No comments Herodotus gives a quite fantastic description of the interior of Khufu’s pyramid, referring to a subterranean lake under the building with an island in it on which the pharaoh was buried. This indicates that the pyramid, which certainly had been entered during the First Intermediate Period, had been closed up again. Moreover, the original entrance must still have been well concealed and all knowledge of its existence had evidently been lost when in the ninth century AD the Caliph Ma’mun drove his tunnel into the building in order to discover the tomb chamber and its hidden treasure.

Ancient Egypt Pyramids

The final closing of the pyramids which had been pillaged in ancient times probably took place during the latest period of Egyptian independence under the Saite dynasty which ruled the country in the seventh and sixth centuries BC. Whereas we have had to deal so far with the destruction of evidence by treasure seekers and stone robbers we now have to discuss an entirely different aspect: the fabrication of misleading evidence. In spite of the neglect and wanton destruction of the Old Kingdom edifices in later times the pyramids retained their aura of sanctity and, with the passage of the centuries, veneration of the Old Kingdom returned. It became a mark of distinction and an insurance for a man’s afterlife to be buried in or near the ancient tombs. The earlier of these ‘intrusive’ burials, to use an archaeological term, bear so clearly the stamp of their own age that they can easily be recognised for what they are. However, more difficult problems for the archaeologists were created by the pharaohs of the last Egyptian dynasties. Towards the end of the pharaonic empire the priests of Amun at Thebes gained an ever-increasing political power which, in keeping with the ancient matrilineal tradition, was exercised in the name of a royal princess who held the title ‘wife of the god’. She was never the pharaoh’s wife but the spouse of Amun and her succession was ensured by adoption of further royal princesses. Thus the pharaoh now held power in a less direct manner – not as husband of the ‘great wife’ but as father of his daughter. The central power had slipped from the hands of the king into those of the priests who, in order to maintain it, began to employ foreign mercenaries. These, however, were no match for any powerful aggressor, such as the Assyrians who overran Egypt without much difficulty at about 650 BC. The Assyrians’ victory was of short duration because they, in turn, had to defend themselves against Media. As the Assyrians’ power in Egypt crumbled, the man whom they had installed to govern the country on their behalf turned against them. He was Psammetichus who declared himself pharaoh and legitimised his position by having his eldest daughter, another Nitokerti, adopted as ‘wife of the god’. Enthroned at his capital of Sals, Psammetichus and his successors in the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty tried to restore the splendour of the ancient traditions, and the Old Kingdom of 2,000 years before their time became their model. Their sculpture and architecture imitated that of the early dynasties so closely that at first Egyptologists were frequently misled. It seems that the Saltes also cleared the pyramids and resealed them after having buried their own dead there. When in 1837 Perring discovered sixty mummies in a large gallery under the Step Pyramid at Saqqara he took them naturally to be the dead retainers of Zoser. Only later was it discovered that not only did the mummies belong to the Late Period but that the gallery itself had been newly excavated by the Saites. Recently both the wooden coffin lid, inscribed with the name of Menkaure, and the mummy found in the pyramid were recognised as late substitutions. Some doubts have therefore arisen about the authenticity of Menkaure’s basalt sarcophagus, which unfortunately had been lost at sea. The existing drawing of it does not make it appear impossible that this sarcophagus too was a Saite production, despite the fact that it reproduces the ‘palace fa$ade’ decoration. Summarising all these facts and taking into account early pillage and late restoration, it becomes clear that the evidence presented by the pyramids today is often confusing and, to some extent, perplexing. The complexity is further increased by the existence of the small subsidiary pyramids which were attached to each big pyramid, dating from that at Meidum onward. The interior chambers of some of these are too small to have served for the burial of a human body, and it has been suggested that they may have been the repositories of the canopic jars, holding the pharaoh’s viscera. In that case this ‘ritual’ pyramid should be regarded as an integral part of the standard pyramid complex, together with the mortuary temple, causeway and valley building. The matter, however, becomes more complicated by the fact that the pyramid complexes of Khufu and Menkaure each contain three of these small pyramids. A pointer concerning their occupants is given by Herodotus. According to the priests from whom he obtained his information, the pharaoh, Khufu, wishing to raise funds for the building of his pyramid, induced his daughter to sell her charms. The lady, who wished to erect a memorial to her filial devotion, asked each man to give her one stone, and she was eventually buried in the small pyramid collected in this manner. Quite apart from the fact that Herodotus could have rejected this preposterous story on numerical grounds – the pyramid contains at least 20,000 stones – it is hardly in keeping with the position of a royal princess of the Fourth Dynasty. However, even the most unlikely legends usually contain a grain of truth and it seems probable that some, at least of these subsidiary pyramids were the tombs of the ‘great queens’. Indeed, according to a late stela, the southernmost of Khufu’s small pyramids was built for Queen Henutsen, one of Khufu’s wives and the mother of Khafre. The details about all these subsidiary pyramids are best given in tabulated form.

