Karnak by Day, the Luxor Temple and the Damn Dam

It's very difficult to upload images here, so you’ll just have to google the sites for yourself and take my word that Karnak was really freakin’ awesome in the daylight. Staggeringly large and slowly added to over hundreds of years by every new ruler that came along, Karnak deserved more time than I could spare for it. Like many holy places, Karnak uses gigantic columns to stress to mortals their stature compared to the gods. Karnak has an amazing array of 134 columns that dwarf all comers. All are decorated from lotus-leaf top to bottom with hieroglyphs, some of which have escaped the direct sunlight and are colored with bright shades of yellow, blue, white and red. Gorgeous.

Beware of Sleestaks

The Luxor Temple is very similar, although much smaller. The added attractions here are some well-preserved statues guarding the gate and a giant obelisk. An unused mosque sits 20 feet above the lower sites of the temple, as that’s where the sand had filled to when the Turks arrived. It shares the double-sided gate style of Karnak, which represents the mountains surrounding a narrow valley, a massive representation of the known world of the Egyptians of the time.

Since I can’t show you pictures, I’ll tell you of my guide on these journeys, who was quite an interesting fellow to travel with. Over the course of a couple of days, he opened up a bit regarding his feelings of modern Egypt, the current archeological work, and his big bringer of worry, the High Dam at Aswan.

Tyr had spent the last 12 years working in the archeological digs around Luxor. He showed me tombs that he had personally helped seal up, and sites where former houses had been blasted away by the Egyptian government. It seems that folks that had taking to dwelling over the Tombs of the Nobles in the Theben Necropolis had also taken to looting a bit as interest in Egyptian artifacts grew around the world (Space is limited for housing, as farmland is crucial. Thus, Egyptians often build over previously allotted land. See Cairo’s “City of the Dead”). These villagers would secretly dig underneath their homes at night, or in the nearby hills, and hope to find a rich tomb where they might break the finger off a mummy or carry away an urn to sell on the black market. They quickly learned to slowly sell these artifacts off, lest their sudden wealth reveal their clandestine treasure huntng. Not everything goes as planned however as Tyr told of occasionally finding bodies that had missed the mummification process: cave-ins, foul air and other mishaps often proved fatal for the unlucky villager. In one infamous case, an entire house collapsed into a sundered tomb. In the end, the Egyptian Antiquities Council convinced the government to bulldoze the village and provide new shelter elsewhere.

Tyr explained the duality of the dam project: control of the water flow had tripled crop collections (year round harvests) and provided much needed electricity for the country. However, since the silt-bearing slough from the heavy rains no longer fertilizes the fields, chemical methods have been employed to conjure up the crops. This has resulted in a steady increase in various cancers for the Nile-dwellers (unverified data, personal communication 2007). To make matters worse, several factories now dump waste into the Nile, as opposed to the age-old method of desert-burial. It is true that malaria and other infectious diseases have been on the rise since the dam was commissioned, and that the Nile delta is now slowly eroding away, where once it grew four meters a year (the silt is currently being stockpiled behind the dam).

But the most arresting alarm for a man comes when you punch him square in the pants: Tyr’s young nephews tell him of their need for Viagra to bring the latest generation into the world. “Can you believe? Young men! All the time: Viagra, Viagra, Viagra!” Which of course leads to (again, unverified) an increase in heart and circulatory problems. In Tyr’s words: “My grandfather would go to the mountain there, to get the stone to sow into the fields, a natural fertilizer. All day, he would follow the donkey, and you know, follow the donkey closely. You see, we don’t allow our daughters to act the way you do in America. But for him, it was no problem to stand tall behind the donkey all day, he was a strong man. But now, only the Viagra brings the wife relief. I hear my nephew’s wife calling like a train station: ‘Ride me! Ride me! Please won’t you ride me?’ We are being slowly poisoned.” (Yea, you know you’re bonding when the ‘Gramps was a donkey duffer’ stories come out.) As Tyr puts it, the people of Egypt don’t feel their left hand in hot water, because the right one is in cold. Maybe he said hand. It could have been testicle. Regardless, Tyr feels frustrated by the current conditions and hopes to raise awareness to change the situation, which he admits will be a difficult struggle.