Tag Archives: Pharaoh

Restoring Luxor Temple

Pylon of Luxor Temple Photo taken in 2004

I’ve been travelling to Egypt since I was sixteen.  I’ve witnessed it change through the years.  It’s wonderful to see the conservation, preservation and, in some cases, restoration of Egypt’s ancient monuments.

An example is Luxor Temple, set right in the heart of modern-day Luxor on the Corniche, the boulevard that borders the east bank of the Nile, with hotels strewn along its length.

Luxor Temple dates from circa 1400BC, a New Kingdom temple built under pharaohs such as Amenhotep III and Tutankhamun of the 18th Dynasty, and Ramses II of the 19th Dynasty. Unlike the other temples in Thebes, Luxor temple is not dedicated to a cult god or a deified version of the pharaoh in death. Instead, Luxor temple is dedicated to the rejuvenation of kingship.  It may have been where many of the pharaohs of Egypt were crowned.

On my first few trips to Egypt the immense pylon (gateway / entranceway) to the massive temple boasted two enormous seated colossi of Ramses II and a single obelisk.  This was originally one of a pair.  Its twin stands in Paris at Le Place de la Concorde.

There used to be a shattered colossus of a once-standing Ramses II lying on the western side of the temple. And also a famous head-and-shoulders bust of this same king, set on a plinth on the eastern side of the entrance.

Head of Ramses II

 

I imagine tourists the world over who’ve visited the temple must have their own version of this photograph taken of me back in 2004.

So it was rather wonderful to visit in late 2018 (after a gap of almost 5 years) and see the incredible changes that had taken place.

 

Here is the pylon of Luxor Temple as it looks now.

 

Two standing statues have been reconstructed, one on either side of the seated colossus.

A fabulous feat of modern engineering to bring this fallen giant back from ruin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And imagine my surprise when I switched on the TV one Sunday evening a couple of weeks ago and saw a Channel 4 documentary which featured the restoration work to raise the fallen statue.  Here is Mahmoud Farouk, who leads the restoration team based in Luxor on photos I took of the television while the documentary was playing.  I even managed a tiny bit of video!

Now, I’m lucky enough to have met Mahmoud.  When I was last in Egypt over Christmas and New Year 2019-20, my guide introduced me to him, and I was very privileged to have him show me around a part of Karnak Temple usually closed to the public.  That’s one of the privileges of being able to tell people I write books set in Egypt !  Here we are together at Karnak.

 

It really is wonderful to see the work that he and his team are doing to clean and preserve the ancient monuments.

Fiona Deal, Author of Meredith Pink’s Adventures in Egypt, all available on Amazon. To join Merry on her adventures please click on each picture for the link.

Pharaoh leaves nothing to chance

Façade, Temple of Seti I, Abydos, Egypt

Façade, Temple of Seti I, Abydos, Egypt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday we visited Abydos, a drive of about 2 hours north from Luxor along the desert road that connects Cairo with Aswan.  Abydos is one of the oldest sites in Egypt and contains archaeological remains from every period of ancient Egypt.

A cult grew up in ancient times that it was the burial place of the god Osiris; and for a thousand years or more ancient Egyptians made pilgrimages to the site to make offerings.

IMG_4438Today, it’s most famous for the temple of Seti I (father to the prodigious builder Ramses II) who ruled at the start of the 19th Dynasty, a little over three thousand years ago.  The quality of the carving, many in raised relief, is outstanding.  The detail on Seti’s crown in this photograph, for example, is exquisite.

IMG_4443The temple is contemporary with the great Hypostyle Hall of pillars at Karnak.  But unlike at Karnak, here at Abydos the original colours of the wall reliefs are beautifully preserved.  Perhaps because of this, the content of the scenes is easy to make out, even for the untrained eye.  Here we have Seti I making offerings before all the major gods of the ancient Egyptian pantheon.  We see him before falcon-headed Horus, ram-headed Knum, ibis-headed Thoth, lion-headed Sekhmet, jackel-headed Anubis and crocodile-headed Sobek.  We see scene after scene of him before Osiris (god of the afterlife) and his wife Isis, with their son Horus.

Temple of Osiris at Abydos

Temple of Osiris at Abydos (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, these scenes are replicated on temple walls the length and breadth of Egypt.  But what really struck me at Abydos – where they hit you square between the eyes – is how little Pharaoh was prepared to leave to chance.  Literally every square inch of his temple is decorated with scenes of him worshipping the gods.  I’m very sure he was well looked after in the afterlife!

Abydos is also famous for its ‘king-list’.  This is a wall carved from one end to the other with the cartouches of the kings of Egypt who preceded Seti I – from Narmer who unified upper and lower Egypt in the Old Kingdom through the Seti’s father Ramses I.  Notably, there are a few key individuals missing.  Hatshepsut has been left out – possibly because she was a woman.  And the controversial kings of the Amarna period (Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and Ay) also fail to get a mention.  The Amarna period was within the living memory of the older folk among the population – a time of social upheaval and religious oppression.

Abydos is a wonderful temple – well worth the drive from Luxor.  And I think my visit may have given me another idea for a book!

Fiona Deal

Author of Meredith Pink’s Adventures in Egypt.

Book 1 of Meredith Pink's Adventures in Egypt

Book 1 of Meredith Pink’s Adventures in Egypt

 

What sparked my enduring fascination with Egypt?

 

 

img230Ok, so here I am aged 16  with the ram-headed sphinxes at Karnak.  It’s October 1983.  I’m on my half-term break.  I’m in Egypt with my parents and younger brother, on the cheap, courtesy of my dad working for an airline and qualifying for concessionary travel.

Cute red pixie shoes, huh?  It took me almost thirty years to actually start writing adventure stories about the land of the pharaohs.  Yet the fascination was sparked back then.  Why?

Perhaps something in the light quality?  It’s a soft pink in Egypt – you can kind of see it in the sky in the photo as it fades to the distance.  I think this has something to do with the quantities of sand and dust in the atmosphere, and so little rain.  Whatever, it makes for some of the most spectacular sunsets on earth.  And a filmy haze over everything that’s like looking at everything in soft-focus.  There’s something very romantic about light quality I think.

Then there’s the immense SCALE of everything.  Standing on the giza plateau and craning up at the great pyramid.  Likewise in Karnak, dwarfed by the columns in the Hypostyle Hall.  How did they do it without modern equipment and engineering?  Was it spacemen?  As a teenager, this was an intriguing thought!

And, of course, the history.  Stepping into the thick, stifling atmosphere of a centuries-old tomb that looks as if the artisans laid down their paint-pots just yesterday.  Learning from the guide that they got light into the depths of their ancient sepulchres while they were carving and decorating them by reflecting the sun from great sheets of electrum at the tomb entrance.  True?  Possibly – not sure if it was really electrum !  But the guides demonstrated it ably enough with a metal biscuit tin.

Standing inside Tutankhamun’s tomb … gawping at the sarcophagus that still contained the remains of the boy king …  Trying unsuccessfully to grapple with the unimaginable period of time – thirty-or-so centuries – that he’d been there.

Or perhaps it was the weird and wonderful stories about the pharaohs and their queens themselves.  Did Ramses II REALLY have more than two hundred children, some by his own daughters?  It was a thought to make me squirm – standing alongside my own father listening to the guide.  Were brothers and sisters REALLY married to each other?  I remember looking at my fourteen year old brother and thinking ‘ugh’.

So somehow, it’s all larger than life, a little bit Hollywood, and desperately mysterious and intriguing.  Nowhere like it on earth !  It reached out and grabbed me.  More than thirty years later it shows no sign of letting go.