Ancient Egyptian Pyramid :

The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P1
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P2
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P3
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P4
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P5
The Unsolved Problems about Ancient Egyptian Pyramids P6

7 comments You will Find in Ancient Egypt Maps for kids :

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No comments Mosque of Sultan Hassan This is one of the most beautiful and monumental mosques in Cairo. The builder of this mosque and school was Sultan El Nasser Hassan. He was the 19th of the Turkish Sultans to have reigned in Egypt and the seventh son of the Sultan El Nasser Mohamed Ibn Kalaoun.

Mosque of Sultan Hassan

Conspiracies were one of his era’s traits. He decided to build his mosque in the square facing the Citadel of Salah El Din. He began the construction in 1356 and it was completed in the year 1363 by Bashir Agha who was one of his princes. This mosque is considered one of the greatest works of Islamic architecture. The mosque is 7907 square meters wide. The entrance is 37.80 m high. There is also a schoool or a madrassa mosque for the four rites of Islam. The court is almost a square in shape. Each side is about 32 meters in length. On each side there is an wan that stands higher than the court. Each wan is roofed with a brick-pointed tunnel-vault with a stone arch. Art lovers consider the arches of its largest wan a miracle of construction.

Mosque of Sultan Hassan

The walls of the Iwan are covered with coloured stone blocks and marble. There is a stucco inscription containing verses from Surat El Fath in Kufic writing. In the middle of the wan there is a marble pulpit and tribune of great craftsmanship. Around the mihrab there are four marble supports. On the right side of the minbar, which is made of white marble, there is a wooden door covered with bronze. At each side of the qibla wall there is a door. The two doors lead to the tomb chamber. The doors were covered with bronze and gold silver inlay.

Mosque of Sultan Hassan

The tomb chamber is 21 square meters high. The walls are covered with marble up to 8 meters.

The Mosque of Sultan Hassan has two minarets. One is 82 meters high and is considered one of the highest Islamic minarets. It is two meters shorter than the two minarets of Mohamed Ali Pasha Mosque which was built 500 years later.

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Horemheb

(meryamun)

Djeserkheperure Setepenre 

Dynasty 18

1321-1293 BC

Horemheb Pharaoh Biography 1321-1293 BC
Horemheb‘s background is virtually unknown except that he came from Herakleopolis near the entrance to the Faiyum and was obviously a career officer whose capabilities were early recognized. First serving under Amenhotep III, he became Great Commander of the Army under Akhenaten and was later appointed King’s Deputy by Tutankhamun. He was obviously a highly ambitious man, and the death of Ay offered the perfect opportunity to restore to Egypt the strong leadership he felt she needed. Horemheb therefore declared himself king in 1321, consolidating his claim to the throne through his marriage to a lady named Mutnodjme, the sister of Nefertiti. He thus formed a link back to the female royal blood line, albeit a tenuous one. From evidence in his recently rediscovered tomb at Saqqara he appears to have had an earlier wife, but her name is not known.

Detail of a statue of Horemheb, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Horemheb must have been in middle age when he became king and he immediately set about restoring the status quo, reopening the temples, repairing them where necessary, and bringing back the priesthood of Amun. Here he did make a change, however: realizing the stranglehold they had endeavoured to put on Amenhotep III, he reappointed priests from the army, whose loyalties he could rely on. To consolidate his hold over the army, now that he was really no longer primarily a military man, he divided it under two separate commanders, one for the north and one for the south.

