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Qutub Complex

Welcome to Delhi, our port of entry in India, the seat of power for the Mughal and other Muslim Sultans and Emperors starting in the 11th and 12th centuries, the capital of British ruled India (established in the New Delhi sector) and the capital of post independence India since 1947. It also has some of the worst air quality in the world, overtopping the AirQualityIndex’s supposed ceiling of 500 consistently (where 400+ is “hazardous”), such as during our visit.

The most celebrated attraction at the complex is the very imposing and impressive minaret built in 1192 of sandstone and marble to a height of almost 240’, making it the tallest brick minaret in the world. It was a clan of Tajiks who settled in India, bringing Islam with them, who constructed the complex over a Hindu fort (with 27 temples) laid waste and converted to building materials.

Built by a predecessor dynasty of the Mughals, the complex repeatedly reflects the partnership of Hindu laborers overseen by Islamic architects in the ornamentation and some mangled Arabic. This includes representations of nature, such as flowers and trees, not otherwise found in mosques.

What’s unusual about this pillar is not only its antiquity (4th or 5th century) and its multiple Sanskrit inscriptions along its 24’ height, but its remarkable resistance to rust. The notorious Erich van Däniken cited it as proof of the visitation of aliens in his Chariots of the Gods, although he later recanted that interpretation when shown that the ancients were simply good metallurgists.

We all know the story of Mahatma Gandhi, his great campaign of nonviolence and success in ridding India of the British. What eludes us is why any Indian would want him dead. In the last few months of his life, Gandhi had moved into a single small room in a rather palatial home owned by one of his admirers. The run up to and the experience of Partition was devastating for Hindus and Muslims alike, a move long fervently opposed by Gandhi. However, at the last, he relented because of his fear of even greater violence and death if the separation were not to occur. It was that reluctant assent to Partition that could not be forgiven by his assassin, who walked up to Gandhi as he was to deliver remarks in the garden, paid his respects, and shot him. To many Hindus, the dismemberment of a great nation assembled for them by the British was a tragic turn of history. Many believed that Partition would be short lived. It has now been 75 years and is highly unlikely to ever be reversed.

Gurdwara Bangla Sahib

Any halfway adequate explanation of the Sikhs and Sikhism would certainly try your patience, but is well worth searching up on your own. Fortunately, we arrived in India reasonably prepared for the complexities of religion and caste or we would have been quite disoriented. In a nutshell, the Sikhs believe in the welfare of all, the radical equality of all and the obligation to serve all. That has led them to, for instance, provide certain medical services at prices even the poorest can afford (here, in Delhi) and to feed anyone and everyone who shows up at their temples (throughout the world).

In defiance of the (very much alive and thriving) caste system, all Sikhs use the same family name (Singh or lion, a warrior caste name), although not all Singhs are Sikh. Most people working in the kitchen are, to our understanding, volunteers.

A massive number of people are served. These shots were taken a very much an off hour for eating.

After touring the kitchens, we headed to the Temple proper, trying not to slip on the marble after walking through the foot bath in our bare feet, photos not permitted. The gold dome is a marker of a Sikh temple. This particular temple is significant in the history and practice of the faith and was originally a Raja’s bungalow (the opposite of what it means in the U.S.), hence “bangla sahib.” We were getting into this solidarity of the orange head scarves and the chance to spend extended quality time with cousin Gwen, as we got ready to head back to the bus.

Like every big city, Boston has layers – layers of history and architecture and how we use and enjoy what the city has to offer us. In Boston, those layers include new layers of the land itself, as the city filled in portions of marsh and bay and riverfront to dramatically expand the colonial era city.

We thought seeing Boston from the water would provide an interesting perspective, so we joined an architecture tour by boat.

Trinity Church at Copley Square

After traipsing through countless churches and cathedrals, we had pretty much sworn off them as sites of interest. What piqued our interest in Trinity Church was curiosity about its story, or rather, it’s stories. First, the church was built in what’s known as the Back Bay, a large neighborhood in the middle of the city in what used to be . . . (you guessed it – marsh). So, the church is built on thousands of pilings pounded into fill. Then, it is widely considered to be one of the most significant buildings in America. It was the first major project of the architect H.H. Richardson and a sort of master template of an architectural style known as Richardsonian Romanesque that was imitated all over late nineteenth century America in schools, churches, hotels, and town halls. The church was built under the leadership of its Rector, Phillips Brooks, a larger than life personality. Brooks was considered the greatest American preacher of the 19th century (with some of his sermons remaining in use), preached to Queen Victoria at her invitation and wrote the lyrics for “O Little Town of Bethlehem” (while in Philadelphia). The church is in the form of a Greek cross, providing the sense of a large inclusive space for worship, and is a statement of its times in the interior decoration, as well.

