“Airplane travel is nature’s way of making you look like your passport photo.”
-Al Gore
Go-Date: Day 67, Saturday. March 30
Lesson Learned: Back up your web site on a regular basis. Things do go wrong, and they have. I’ve been down for two days, but we may be back to normal.
Desert Condos for Sale
Today started early, 6AM to be exact. We wanted to get an early start so that we do both the Valley of the Kings, and the Valley of the Queens on the same day. You have to time your visits to avoid not only the tour busses from Luxor, but also from the Red Sea resorts. If you leave by 6 you can be at the first tomb by 6:15 (the tombs open at 6AM). The Luxor buses arrive at 8AM and the Red Sea buses show up at around 10AM. Hopefully, we’ll be at breakfast by then.
The Valley of the Kings is a valley where all the important kings decided to retire, permanently. For a period of 500 years from the 16th to 11th century BCE, rock cut tombs were excavated for the pharaohs and powerful nobles of the New Kingdom (the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Dynasties of Ancient Egypt). I never can keep all the dynasties straight, or really cared to, but it’s mind boggling to think of how long this civilization carried on as one of the premier world cultures as others around it rose and fell for various reasons.
• Predynastic Period (c. 5000-3100 BCE)
• Archaic (Early Dynastic) Period (c. 3100-2686 BCE)
• Old Kingdom: Age of the Pyramid Builders (c. 2686-2181 BCE)
• First Intermediate Period (c. 2181-2055 BCE)
• Middle Kingdom: 12th Dynasty (c. 2055-1786 BCE)
• Second Intermediate Period (c. 1786-1567 BCE)
• New Kingdom (c. 1567-1085 BCE)
• Third Intermediate Period (c. 1085-664 BCE)
• From the Late Period to Alexander’s Conquest (c.664-332 BCE)
This kind of history sort of makes me feel better, since no matter who we elect, they can’t totally screw up the whole world for humanity. It finds ways to keep on going.
Valley of the Kings
The Valley of the Kings contains 63 tombs and chambers. It was the principal burial place of the major royal figures of the Egyptian New Kingdom, as well as a number of privileged nobles. The royal tombs are decorated with scenes from Egyptian mythology and give clues as to the beliefs and funerary rituals of the period. Almost all of the tombs seem to have been opened and robbed in antiquity, but they still give an idea of the opulence and power of the pharaohs. My biggest gripe is you can’t tell which tomb paintings are original, and which ones have been redone like paint-by-numbers hobby kits. I’ve tried to do more research on the tombs, but its tedious. Every time I try to search something all you get on the first 12 pages on the search engine are ads for tour groups, hotels, tour guides, cruises, papyrus sales events, flight offers, and porno sites with Cleopatra wearing, well….not much.
The other thing that really bites is how people have defaced these antiquities over the ages. Even the Greeks and Romans had to put their version of “Elroy was here” all over the place. The ancient Egyptians that disagreed with the dead guys came in and chipped their faces, or at least their noses off all the tomb art or statues. Grave robbers did the same so that the ghosts wouldn’t follow them and inflict their revenge for desecrating their graves. People are so screwed up. In the early post-Jesus period, the Christians were horrible about destroying artifacts as well. Christians would take over an ancient temple or tomb, plant a cross on the roof and make it a church. Now, the Muslims are doing they same thing or worse, all over Syria, Iraq, and other hot spots as well (they aren’t making these sites into churches, but they sure are blowing up a lot of antiquities). Stupid people doing stupid things. We never learn.
I promise, I didn’t deface a single artifact. I never touched one, even though almost all of them are unprotected and you can tell thousands of people have placed their oily hands on them. Egypt has more ancient wealth than they can properly protect. I hope the country is able to preserve these artifacts properly for the future.