Horemheb usurped the monuments of his immediate predecessors Ay and Tutankhamun. To the two great ‘Restoration‘ stele that detailed the good works of Tutankhamun he simply added his own name. Embellishments were carried out at the great temple of at Karnak where he initiated the great Hypostyle Hall and added a tall pylon, No. 9. Here he achieved two objects: first, he built the pylon to the glory of Amun on the south side of Karnak; and secondly, he destroyed the hated temple to the Aten erected by Akhenaten by simply dismantling it and using its small talatat (‘two-hands width’) blocks as interior filling for the hollow pylon. Archaeologists have recovered thousands of these blocks during the restoration of the pylon and have been able to reconstruct great Amarna scenes. In one sense, therefore, Horemheb’s destructive scheme backfired: by hiding the blocks in the pylon he preserved them for posterity.

Horemheb with Amun at the Museo Egizio

Horemheb took over Ay’s mortuary temple on the west bank at Medinet Habu, together with the two colossal quartzite statues of Tutankhamun that Ay had himself usurped. Thus he set about completely expunging from the record any trace of his four Amarna predecessors. He dated his reign from the death of Amenhotep III, adding the intervening years to his own total; none of the Amarna names appeared in any of the Ramesside king lists at Abydos and Karnak. Furthermore, in the early 19th Dynasty tomb of a certain Amenmosi at Thebes (TT 19), where two rows of seated statues of kings and queens are depicted on the west wall, Horemheb is placed between Amenhotep III and Ramses I. Kings of the 19th Dynasty were to regard him as the founder of their line, and this probably explains why a number of tombs of officials, as well as that of Ramses II‘s sister, the princess Tia, were deliberately placed near his Saqqara tomb.

Although official records of Horemheb‘s reign go as high as Year 59 (incorporating those of the Amarna pharaohs), his actual reign of almost 30 years was spent in consolidation. There is little evidence of external contact except for a campaign in Kush (possibly simply a royal progress or inspection) and a trading expedition to the south.

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No comments Facts and Secrets about Ancient Egyptian Musical Instruments
Dance was also very popular in ancient Egypt, again in both religious and secular spheres. Rhythmic Accompaniment was provided by clapping, clapping, cymbals, tambourines or chanting. Again, dancing was mainly a group activity, Representations vary from slow, postured movement to lyrical, fluid or gymnastic performances.

Ancient Egyptian Dance

Ancient Egyptian Music in some form was an essential accompaniment to the dance , but it was also a recreational and religious art in its own right. Musical scenes are depicted from the Old Kingdom onwards. Although there were always musicians of both sexes, in the Old Kingdom most of those shown are women. One theme that recurs again and again is that of the blind harper, usually male. The Egyptians seem to have lacked a written, ancient Egyptian musical notation so a blind performer would have been at no disadvantage. To gain some idea of the music played it is necessary to study the instruments, many of which survive. They can be divided into three categories- stringed, wind and percussion-and their range increased during the New Kingdom when new varieties were adopted from the Near East.

Stringed instruments comprised the harp, the lyre and the lute. Two varieties of harp are known. The arched, or bow, harp was used from the sixth Dynasty onwards, but the angular harp appeared at the start of the New Kingdom, imported from Asia. The number of strings on these harps varies from four to ten and the size of the instruments is also variable. The strings were attached to the neck by pegs and to the sound box by a suspension rod, secured by a cord which could be adjusted to vary the tone. The harp was played by both mane and workmen. The lute and the lyre both appeared from the Near East during the New Kingdom. The lute consisted of a long wooden neck attached to a sound box, which was made either of wood or, in the case of small examples, a tortoise shell.

Ancient Egyptian flute

A skin was stretched over the box for sounding and the neck had frets onto which the strings were pressed to make the notes, They were played with a plectrum. The lyre had two forms, asymmetrical and symmetrical, and consisted of two arms attached to a sound box. The two arms were joined by a yoke to which the strings were attached by cords, pieces of cloth or papyrus. Both these instruments were played mostly by women, either in orchestras or solo to accompany singers.

