Tell Amarna

Dear Friends,

OK, today's the day we visit tel el Amarna (also Tell Amarna, and other spellings) which is where Aknaton (also "Akhenaten") moved the capital of Egypt. You may remember that Aknaton was an amazing pharaoh for several reasons. He introduced monotheism with the worhip of the one god who was represented by the sun--Aten, the Sun God/Amon Raa; he was married to the beautiful Nefertiti; and he was the first to change the traditional "perfect" images of people in sculpture, paintings, and carvings to a more realistic representation. He is seen as a rather odd looking person with a pot belly and an oddly shaped body. He was assassinated by the priests, and the capitol was moved back to Luxor an the old religions (and priests) regained power.

This was a huge site--heck, it was the capitol of Egypt. We climbed the sides of a small mountain to see the royal tombs, we saw the ruins of the palace and the temple we saw two boundary stellas which were huge carvings that marked the boundaries (only two remain (it may be three, I don't remember specifically). There had been close to 20 at one time). 

This was an all day trip for us that returned us to El Minya for an overnight. It was really great.

Here are some photos and a video:

1. from the foot of a boundary stella looking at the van and the road we took to get here (not a lot of vegetation!)

2. detail of one of the boundary stellas (remember this was carved here over 3,300

 years ago!

3. path up to

 the tombs. If you look closely you'll notice all the flights of stairs in the distance.

4. video of Lea and Stu moving along a path by tombs. Notice how high up we are. The van at the end that you see is our van that moved from where we started to be where we would come down off the mountain.

And, we saw a lot of other neat sandy, high, sites and tombs. They didn't allow us to take pictures in the tombs.

That's it for today.

Love,

Frank

Reaching Minya

Dear Friends,

We finally reached Minya (by the way, for most of the town/city/area names, there are several spellings. That's because when the names were translated into the Roman alphabet there were various ways to represent the translation. So, for example, you'll see Minya and Minia. Plus, there are the Arabic names which are different than the western names. 

Anyway, on our drive, we had a wonderful time seeing the middle of Egypt. We went through towns and villages. Because the tourist police were leading us (as fast as they could drive, by the way) we didn't get to have photo stops or even go slow enough that it was easy to take photos. When we got into towns and there was a slow down in traffic, the police put on their sirens, pull around the traffic jam and we'd speed along. Again, it made us feel conspicuous and like the tourists we were.

We got into Minya in the middle of the afternoon. The town is a city and quite large. It has one of the largest universities in Egypt, therefore, a lot of students. 

AND, because of that, a lot of protests. We were asked not to leave the very pretty hotel grounds unless we had our guide with us. 

This was early in January and the New Year's Day had just passed a little while ago. I'll put a couple photos of the decorations we saw. Also, we found out that even the non-

Christian Egyptians celebrate Christmas. They have Santa Claus figures (there was an 8-10 ft tall Santa at our Cairo hotel), decorated trees and the whole secular thing. Basam and Manal told us that it is a time of celebration and gift giving (not of celebrating the birth of Jesus). For the Christmas part of the celebrations, they use cotton balls and cotton batting to create "snow." You'll see some of that in one of the photos.

 

The hotel was right along the Nile. The rooms were in separate grouping of two or more rooms. This was the best hotel in the city and the rooms were basic (really basic) and the heat wasn't great. It was getting into the low 40s at night. I slept in long-johns.

I'll post below some photos of the Nile, the next day's sunrise, some fishermen and some of the non-human life along the river.

Frank

Dear Friends,

It's hard to believe that in a couple days we'll have been home from Egypt for almost 2 months. WOW. We've had so much to do and life has been so full that in some ways it seems like it's been a year or so since we were in Egypt. In other ways it seems like I'm still there. Egypt becomes a part of you it seems.

More for myself than for anyone else, I'm going to continue this blog so that I have a place to have some of my photos and a description of what they are about.

It looks like my last post was while we were still in Cairo.

We left Cairo on Wednesday, January 7 and headed south towards Luxor.  This total drive would be Cairo to Minya (155 miles), Minya to Asyut (75 miles), Asyut to Luxor (200 miles), then after our Nile Cruise and our Lake Nassar Cruise, we'd drive from Aswan to Luxor (about 81 miles). That means that we'll have driven about 510 miles along the Nile.  Neat!

Anyway, on our way south, we passed Saquarra, and were driving with just sand desert on both sides of the van (we had in the van Lea, Stuart, Ahmet our great guide, Mahmoot our wonderful driver, myself, and a tourist police officer. We were led by a jeep with a driver and a person beside him and 2-3 people in the back of the covered jeep who each had a machine gun. We felt safe and a bit conspicuous.

As we drove along, I noticed a large outcropping in the distance. It looked a lot like Devils

 Rock out west. I pointed it out (there's a photo below of when we got a bit closer). Ahmet didn't

 seem like it was anything special. Then we turned off onto a smaller road and started driving toward this neat outcropping. As we got closer we could tell it wasn't a natural formation, it was a pyramid!

 

We were seeing Meidum Pyramid from a

 distance.

 

You'll see a couple photos of the pyramid, the guard shack 

and the "lesser tombs" in the human-made mound nearby. 

I'll see if I can put a video on this

 to also give an idea of the size of this neat place.

We were here for a while and then headed south towards Minya.

I'll end this post here and add the photos.

Love,

Frank