Egypt 2023 - Day 9 - Esna & New Year’s Eve

Last night, the ship stopped at Esna, and this morning, we left the ship and walked directly into the town. We walked through the market or souk, where Walid showed us a traditional tailor’s shop making galabeya and an ironing shop next door. The market was of the usual sort, but it was cool to see the old style of ironing, where the vendor sprayed starchy water from his mouth (!!) and used his foot to apply pressure to the flat iron.

Shopkeep ironing a galabeya in Esna Market

After the souk, we spied the oldest standing minaret in Egypt, right next to the souk, and then walked a few meters to the temple of Khnum. Khnum is a creator god responsible for sculpting the faces of babies on a spinning wheel while they are in the womb. He is the patron god of Aswan, but his temple at Esna is really special. It was buried under the sand until its discovery in 1816. It was only discovered because a massive sandstorm cleared off the roof.

Excavation of the temples at Esna is still occurring. The main temple is 9 meters (29.5 feet) below the city's current ground level. But an ancient temple, probably dedicated to Amun-ra, is buried behind and below the Roman-era temple to Khnum. 

Façade of the Temple of Khnum at Esna from ground level

The exterior of the Roman Temple has a huge set of columns topped with the lotus blossom motif. King Mohammad Ali used the temple as a storehouse for cotton from Cairo, and his soldiers trained by shooting at the architrave; thus, many of the friezes at the top of the temple were heavily damaged. Inside remained remarkably intact, but the paint was rendered black by smoke and time. USAID has restored much of the painting and continues its work to this day.

The Hypostyle hall with its painted colonnade is breathtaking, and the high reliefs all over the walls are in near-perfect condition. It’s become one of my favorites, alongside Dendera and Karnak.

The gorgeous painted capitals inside the Temple of Khnum at Esna

We then took a brief stop at the Esna Cultural Center, the renovation of which was just completed by USAID this year. It is set to open as a new market and small museum next year, but we got a tour of the building and its roof, which allowed us to get some good pictures of Esna from a bit higher. Esna is just a village, and much of it is still in disrepair. Many of the multi-family houses with their sycamore balconies are no longer habitable. Part of the renovation of the city is to demolish many of these unsalvageable mud-brick residences and replace them with modern Egyptian housing at no cost to the villagers. If the money holds up, Esna should look pretty amazing in ten years.

The current town of Esna undergoing extensive renovation by the government

The trip to Esna was short, and we returned to the ship before lunch, setting sail once again to our final destination, back at the port of Luxor. 

A performance of various dances representing different parts of Egypt was part of this evening’s entertainment. The troupe included a band playing traditional Egyptian instruments, including the darbouka, a goblet-shaped drum; the ney, an Egyptian flute that’s similar to an oboe; a hand drum; and the rababa, a single-string sort of lute played with a bow. They performed several dances, including a whirling dervish-style dance, where a (quite handsome) man in a multi-hued circular coat spun wildly in a tight circle. The dance must have gone on for 5 minutes, including a moment when he turned on electric lights on the outfit that illuminated the whole darkened room in a rainbow of colors. I doubt it was a particularly classical interpretation of the dervish dance, as sufis that practice the true dervish take vows of poverty and austerity, and it is considered a sacred meditation.

Dervish dance with the band playing behind

Tonight is New Year’s Eve, and there was a special dinner planned for us with Beef Wellington, smoked salmon with caviar, and a big impressively decorated dessert buffet, mostly filled with cakes of various flavors and a few other nummies like crème brûlée (the only one of the desserts I actually cared for in the spread, quite frankly.)

New Years Eve dinner getting started

After that, the lounge was turned into the dance floor, where, at least conceptually, we were to dance the night away until midnight. The crowd was slow to congregate, but Sean was eager to get to dancing, so he, I, Moses, our amazingly cool bartender, and a few of the other staff got dancing early to 70’s disco. About an hour later, the dance floor was almost 75% crew, rocking out to Arabic dance music. The wait staff of the restaurant kept rushing out to grab crew members from the back until half of the crew was out on the floor. It was a delight to join, but man, I could *not* keep up with their enthusiasm. By 10:00, Sean and I were pretty well done. I returned to the room first and Sean about fifteen minutes later.