Various wind instruments are known, with and without reeds. The flutes of ancient Egypt were played obliquely. They could be made of reed or metal and came in different sizes. Reeded instruments were the clarinet and the oboe, which were played in pairs, on acting as a drone. The oboe tended to replace the clarinet in the New Kingdom and was mostly plated by women. Trumpets were not used in orchestras, but only for military and religious purposes.

Of percussion instruments,those most commonly used in orchestras or for accompaniment wee the tambourine and drum. Clapperboards, bells and sisttra were mostly reserved o religious uses.

The British Museum’s collection contains several scenes showing musical groups. The firs is of Old Kingdom dare and shows a male chamber group consisting of a harpist , a flautist and two singers. The New Kingdom scenes show a greater variety of instruments. One depicts a female ensemble at a banquet. The group consists of a large lute, a clapping singer, a smaller lute, a double oboe and a tambourine or drum, A similar banquet scene from a Theban tomb shows a double oboe and three women clapping out a rhythm to accompany two dancers, The final scene depicts a religious procession and indicates the pleasure to be had at a festival which would also have been a holiday. It represents a procession similar to one described by Herodotus, which took place at Bubastis – an occasion of a great joy and frenzy.

The worshipers went to Bubastis in barges, men and women packed in together: on the way some of the women kept up a continual clatter with castanets while some of the men played flutes. The rest sang and clapped their hands. Whenever they passed a town along the bank they brought the barge close inshore, making their ancient Egyptian music . The crowed in the barges yelled good-nature abuse at the women of the place, began to dance about or hitched up their robes to reveal their behinds, On reaching Bubastis they celebrated the festivals with elaborate sacrifices and drank vast quantities of wine.

Ancient Egyptian Sistrum

As already of the main sources if employment for musicians was performing a banquets. Dinner parties seem to have been on of the favorite pastimes of the Ancient Egyptians middle and upper classes, judging by the frequency with which they are depicted in tomb scenes. At the beginning of a feast the guests would be greeted by their hosts and offered flowered garlands by servants. They were also given scented cones for their hair, as described in the previous chapter. Gusts did not sit round a large dining table as we today but small tables at which they were served with food and wine. The hosts and honored gusts sat in chairs, while others sat on stools or cushions. In some scenes the men and women sit separately, while in others they mingle freely. This nay represents the difference between married couples and single gusts. The food and wine was heaped enticingly on stands and tables , almost like a buffet, although servants brought the food to the gusts.

During the meal musicians played and afterwards dancers, or possibly an acrobat, would perform, As the banquet continued, more and more wine was consumed, accompanied by such sentiments as ‘Give me eighteen cups of wine, for I should love to drink to drunkenness my inside is as dry as straw’. The end result of such indulgence is also recorded, men and even women being sick into a bowl held by servants and being comforted by their neighbors as the jollity continues.

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No comments Introduction This is a book about a scientific discovery. Having spent my life as a professional scientist, I have written it up just as I would have recorded any other discovery. The training of a scientist sets limitations by which the average story writer is usually not bound. Above all, the scientist has to guard against the ever present danger of approaching his subjects with preconceived theories which he then sets out to prove as being correct. Fortunately, this danger did not exist in the present case, simply because I had no theories on the subject at all. Not having any theories was not too difficult either since I did not even know the subject well enough at that time.