The interior design of the church was entrusted to John La Farge, a painter and innovative artisan in stained glass who incorporated half globes and other three dimensional glass surfaces to gather and direct light, as well as combinations of opalescent and clear glass to create compelling images. He and Louis Comfort Tiffany were great rivals (Tiffany’s windows for Arlington Street Church, below). Trinity is filled with exemplary stained glass by various designers:

Arlington Street Church

Meanwhile, several blocks away, in the first public building to be constructed in Back Bay by another well-established congregation (1729) that had birthed Unitarianism, the Arlington Street Church is host to a sanctuary lighted by only Tiffany windows (a sampling):

Public Garden

Metropolitan Water Works

We have a weakness for the beauty of mechanical things, especially displays of 19th century industrial muscle. The Metropolitan Waterworks is now a museum with guided tours of three different stages of technology for getting water pumped from a reservoir to the thirsty citizens of Boston. It was fun climbing through and walking the catwalks, although Jim demurred when it came to the highest level!

Whenever we travel for pleasure outside of our own country, we have to wonder about ourselves. Are we big game hunters or voyeurs, are we genuinely trying to engage with another place, another culture and people, or are we simply trying to satisfy the insatiable human need for stories? Even if we feel welcomed by ordinary pandemic weary people (like the locals cheering us as we rode by on a bus in one Egyptian town), sometimes we feel we have to get out of the way and just observe (watching our toes). So, here are some photos and random thoughts on little things we’ve seen.

The ancient Egyptians were master tellers of gripping stories that propelled their civilization and kept it going for thousands of years. The Divine Right of Kings (in fact, the actual divinity of kings), the Resurrection of the Dead (for everyone), the Unitary Nation State (with the Pharaoh’s crown itself incorporating the symbols of both Upper and Lower Egypt), the Great Battle between Good and Evil, miraculous conception by the gods, the underworld, all go back to Egypt and all that writing on the columns and the wall.

The stories of Egypt, Israel and Jordan are linked tightly together, both in the past and to the present day. In the biblical accounts, Egypt is a place of both exile and refuge. Our guide in Jordan was Palestinian with family he could not visit in the West Bank. Geographically, Cairo is significantly closer to Jerusalem than to Aswan. And culturally, everyone looks back to Abraham and the prophets.

Egypt struggles. In Cairo, thousands of people make their home in the mausoleums of an enormous cemetery known as the City of the Dead (of course, in America thousands sleep homeless on the street). In the country, our guide assures us that conditions are pretty good and that there are many prosperous farmers who choose to live in the old way.

In Israel and Egypt, we had to be conscious of different expectations separating the sexes, whether at airport or other security checks where it would be men on the left, women on the right, or approaching the Western Wall where there are two sections of wall, one for men and the much more crowded one for women.

In Egypt, the Nile is everything. Life revolves around it and the water it has provided as a gift since before we knew of a thing called time.

Throughout the region, reminders of conflict are never far. An armed and very alert escort wearing a suit was almost always with us in Egypt (sometimes police cars fore and aft with Tourist Police markings). In Jordan, we only had a guard when crossing the desert (“because the King insists,” according to our guide). Despite this, despite the consistently heavy police and army presence in Israel, and despite the x-ray machines and metal detectors when entering any tourist destination, we felt safe.

We felt genuinely welcomed by the communities into which we traveled and never sensed any hostility or resentment. We not only were cheered by people on the street in that Egyptian town, a waitress at our hotel in Petra, the two men checking passports on leaving Jordan, engaged us in friendly banter and urged us to come back to stay with them longer. And, our guide in, again, Jordan gave a very moving little farewell speech, “I know your friends and family all told you that you were crazy to come to the Middle East, that this is a dangerous place to be and you came anyway.” (Not a dry eye in the house.) Our Egyptian guide, who took any opportunity to correct the misunderstandings most Americans have about Islam (“all that is just politics, it is not Islam”), also went out of her way to encourage us to buy from the mobs of vendors we encountered at every tourist stop and to even do an occasional sales pitch for one of them, pointing out that we were among the first tourists to be coming back in force after two years of covid when they were just beginning to recover from the chaos of the Arab Spring.

