belzoni’s work (the entrance to the temple is just barely visible in the lower middle part of the sketch).

When the Egyptians decided to build the High Dam in Aswan, it became apparent that the temples of Abu Simbel were in the flood plain of the new lake, Lake Nasser.  Abu Simbel was literally cut out from the mountain piece by piece, and rebuilt on higher ground.  A donation campaign began in 1959, and the move began in 1964, eventually completing in 1968.

The original locations of the temples, from a picture taken in the early 1900s.

A picture of the move in progress.  Notice the arch that has been built to support the false mountain that now surrounds the temple.

Wow.  Just, wow.

The exterior of the temple of Ramses II, as it stands today.

The exterior of Nefertari’s temple.  Is it just me, or does it seem a little odd that Nefertari only appears twice, but Ramses II appears 4 times?

Unfortunately, like the Egyptian Museum, visitors are not allowed to take pictures inside either temple.  I bought a few pictures of the temple, that have been helpfully distributed without copyright.  I’ll post a few of those when I get a chance.

Here is a stereogram I captured of two of the statues in front of Ramses II temple.  I tried to get a full view, but there was no way to get a good stereogram from that position.  There were too many other tourists for that — even at 7:30 in the morning.

More later…