Ancient Egyptian Pyramid

As so often happens in scientific enquiry it all began with a chance observation which, while interesting and stimulating in itself, did not appear to be of more than limited importance. Although I was fully aware of the great riddle presented by the pyramids, namely the question why this immense effort had been made 5,000 years ago, I was not at that stage aware that my chance observation might provide the key to it; neither did it enter my mind that I might possibly contribute to its solution. However, a scientific discovery is usually not, as so many people imagine, a sudden flash of intuition by which the whole truth is revealed in one glorious instant. In ninety-nine out of a hundred cases it is a slow, and often laborious, process – very much like a detective story in which the clues have to be patiently assembled, and many false leads have to be eliminated. Just as is the case with a detective story, the process by which the scientist obtains his final result is as intriguing to him as the result itself. Certainly, the result must remain the ultimate aim but much of the satisfaction with the achievement is vested in the way that led to it. It is for this reason that in my account of the pyramid problem I have essentially adhered to the chronological order of the various stages which ultimately led to the solution. It was a task which to me, as a scientist, was superbly exciting, and it is the joy of this excitement, more than anything else, which I should like the reader to share with me. There is another reason for recording the events in their chronological sequence. However sure the scientist may feel that he has not slipped up somewhere in his arguments and conclusions, nobody would be so conceited as to believe that his deductions are infallible. It is therefore essential that he should present a full account of his work so that it can be checked at every stage. The thesis put forward in this book is an extremely simple one. The pyramids of Egypt are immensely large, immensely ancient and, by general consensus, extremely useless. These fantastic man- made mountains, containing altogether more than 25 million tons of quarried limestone, and with very little space inside them, were heaped up in little more than a century. Nevertheless, however useless they appear to us, they must have been considered as extremely useful by the ancient Egyptians since they expended an almost unbelievable amount of labour in constructing them. In the course of history attempts have been made to explain the function of the pyramids as astronomical observatories, as granaries, as refuges from the Flood, as repositories of divinely inspired prophecies, or even as the work of visitors from another planet. Archaeological evidence, however, leaves no doubt that the pyramids served as funerary monuments for the early pharaohs. Whether they were the actual burial places, as most people believe, or whether they are merely cenotaphs, will be discussed later. It is, in any case, a matter of only secondary importance to our own considerations. The fact remains that all archaeological and literary finds attest to the existence of funeral rites and of a large body of mortuary priests in connection with the pyramids. On the basis of this inescapable conclusion it had to be assumed that this early civilisation had mobilised all its resources and directed its entire labour force to produce nothing better than a gigantic royal tomb. This assumption is made even more difficult by the fact that the era of large pyramids was relatively short and that, for centuries before and after, pharaohs were buried less ostentatiously, and certainly much more cheaply. It is our thesis that the generally accepted conclusion that the large pyramids are nothing more than royal tombs may be based on a subtle logical error. While it is readily admitted that the pyramids served as royal mausolea, it does not necessarily mean that this was the only purpose of their construction. In fact, it probably was not even the main purpose. The discovery of this main purpose is the story told in this book. No discovery ever stands on its own; it is always based on an existing body of accumulated knowledge into which it has to fit and to which it has to make an original contribution. In our case the body of existing knowledge is the field of Egyptology. For over a century professional Egyptologists have excavated the tombs and temples of Egypt, deciphered and translated the inscriptions on the walls and in the papyri, correlated archaeological and scriptural evidence, and in this way built up a remarkably consistent picture of a civilisation that died thousands of years ago. Their painstaking research and their conclusions by now fill about 20,000 volumes of books and bound periodicals. Thanks to this massive treasure house of information I have been able to study the background to my own work on the pyramids. Without this immense volume of fact, collected by Egyptologists, my own observations would have neither purpose nor meaning. When setting out on this work I was delighted to discover that, with one somewhat bizarre exception, Egyptologists did not resent the intrusion of a stranger in their midst. Quite on the contrary, they were invariably most helpful, patiently explaining to me the relevant features of their work and guiding me through the maze of Egyptological publications. Their attitude, that of true and devoted scholars, has been to welcome and listen to the scientist in the hope that he may make some contribution to their own field. Without their appreciation of my efforts and their enthusiastic encouragement of my work, the present book would never have been written. I am grateful to them, not only for their help but for having so generously opened to me a beautiful and exciting field of study.

Riddle of Ancient Egyptian Pyramid :

Riddle of Ancient Egyptian Pyramid P1
Riddle of Ancient Egyptian Pyramid P2

No comments As set out above, our estimate represents an average figure for a labour force of constant strength employed with maximal efficiency and at a steady rate for the span of a hundred years. This certainly must be regarded as a gross simplification but it should be remembered that it is a minimum figure, since fluctuations in employment would cause an increase and not a decrease in the aggregate number of workers. For reasons to be discussed later, we may suspect that the actual labour force was less than 70,000 to begin with, increased to more than this number in the middle of the period, and was probably run down fairly rapidly at its end.

