Today was one extremely busy day. I made sure to leave at 6am so I could miss the hot part of the day. Fortunately right next door to my hotel is a bicycle rental place. Now when I think of bicycle rental I envision a 21 speed mountain bike or hybrid; however in Egypt as far as I can tell no such thing exists! These bicycles didn’t have more then one speed :P. I know it wasn’t just the place I went to either since I saw other bicyclists with the same lameass bikes. Fortunately where I was going was mostly flat, and I just walked up the slightly hilly bits.
The guy at the ticket office tried to give me change for a 50 when I handed him 100LE. Fortunately it was 6am and not all that hot out yet so I noticed. The bicycle ride up to Deir El Medina was quite pretty, and fortunately not very far. It was less then 1 kilometre away. Deir El Medina is the village of the workmen. It is where all of the people who worked on the temples, tombs, and worked for the Royalty lived. So in this area you had the scribes, the folks who engraved the temple walls, the people who painted the temple and tomb walls, the folks who made the statues for the temples.... and well you get the idea. There was a village built for them and their families to live in, right next to a few of the major temples in Thebes (Luxor west bank).
Cash wasn’t used back then, so they got housing, food, cloth, supplies and beer as their wages. Some of the ostraca (pottery shards with writing on them) and other artefacts showed lists of what the families received. Apparently beer was considered essential to all families, so both beer and beer making supplies were given to everyone by the Pharaohs. There also were some interesting pottery shards found with practice hieroglyphics on them. This definitely makes sense as the hieroglyphics generally look perfect, and I wouldn’t want to know what would happen to one of the workers if they made a mistake or a poor drawing or engraving of a hieroglyph! Well that and some of those hieroglyphics are difficult to draw, especially the bird ones.
As well as live in this village, the workmen decided that they would also have their tombs there. After building tombs for royalty I’m guessing they had a pretty good idea of what went into a tomb. However their budget was a bit lower, so they weren’t nearly as fancy as those in the Valley of the Kings and Queens. They also tended to only be a couple of rooms at most, and not have as many fancy treasures in them. The tombs of Deir El Medina were all cut out of the mountain, or a hole dug into the ground. Several of these tombs were just a place carved out to fit the sarcophagus, however there are a few that are as nice as those in the valley of the kings or queens when it comes to the painting! They did have the expert royal painters living amongst them afterall. I figure the more wealthy of the workers were able to splurge for some pretty nice tombs.
Peshedu has one of the nicest tombs I have seen to date! The painting is just gorgeous, and it is very detailed, as well as skilfully done. You can see the wall paintings in with my photos once I finally get them all uploaded. Being tombs, and paint being fragile and fading easily you aren’t allowed to take photos inside of the tombs. Well I’m sure you have guessed by now from reading my blog entries that in many instances this is solved with a little baksheesh. I was able to get photos of two out of the three tombs. The person who showed me the second tomb didn’t offer to let me take photos, and it was the least interesting of the three so I didn’t push the issue. I can’t really describe the tombs, as they describe themselves in the upcoming photos.
After being shown the tombs I wandered around looking into all of the less interesting tombs off to the sides. There are at least 50 cut into the rock in the area I was in! I was able to take photos of the two interesting ones through the bars in the locked door, but that was about it. They were one room tombs without any hallway or rooms on the way down. Also, they didn’t have stairs leading downwards, they were just cut right there into the mountains. There were also tombs which were basically holes in the ground which went straight down, without any stairs in site! They were obviously tombs though as they were cut into the mountain this way, and several were numbered. I really should have taken up archaeology in school... they get at all the best stuff!
Once I got to the area with the giant hole, this guard who was very much out of breath came running up and told me to come back down. I ignored him and kept going on my walk around the tombs. He was quite worried that I would fall in the hole, however no one seemed worried about the 20 other holes I had passed in my wanderings. The guard looked quite stressed as I walked around, and was relieved when I finally headed out of that area. I was able to get rid of him though and walk on my own after that.
Next up was the Ptolemic temple. It was quite a nice temple, somewhat intact. Inside of the larger structure and temple was a smaller temple to Hathor. The Hathor temple was in great condition, and the paint on the walls was also quite vibrant in many places. The pillars of course has the standard Hathor sistren heads, with lotus flowers above, and all painted blue on the top. Now how that paint has survived a few thousand years is beyond me! The guard also brought me up to the roof of the temple, which wasn’t as exciting as most temple roofs since it was a small temple and thus a very small roof. The views were pretty though, and I did get a couple of nice shots of the temple from high up on my way down the stairs.