In 2005, a team led by archaeologist Otto Schaden discovered the valley’s first unknown tomb since Tutankhamun’s (which was uncovered by Howard Carter in 1922) . The site, dubbed KV 63, was found only about 50 feet (15 meters) from the walls of Tut’s resting place. That’s the thing I want to convey here, these tombs are not scattered all across the desert, they are like Brooklyn condos….one on top of the other. You can’t dig a basement for your house without finding another tomb. Just ask the people of Alabaster City who have been moved out of their houses because someone found a new tomb when they tried to dig a root cellar during a home renovation in 2015 (the government actually force relocated an entire village on the edge of Luxor). At least one late Ramesside pharaoh’s tomb (Ramses VIII) is still undiscovered, and many believe it may be found within the valley. As fun as it may sound, I’m not volunteering to be apart of the tomb hunter expedition. Of the 63 tombs, only 10 or 11 are open at one time. The rest are closed to keep the sweaty tourist from corrupting the tomb paintings with their….sweat. Humidity is a very bad thing in these tombs. And you cannot believe how incredibly hot and dry it is here. Hell, we are here in March. Just wait until August. The locals say that they “sleep at home from June through August” I don’t blame them, not even mad dogs and Englishmen would venture out to these tombs in August.
Here are the tombs we visited:
• KV6 – The tomb of Ramses IX
• KV9 Rameses V and Rameses VI
• KV8 – The tomb of Merenptah
• KV11 – The tomb of Ramses III
• KV62 – The Tomb of King Tutankhamun (Howard Carter)
I haven’t separated the pictures out, because they all get confusing once you are going through the valley and the tombs themselves. We considered doing others, like Seti I but some of these cost over $100 to enter and we just didn’t budget that much for the Exhibit prices. Also, you are hard pressed to differentiate one from the other once inside the tombs. Pics to follow.
Another gripe, even though I paid for a photography ticket the guards wouldn’t let me take pics in King Tut’s tomb, and wanted baksheesh at the others. This is the only tomb in the valley in which the mummy still resides. The archaeologists didn’t plan for this, it was because Howard Carter screwed up the removal process so badly in 1922 that if they tried to lift and take Tut out he would crumble. These old British excavators sometimes didn’t seem to know what the hell they were doing. I’ll lump old Howard in with Arthur Evans at Knossos. Bad scientists.
Breakfast of Champions
One interesting side trip of this day was breakfast in a real live local café. I mean a cafe’ that locals frequent and never, never, never would appear on any tour guide. It was outside (on a flat spot next to an abandoned house), in a half-abandoned village, with no electricity, no roof for that matter, and all cooking was done on a propane burner. All water was ported in and served up out of an igloo water jug. We didn’t drink the water, but we did drink the coffee. It was a real experience.
The people of Egypt, poor as they are, manage to scrape away a living in the harshest conditions. They are friendly, honest (from what I can tell), hard-working, industrious, and persistent. Exactly the characteristics you want out of a Harvard MBA graduate. There needs to be economic opportunity for these people. The children are lively, precocious, cute and curious. It is a shame for the world to waste this energy and creativity. I hope Egypt can develop opportunities for its people beyond the tourist industry.
Valley of the Queens
Gender inequality has lasted for millennia, and the American congress seems to want to make sure that inequality continues. This valley, if for those ladies that were not allowed in the Boy’s Valley just a couple klicks down the road. Really, once you are out in the valley, you could not tell the Kings’ place from the Queens’. I mean, its not like there was a nice lake, golf course, or country club here that made this real estate more valuable. Sand and rocks. Rocks and sand. That’s all you will see here above the ground.
The Valley of the Queens is where the wives of Pharaohs were buried in ancient times. It used to be called Ta-Set-Neferu, meaning –”the place of beauty” or “Woman know thy place”, the history seems a bit muddled. The Valley of the Queens consists of the main wadi (a valley, ravine, or channel that is dry except in the rainy season) which contains most of the tombs. The main wadi contains 91 tombs and the subsidiary valleys add another 19 tombs. The burials in the subsidiary valleys all date to the 18th dynasty.
The reason for choosing the Valley of the Queens as a burial site is not known. The location in close proximity to the worker’s village in Deir el-Medina and the Valley of the Kings may have been a factor. It also may be that the pharaohs just got a bargain on the real estate.
• QV43 – Prince Set-hirkhopshef,
• QV68 – Queen Merytamun
• QV55 – Prince Amenhirkhopshef
• QV 44 – Prince Khaemweset
We didn’t visit the tomb of Queen Nefertari, even though we heard it was the best in the valley because of cost. It was over $100 and these treks inside the tombs all last less than half an hour. Also, this is where the lines are longest from the tour buses. I guess