Ancient Egyptian Pyramids

Considering these large numbers, we now begin to see why the building period of the Meidum pyramid and the Bent Pyramid had to overlap so heavily, and why the old concept of consecutive building periods under successive pharaohs was quite impossible. While it is true that, since the work was carried out during the inundation period, the drain on food production in the Pyramid Age was not serious, its general economic effect on the country must have been profound. We can best illustrate the pattern of work by a simple and highly idealised diagram. Let us consider first the accepted idea that on his accession to the throne the pharaoh started on the construction of his pyramid. He then would make use of the maximum available labour force in order to ensure that the monument should be completed as speedily as possible. This means that the maximum number of workers available for the project will have been run up as rapidly as possible and they would all be employed season after season for ten or twenty years. Throughout this time they were busy quarrying, transporting and placing the blocks. Then, however, the stage was reached when the pyramid had grown so high that access to the working area was becoming restricted and also slow. This means that the working force had to be run down during the next seasons until the pyramid was finished and all building activity ceased. Nothing now happened until the next pharaoh started his reign, when the same process had to be gone through all over again. Since there would have been an interval between the building periods and also a gradual run-down of the force at the end of each period, our original calculation of the labour force is too low and about 150,0 workers had to be employed seasonally for, say, fifteen years, after which they would be idle for a similar period. It does not require much imagination to see that this type of employment pattern is utterly unrealistic and economically not feasible. Even the lower figure of 70,000 workers will have represented a colossal army in the Egypt of 5,000 years ago. Its communal feeding, clothing and upkeep for three or four months each year must have completely revolutionised the pattern of life of the whole country. In the course of ten or twenty years of construction, a large section of theworking population came under the jurisdiction of a central administration which completely regulated its life. It was this new central administration which had now become responsible for their livelihood and to whom they had become answerable instead of to their tribal council and their village elders. The whole exercise involved far too drastic a change in the life of everybody to be reversed to the original pattern after a span of twenty years. No economy in the world, not even that of ancient Egypt, could have survived such a switching on and off of this immense working force. In other words, consecutive construction of large pyramids was simply not practicable. Going back to our diagram we see that a critical stage for the maintenance of the working force was reached when limitation of access to the pyramid demanded its reduction. At this stage there was only one way out of the economic dilemma; the surplus workers had to be shifted to the start of the next pyramid. From then on not one but two pyramids were under construction, as indeed we have discovered in the simultaneous work on the Meidum and Bent Pyramids. It is also clear that pyramid building had to become essentially independent of the length of a pharaoh’s reign since it had to continue unabated in order to maintain the employment pattern once it had been instituted. With construction periods running heavily into each other and the total labour force probably increasing all the time, the fact that there exist more large pyramids in the Fourth Dynasty than pharaohs who could be buried in them becomes understandable. Since the average reigns of Snofru, Khufu and Khafre seem each to have been about a quarter of a century, it is not surprising that they ended up with four, or possibly five, large pyramids. The difficulty of gearing the construction of a pyramid to the length of a prospective reign had already occurred to the great German Egyptologist, Richard Lepsius, in the middle of the nineteenth century. How, he asked, could a pharaoh provide a completed or nearly completed monument at the time of his death when he could not possibly foresee how long he still had to live? Lepsius’ answer was his famous accretion theory, according to which the king would start with a tomb chamber over which he would then erect a gradually increasing pyramid. Its final size would therefore be determined by the length of his reign.

When it was eventually discovered that the layout of the large pyramids had been determined at the outset, Lepsius’ theory had to be discarded. However, it appears that by then his critics had forgotten the real reason for Lepsius’s proposal and the problem of correlating pyramid construction and length of reign remained unsolved. The suggestion that the successor would finish the previous king’s monument turns out to be a semantic argument. If a pharaoh died halfway through the completion of his monument, his successor would have had to finish a sizable structure when starting on his own pyramid, which would be indistinguishable from the pattern of continuous construction outlined above.