The flight back to Cairo is tomorrow, but the adventure isn’t quite done. We’ll be visiting the not-quite-yet-open new Grand Egyptian Museum for a bit a sneak peak at a few of the exhibits an the grand staircase after we arrive, and then the day after is probably the busiest day of the trip. 

Saying goodbye to the beautiful Nile

But more on that tomorrow! Now to pack and get ready to say farewell to the brilliant, attentive, friendly staff and crew of the S.S. Sphinx for the last time.

Thank you for reading.

Egypt 2023 - Day 7 - Philae, Aswan Dam, Shopping, Felucca & Light Show

It was a packed day, with more places to visit than I could put in the title. Our first stop was to hop on a bus (of course), take a twenty-minute ride, then arrange on a little motor boat to putter us over to the temple complex known as Philae. The temple complex is only accessible via boat.

Philae temple at Sunrise from our little boat on the Nile

Philae is the Greek transliteration of the Nubian name Pilak, the island on which the temple was originally located. When the complex was threatened by the rising waters of Aswan Lake after the building of the Aswan High Dam (more on that later), the entire temple was moved stone-by-stone to another, higher-elevation island right next to the original.

Philae’s main excitement is the large temple dedicated to Isis, the goddess of love and magic and the wife of Osiris. It’s a beautiful building with a fully intact gate and lots of striking reliefs and paintings. The patron god of Aswan is Khnum, the ram-headed god of creation that shapes the faces of babies out of clay in the womb. We’ll be visiting a temple to Khnum in a few days, so let’s leave it at that for now. Since Isis is not the patron of Aswan, Taharqa, the Pharaoh responsible for the building of Philae, thought it appropriate to ask the high priest of Khnum to ask the god for permission to build a temple for another god there. In front of the main hall is a great stone inscribed with this permission, written in the apparent words of Khnum.

The “permission stone” from the God Khnum to build the Temple of Isis at Philae

Aside from the large temple to Isis, there is also a chapel built in the Roman era style, commissioned by the emperor Trajan, and a small temple to the Goddess Hathor because everyone needs to have a temple to the Goddess Hathor apparently, as she is considered the mother of all the Gods of Egypt. 

The other interesting thing about the island is it is filled with cats. They’re not the healthiest-looking little guys, but they are super affectionate, as tourists are constantly feeding them scraps. They will follow you about, demanding cuddles, and appear to be as much of an attraction as the temples.

Cat and her Kit at the temple of Philae

After Philae, we took a trip to see the Aswan High Dam. The dam is probably the most important innovation of modern Egypt and has changed the entire landscape of the country, both figuratively and literally. Construction on the dam began in 1960 and lasted precisely 10 years, completing near the end of 1970. Its completion created the imposing Lake Nasser, a massive 500km lake dividing Upper and Lower Egypt and preventing the inconsistency of the annual flooding of the Nile River.

High Aswan is 118 meters above sea level at its highest point and is very wide, acting like a huge wedge driven into the Nile. It is a critical military site. Walid stated that the destruction of the dam would flood the entirety of Upper Egypt within seven minutes, destroying everything in its path, including Cairo. That means security on the dam is tight. The bus was scanned and inspected at multiple military checkpoints, and we were only allowed to explore for ten minutes before the bus had to leave. We took pictures from atop the huge structure, looked at a few boards containing sun-faded photos of the construction and plans for the dam, and were on our way.

The High Aswan Dam (Aswan side) and the Monument built by the Egyptian Government honoring the Russian Engineers that oversaw it

I actually had to go back after writing the next section and add another bit in here because it's important to note that the creation of High Aswan was not without its sacrifices, willing or otherwise. The area that is now Lake Nasser was once the land called Nubia, which was a trade partner and sometimes a thorn in the side of the Egyptian kingdoms for thousands of years. Hatshepsut famously sent her stepson Thutmose III there to conquer it, which he succeeded at before she threw him into prison there to prevent him from ascending to the throne. The creation of Lake Nasser not only displaced 80-odd temples, which created a *massive* UNESCO project to transplant them all to new locations, but also obliterated the entirety of Nubia, displacing almost 100,000 modern-day Nubians to Aswan, Sudan, and several other locations. It has created quite a diaspora of the Nubian people, who have their own language and cultural identity. Egypt did pay to transplant all the citizenry, but not all of them went willingly. It is important to note that huge, mainly positive undertakings like this have economic and cultural costs. 

