Sorry You Couldn't Come Along

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.

As we taxied to the terminal, the pilot welcomed us to Abu Simbel and announced the current temperature: 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit). It was April 1, 2022 and unseasonably warm in this outpost up close to the border with Sudan.

Our destination for the day lay behind this artificial hill, created to accommodate the relocation in 1968 of two massive Nile-side temples built by Ramses II in the 13th Century B.C. It was part of the UNESCO Nubian Salvage Campaign in anticipation of the rise of Lake Nasser when the Aswan High Dam was complete. Because the U.S. provided the lion’s share of funding for the project, the Egyptian government presented the Nubian Temple of Dendur as a gift to the American people. Lyndon Johnson then designated the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the receiving institution.

Ramses created the first of these temples to celebrate his victory in the battle of Kadesh and as a warning to the Nubians to stop harassing his southern border. The second temple was a tribute to his favorite wife, Nefartari.

Imagine rounding a bend in the river as part of a raiding party and coming upon these stupendously imposing monuments to power and the imposition of will; four of Ramses the Great, sitting calmly. His strategy actually worked. Troubles from the south dropped precipitously during his long reign.

Meanwhile, next door at the temple Ramses built in tribute to his Queen Nefartari, the theme is a little more mellow, although Ramses remains the main idea interspersed with what looks like representations of Nefartari with a child next to her and holding something in her left hand. The more you look the more you notice (and, we’re most likely wrong).

It’s a nice little temple and quiet enough to practice walking like an Egyptian.

Egad! Another temple? After making our way over from the dock, we found that Esna Temple stands a good 30 feet below current ground level (and the greater part of the temple remains unexcavated underneath the town) . So, down the stairs we went to take in another Greco-Roman period temple (remember, you can tell from those massive walls connecting the columns and providing plenty of space for messaging). Of course, underneath this unearthed temple lay the foundations of still earlier temples, as the habit through the ages was to build the new on top of the old. The best estimate is that the original temple in this spot was from the reign of Tuthmosis III during the New Kingdom period. A few things made Esna interesting:

First, it’s rare to see dancing kings. That’s reportedly Emperor Trajan (perhaps the inspiration for The Bangles hit Walk Like an Egyptian?).

But, it’s the capitals topping the 24 columns in the hypostyle hall that are the star of the show. Every column appears to be unique and each is really marvelous, even after you’ve seen a lot of temples.