No comments An Engineer at the Cataract, 1859
Isambard Kingdom Brunei

Philae Temple

Philae, February 13, 1859 I now write to you from a charming place; but Asowan, which 1 left to come here, is also beautiful, and I will speak of that first. It is strange that so little is said in the guide books of the picturesque beauty of these places. Approaching Assouan, you glide through a reef of rocks, large boulders of granite polished by the action of the water charged with sand. You arrive at a charming bay or lake of perfectly still water and studded with those singular jet-black or red-rock islands. In the distance you see a continuation of the river, with distant islands shut in by mountains, of beautiful colours, some a lilac sandstone, some of the bright yellow of the sands of the desert. Above the promontories the water excursions are delicious. You enter at once among the islands of the Cataracts, fantastic forms of granite heaps of boulders split and worn into singular shapes. After spending a week at Assouan, with a trip by land to Philae, I was so charmed with the appearance of the Cataracts as seen from the shore, and with the deliciously quiet repose of Philae, that I determined to get a boat, and sleep a few nights there. We succeeded in hiring a country boat laden with dates, and emptied her, and fitted up her three cabins. [Mr. Brunei’s Nile boat, being of iron, could not safely go up the Cataract.] We put our cook and dragoman and provisions etc on board, and some men, and went up the Cataract. It was a most amusing affair, and most beautiful and curious scenery all the way. It is a long rapid of three miles, and perhaps one mile wide, full of rocky islands and isolated rocks. A bird’s eye view hardly shows a free passage, and some of the more rapid falls are between rocks not forty feet wide in appearance not twenty. Although they do not drag the boats up perpendicular falls, of three or four feet, as the travellers’ books tell you, they really do drag the boats up rushes of water which, until I had seen it, and had then calculated the power required, I should imprudently have said could not be effected. We were dragged up at one place a gush of water, what might fairly be called a fall of about three feet, the water rushing past very formidably, and between rocks seemingly not more than wide enough to let our boat pass, and this only by some thirty-five men at three or four ropes, the men standing in the water and on the rocks in all directions, shouting, plunging into the water, swimming across the top or bottom of the fall, just as they wanted, then getting under the boat to push it off rocks, all with an immense expenditure of noise and apparent confusion and want of plan, yet on the whole properly and successfully. We were probably twenty or thirty minutes getting up this one, sometimes bumping hard on one rock, sometimes on another, and jammed hard first on one side and then on the other, the boat all the time on the fall with ropes all strained, sometimes going up a foot or two, sometimes losing it, til at least we crept to the top, and sailed quiedy on in a perfectly smooth lake. These efforts up the different falls had been going on for nearly eight hours and the relief from noise was delicious. We selected a quiet spot under the temples of Philae. . . .

The Rush of the Cataract, 1836 

Lord Lindsay …. the cry arose that we were going down the stream again! I sprung out, the vessel was edging away from the rock I leapt and caught by my hands, my feet in the water; the Arabs pulled me up, and I was safe, thank God! Twice did the boat nearly escape us, the current was so violent; at last we got her safely lashed to the rock with all the ropes we had, and for an hour, or more, the men were occupied in landing everything portable: first our things, then the oars, planks, etc, of the boat, lastly their own stores of dates and biscuits, which they could not touch (honest fellows!) till ours were safe. We expected every minute to see the ropes break and the boat topple over, lying sideways as she did, the deck half under water.

Here we were then, and a most extraordinary scene it was to be in! Wild and picturesque at all times, doubly so now, dark purple clouds lowering around us, rain pouring (a wonder of itself in Upper Egypt), lightning flashing, and thunder outroaring the rapids that were dashing past on either side of our islet, covered as it was with boxes, books, pipes, guns, crockery, pigeons, fowls, lambs, goats, and last but not least, two chameleons, poor things!