On my way out I gave the guard a 5 (would be like handing him $5-$10 in the US, he could have had a couple of meals out for that price). He looked at it like it wasn’t enough, and I told him that’s all he was getting, so he said thank you. Then a minute later he walked to the outer part of the temple to complain that the 5 wasn’t enough. So I called him rude and took my 5 back out of his hand LOL. I’m not usually this rude, but the complains of the guards about the tips not being enough was getting terribly old, and perhaps this one guard won’t pull that trick on tourists again...
On the way back down the path I took photos of the remains of the old mud brick houses and the mountains around. The bicycle ride back down the hill was much nicer :>. The trip so far had only taken 2 hours, and it wasn’t too hot out yet, and I still had energy to spare, so I headed off to the valley of the Queens. This was only a kilometre at most away from Dier El Madina. I was quite happy that I had rented a bike, or walked from site to site would have taken forever, and there weren’t any taxis at that hour of the morning. There is a nice hike that one can take over top of the mountains from one site to another, but the hike up to the top of the mountains in the first place is rather long and steep! There is one area that goes to the top that has a staircase built in. There must have been at least 1000 stairs to the top! See the photos once they are uploaded to see the longest staircase ever.
I have to admit that the valley of the Queens wasn’t quite as spectacular as that of the Kings. The wall art was of course wonderfully done though. The scenes on the walls were the standard temple style offering scenes. Unfortunately there were only three tombs open, and they weren’t all that large, so I finished looking at them in about 1/2 hour. The odd bit is that two of them were tombs for Queens in particular, but most of the scenes on the walls were of their husbands the kings, or at least them with their husbands. There were very few images of the Queens on their own, or with other women, which I found quite odd. Unfortunately the tomb of Nefertiti is currently closed to the public, so I wasn’t able to see this tomb, which is by far the most splendid tomb in all of Egypt from what I have seen from the photos in the various books I have.
The bike ride back down from the valley of the Queens was also quite nice being mostly downhill. I then went back to my hotel for breakfast. Nothing like a large breakfast after 3 hours of temple and tomb wandering. After relaxing for an hour, I decided to make good use of the bicycle and get another temple in. I also want to make sure I see everything on the west bank. Fortunately it still wasn’t too hot out, just nearly too hot. Also, the Rammessium was only a five minute bicycle ride from my hotel, so I had to go look.
This was Ramses II’s mortuary temple. I say was because it’s only half still there. It has fared much better then his son Merinptah’s temple though. There is a roof in many places, the columns are still intact, some of the walls are still there and so on. At the edge of the temple is the largest of all of the Ramses II statues. Now this is hard to believe if you have seen my photos of the giant Ramses II statue in the museum at Memphis! (the statue inside the museum that was laying down). Unfortunately the statue at the Rammesseum was broken into a few pieces.
On the front walls of the Hopestyle hall, and the other halls are scenes of Ramses out hunting, or killing his enemies. There are also of course scenes of him making offerings to the various Egyptian Deities. Unfortunately the main sacred shrine room is pretty much non-existent accept for a bit of floor. The pillars in this temple are particularly stunning, and the engravings in them are amazing. Aside from all this, it’s basically a giant temple built by Ramses II, dedicated to himself (and likely a few Deities as well, but mostly himself as it is his mortuary temple afterall).
Outside of the temple are these long domed old mud brick houses. The shape is like that of a cylinder cut in half and placed on the ground. They are quite pretty really, in an extremely rustic sort of way. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see these, and I have been told I would need special permission to do so. These houses were where the temple priestesses lived in ancient Egypt. When I told my guide that I would like to find out how much they might rent one of those to me for so I could live in them, she found this amusing and called me a priestess. I didn’t yet know what their use was.
The rest of the day was sitting either in the lovely courtyard outside the hotel, or in my room with the AC and fan both turned up full blast. The meals at this hotel are huge! The breakfast is only large, but the lunch and dinner are definitely more then filling, and I tend to often leave food uneaten. Fortunately the food is also quite good, as there is nothing worse then large amounts of food that is only sort of good.
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