On our last evening, anticipating an extraordinarily early departure for the airport the next day, we walked from our Amman hotel (the one with the artificial Siq) to a nearby large modern shopping area to look for a light supper. We came to an open air multilevel mall lined with restaurants on both sides and noticed just one restaurant with lots of people sitting at tables outside, so we asked for a table and placed our order. Only after sipping our water and eating the complimentary snack did we notice that no one else was eating or drinking anything, but sitting there talking with their untouched food and drinks in front of them. Oops. It was still Ramadan. At first, we felt bad and embarrassed. Then we noticed that no one really noticed or cared. There were no dirty looks. After a while, the main courses came rolling out of the kitchen and ours also came out in the order of ordering. Still, no one else ate or drank until one of the waiters came out and announced that the sun had set.

We hope our heart is equally open to welcome the stranger.

Not known for a storied past, but for its remarkable completeness and state of preservation, ancient Greek inscriptions attribute the founding of Jerash to Alexander the Great in 331 B.C. The Romans took over in 63 B.C. and made it part of their province of Arabia, along with Petra and Philadelphia (Amman).

Having limited time, we took in only part of southern Jerash. The backbone of a Roman city was its Cardo or main street, running north to south, in this case from the North Gate to the Oval Plaza.

Overlooking the Oval Plaza and the rest of the city is the Temple of Zeus.

And, between the Temple of Zeus and the Oval Plaza lies the Naos of Zeus. Our best guess is that “Naos” refers to a spring.

Heading south from the Oval Plaza is the Hippodrome (arena for horse racing).

Just above the Temple of Zeus is the South Theater, the most complete theater of its kind we’ve seen anywhere. People got a kick out of standing on the orator’s sweet spot where voice is acoustically projected wonderfully throughout the theater and belting out a song.

The cluster of tall columns in the distance is the Temple of Artemis.

Hadrian’s Arch commemorates a visit to the city by Emperor Hadrian in 129 A.D. Large sections of the city were destroyed by an earthquake in 749 and it was further decimated by later quakes so that the city never really recovered. In the 12th Century, a small Muslim garrison was stationed there, but Baldwin II (crusader king of Jerusalem) then completely destroyed the city. Subsequent development on the site, however, was not directly on top of the Greco-Roman city, but on what had become agricultural land, and did not involve the repurposing of the stone from the ancient city. This accounts for the unusual completeness of the ruins. Sometimes things work out.

When people think of Petra, this scene is what comes to mind, the iconic image that has made Petra Jordan’s #1 tourist attraction and put the place on many a bucket list. Actually, it is quite cool and our guide, of course, played the theme from Raider’s of the Lost Ark through our earpieces as we rounded a bend and encountered the view.

The initial approach to Petra from the tourist entrance gate is somewhat unremarkable. You can hire a horse to take you to the entrance of the Siq, although it’s not terribly far. It’s the first of many offers of transportation.

Wanting to have a city in the middle of the desert somewhere around the 4th Century B.C., the Nabateans needed to create an artificial oasis and become expert at managing water and rainfall. They did this by building a system of dams and conduits to capture the water from rainfall and flash floods and store it in cisterns. Why here? They were nomads and familiar with the caravan trading routes for spices and such and they established their city at a spot able to control several of them.

As we make our way through the Siq (a 3/4 mile walk), notice the remains of water conduits on the side walls of the gorge. The Siq itself is so iconic that the entrance to our (very nice) W Hotel in Amman features a sort of tunnel you go through inspired by the Siq to get to the elevator banks.

But, here it is. The Treasury. The real purpose of this very large rock carving in sandstone seems to have been, however, a mausoleum for a Nabatean king, not a place for money. There is an inside to it, but it’s not very big.

There’s a big open space in front of the Treasury, a sort of town square, where people gather for pictures, vendors tout their wares, and we have to figure out where we go from here. So, it’s off to see the city.

For centuries Petra was a matter of legend for Europeans as a lost city. It was then “discovered” in 1812 by an Arab speaking Swiss basically traveling undercover to sneak in among the Bedouins living there in the caves. Over the years a great deal has been looted, as pretty much everywhere else in antiquity. It became a favored exotic destination for wealthy Europeans doing a sort of early glamping. Agatha Christie stayed there (she spent a lot of time in Egypt, as well) and based one of her books there (“Appointment with Death”). In 1985 the Bedouins were booted out of Petra and resettled nearby. As partial compensation, they were granted the right to peddle goods and services to tourists and keep their animals there. Need a ride? The tourists on donkeys on some of the steep trails looked scared to death. We walked.

