Egypt: Luxor

After the quick bus ride to Luxor, we ate a very western meal of bugers and fries at a neaby cafe and a few hours later travelled by horse-drawn carriages to Karnak temple, where we met our local guide, Adlle (sp.) who was brilliant and mixed Egyptology with photography tips (after a while I just handed him my camera) and Australian jokes, causing general hilarity amongst the group. His university thesis was on Karnak temple itself, and he pointed out many things we would never have picked up otherwise.

‘Come and look at the amazing colours!’ he would exclaim loudly as other tourists wandered past, looking over his shoulder until they had gone and gesturing for us to huddle close to hear another ‘secret’.

Moses, changed by the Greeks from the original Egyptian name of Moussa, was described in the bible as having the same ‘title’ as Ramses II is depicted in hieroglyphs within the temple, resulting in the assumption that they were around during the same dynasty; The sun God ‘Amon-Ra’ (all other Egyptian Gods are a manifestation of this one God) is most likely a literary ancestor of ‘Amen’ and other similar sounding words worshipped in other religions; The hundreds of impressively huge columns within the temple were designed in such a way that many of the reliefs form the anicent Egyptian symbol of life, Ank, if looked on from above – Adlle could have told stories and ‘secrets’ all day and we would never have noticed the time go by. As it was, two hours felt like 10 mins, and by the end of the afternoon we could really imagine the temple floors of carved silver and statues of gold, the heavy stone roofs and slits of sunlight lighting the darkened temple, and the true holiness of the place, instead of a few massive stone carvings.

We watched the sun set over the temple obilisks and caught the horse-drawn carriages back to the hotel. I don’t think we could have fit anything else into one day.

-Sarah