Afterward, the bus stopped for some shopping at an essential oils store. According to our guide, the oils are those used by all the major perfumeries to create their signature scents, but at ten times the dilution (and ten times the price), you could purchase them by getting the oils directly from Aswan, where they are extracted. I admit I decided to stay on the bus for the thirty minutes that it stopped at the store, as I am very sensitive to smells, and I assumed it would be overwhelming. The others in the group told me it was actually really cool and not overpowering inside at all, so now, as with most of the things I have opted out of, I regret not participating.

The next stop was the “Unfinished Obelisk” at the Granite quarry of Aswan. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the obelisk, ordered by Hatshepsut as part of a pair, isn’t much to look at. We had to hike up a small hill of granite to see it up close, and it’s…definitely an unfinished obelisk. It lays on its side, partially resolved from the lumpy granite surrounding it, like a sad little ruin.

The majesty of the Unfinished Obelisk. Notice the giant crack. Also Rob.

The story behind it, however, and its significance to archaeology, isn’t to be sniffed at. The reason the obelisk is unfinished is thus: the ancient method of carving such large structures out of granite involves drilling many holes into the solid stone and forcing water into them for weeks until the water causes the rock to strategically crack. This forms the general shape of the monument. Midway through this process on this particular obelisk, however, the massive stone cracked almost in half along its vertical axis, and the damage was irreconcilable. The ancient builders stopped construction, abandoning the first version and moving on to the second. The only reason archaeologists know how these obelisks and many others like it were constructed is because of Hatshepsut’s unfinished one, and so it is extremely significant to history despite its underwhelming appearance.

After the obelisk, we made one last bus stop to another shopping excursion, this time one I was actually excited about. The Papyrus Academy in Aswan is a part of the Aswan University Fine Arts program, and all the money made from purchases there goes to scholarships for the students of the artistic antiquities program. The students themselves run the shop, not just selling paintings they make themselves but explaining the designs and significance of each one. We were presented with a demonstration by an eager young female student named Mina of how papyrus reeds, related to sugar cane and also edible, are stripped, pressed, and dried to create paper that can last thousands of years in the right conditions.

The paintings were quite stunning and reasonably priced, given their handmade nature. I admit, we purchased a few (one of Isis and one of the Nile god Sobek), and I don’t regret it one bit.

At last, we returned to the ship for lunch. Yes, lunch. All of these stops were before 13:00. After some rest, several of us went on a very relaxing tour of the Nile with Walid on one of the large sailboats called a Felucca. Felucca are no longer used for practical purposes, merely as a way for tourists to get a sense of how sailing the Nile was once done. They are inherently slow, as the winds on the Nile are enough to sail by but not enough to sail consistently by. Taking a Felucca from Aswan to Luxor is a nine-day adventure, not for the faint of heart, as they are not very big ships (the smallest hold about 8 people and the largest about 20) and usually don’t have restroom facilities. Yeah, just ponder that for a minute.

Typical Feluccas on the Nile at Aswan

But a leisurely sail in the Nile near Aswan was just the thing after a long day of touring and shopping. The two Nubian sailors aboard the Felucca were very experienced, and one had an absolutely adorable eight-year-old son who steered the prow while his father directed him. We sailed around for the better part of an hour and, of course, were requested to partake of the very inexpensive, handcrafted Nubian goods displayed aboard the ship.

After the Felucca ride, a few more hours of relaxation before we departed for a journey *back* to the temple complex at Philae for an evening sound and light show sponsored by Egyptian Air. The light show tells the story of the history of the temple across the thousands of years of its existence, even into its modern-day transplantation onto the new island, all done from the perspective of the gods Khnum, Isis, Hathor, and a bevy of other historical voices. 

The Temple of Isis at Philae illuminated for the Light show

It was a little hokey, and we were all absolutely annihilated at this point in the evening, but the cats were all cuddles and love even at night, and the lights really did make the complex look beautiful, so that made the adventure worth the few hours of travel and show.

Late dinner, and so to bed. Tomorrow is a short day but a significant one, as we take a (very) brief flight to the temple of Ramses the Great at the small town of Abu Simbel, only 80km north of the Sudanese border, on the shore of Lake Nasser.

Until next time, dear readers!