Let’s face it, after the intensity of our journey through Egypt, leaning back to lie on top of the water as if it were a firm mattress was just our speed. Even Jim had no problem floating. Amanda slathered herself with the legendary black mud, assured that it would erase 10 years (alas, it turned out to only be 5). The oddest thing was how slick and oily the Dead Sea feels with such high salt content that nothing except a few bacteria can live there, not even those pup fish from Death Valley.

From what we saw of city, town and countryside during our brief stay, Jordan is orders of magnitude more prosperous than Egypt. For one thing, vendors selling to tourists were only mildly aggressive, while in Egypt they often seemed almost desperate. It’s a country that’s easy to like as a visitor. In keeping with the relaxed mode, our guide stopped the bus and hopped off to talk with this Bedouin father and his young son with their small flock. They were camped nearby so that the boy’s older siblings could go to school. Having no grazing rights, they run the animals along the road. The Bedouin encampment was one of several spotted on the way to Mount Nebo.

It seemed fitting that the only available mode of transportation (other than a very long walk through an unfamiliar town) to the temple known either as the Temple of Edfu or the Temple of Horus should be by horse drawn carriage. It was a ceremonious conclusion to our quest to begin to understand a culture that has fascinated the rest of the world for thousands of years, a culture that was held in awe by the rest of the ancient world as a sort of fountainhead of knowledge, wisdom and power. It would also help to wrap up the continuing thread of the story of Isis, Osiris and Horus.

The Temple of Horus at Edfu was built by the Ptolomies, the successors of Alexander the Great, beginning in 237 B.C. Naturally, like all the other temples we’ve explored, it was built on the site of earlier temples. It’s also located where legend placed the epic final battle between Horus and Seth.

The pylons (the massive structures flanking the entrance) are 118 feet tall and have within them rooms and passageways. The overall shape mimics the hieroglyph ‘akhet’ or “horizon” which consists of two hills through which the sun rises and sets, associating the building with a place of birth and creation. The big vertical grooves would hold banners. The area between the “hills” became a sort of speaking platform for the priests.

Finally, Osiris is avenged and Horus has fulfilled his quest, killing Seth by spearing him in his manifestation as the hippopotamus in scene after scene.

North of Aswan along the Nile (of course) is the Temple of Kom Ombo, unique in being a matched set of two temples dedicated to two gods, side by side: Horus (typically represented in his manifestation as a falcon) and Sobek (typically in his manifestation as a crocodile). Sobek is associated with fertility, power and military prowess, although he also helped Isis to heal Osiris. You’ve met Horus, god of kingship and the sky and the son of Isis and Osiris (whose murder he must avenge), forming the most important little family in the Egyptian religion.

The ancient Egyptians applied their skill at mummification to many kinds of animals, including these crocodiles found at Kom Ombo and exhibited at the nearby museum. There had been something like 300 of them, but most were stolen.

The Temples now located on Philae Island in Lake Nasser (close to Aswan) are additional ancient monuments rescued by UNESCO due to the inundation of their original sites as Lake Nasser filled.

We suppose that everything that happens gets suspended for a moment in what we call “the present” and then becomes “history,” such as this account found at the entrance of the Temple of Isis of coming up from Alexandria, encountering the Mamluks at the Pyramids, then going on to the cataracts by a soldier accompanying Bonaparte on his expedition into Egypt. Compared to the tablet on which he chose to write his version of events, it seems like yesterday that Bonaparte turned the world upside down.

The repurposing of the Temple of Isis by Christians creates its own history on top of the ancients that captures our imagination and causes us to wonder at the continuous reinvention of culture and the world of the spirit by our fellow humans as they honored the holiness of this space, but took it in a new and different direction that we still struggle to understand.

The Temple of Isis contains two unusual images, above, of Hathor, the nursemaid (and later the wife) of Horus, suckling him. As you may remember from a previous post, Isis the mother of Horus conceived him after she reassembled her murdered husband Osiris from the 42 widely scattered pieces into which her evil brother-in-law Seth had rendered him. What a powerful story.

And, there are more structures on Philae Island to fit into the puzzle of times long past that continue to affect us in subtle ways.

Ancient Nubia straddles the lands that are now Egypt and Sudan. Nubia had a high culture in its own right and at times was a worthy rival of Egypt. There were times, in fact, when it was a Nubian who sat on the throne of a united Egypt and there were cultural borrowings in both directions. Nubia, of course, controlled the trade routes into the rest of Africa. When the construction of the Aswan High Dam created Lake Nasser, an enormous swath of Nubia was flooded and the displaced people were given the choice of relocating to either Sudan or Egypt. Many chose Egypt and we set out to visit one of those villages and a family living there just upriver from Aswan.