No comments A City of the Earth, 1913 
Rudyard Kipling

But I bought nothing. The city thrust more treasure upon me than I could carry away. It came out of dark alleyways on tawny camels loaded with pots; on pattering asses half buried under nets of cut clover; in the exquisitely modelled hands of little children scurrying home from the cook-shop with the evening meal, chin pressed against the platter’s edge and eyes round with responsibility over the pile; in the broken lights from jotting rooms overhead, where the women lie, chin between palms, looking out of windows not a foot from the floor; in every glimpse into every courtyard, where the men smoke by the tank; in the heaps of rubbish and rotten bricks that flanked newly painted houses, waiting to be built, some day, into houses once more; in the slap and slide of the heelless red-and-yellow slippers all around, and, above all, in the mixed delicious smells of frying butter, Mohammedan bread, kababs, leather, cooking–smoke, assafetida, peppers and turmeric.

Cairo City of the Earth

Devils cannot abide the smell of burning turmeric, but the right-minded man loves it. It stands for evening that brings all home, the evening meal, the dipping of friendly hands in the dish, the one face, the dropped veil, and the big, guttering pipe afterward.

Praise be to Allah for the diversity of His creatures and for the Five Advantages of Travel and for the glories of the Cities of the Earth! Harun–al–Raschid, in roaring Baghdad of old, never delighted himself to the limits of such delight as was mine, that afternoon. It is true that the call to prayer, the cadence of some of the street cries, and the cut of some of the garments differed a little from what I had been brought up to; but for the rest, the shadow on the dial had turned back twenty degrees for me, and I found myself saying, as perhaps the dead say when they have recovered their wits, ‘This is my real world again.’

Some men are Mohammedans by birth, some by training, and some by fate, but I have never met an Englishman yet who hated Islam and its people as I have met Englishmen who hated some other faiths. Musalmani awadani, as the saying goes where there are Mohammedans, there is a comprehensible civilisation.

Then we came upon a deserted mosque of pitted brick colonnades round a vast courtyard open to a pale sky. It was utterly empty except for its own proper spirit, and that caught one by the throat as one entered. Christian churches may compromise with images and side-chapels where the unworthy or abashed can traffic with accessible saints. Islam has but one pulpit and one stark affirmation living or dying, one only and where men have repeated that in red-hot belief through centuries, the air still shakes to it.

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No comments The Gods of the Inundation To the ancient Egyptians a tradition survived from their remote past, that the cataract region was the edge of the world. It was said that here the life-giving waters (the annual inundation) rose from the primaeval ocean Nun to render the land fertile. Welcoming the chocolate-brown flood was Hapi the Nile-god. He was believed to live in a grotto at Bigeh Island, and his role was a dual one: receiving the waters with oustretched arms and directing its flow into the eternal ocean (the Mediterranean) in the north. I lapi was depicted as a simple fisherman or oarsman with a narrow belt and the bulbous breasts of plenty. On his head were aquatic plants: the papyrus svmbolised his role as giver of water to Lower Egypt and the lotus to Upper Egypt. Hapi came to represent the provinces of Egypt in temple reliefs, offering the fruits of the land to the great god to whom a temple was dedicated.

Ancient Egyptian Gods of the Inundation

Having received the ‘first water’, Hapi left it to two guardian goddesses of the cataracts to control and direct the flood. Anukis, on the island of Sehel and portrayed with a lofty head-dress of feathers, clasped the river banks and compressed the swirling waters, directing it towards Aswan. Satis, on the island of Elephantine, let fly the current with the force of an arrow; she is usually depicted carrying a bow and arrows. Khnum, the ram-headed god, was the great god of the whole of the cataract region, and hence of the inundation. In the company of his wife Satis and daughter Anukis, Khnum received manifold offerings at his sanctuary on Elephantine. Famines due to low flood were attributed to his anger at insufficient offerings. In fact, Khnum later became the focus of an elaborate tradition in which he was not only a god of the inundation but also a god of creation, having fashioned man on a potter’s wheel from the clay of the river.

Ancient Egyptian Gods of the Inundation

Elephantine was inhabited from very early times. A tribe bearing an elephant emblem settled there in pre-history and erected the first shrine to Khnum. On their heavily fortified island home, where they commanded a good view of the surrounding landscape, they were safe from surprise raids. Opposite the northern end of the island lay Aswan, the trading centre on the mainland. Thus, while peace had not yet been made with the Nubian tribes on the border and a state of uncertainty prevailed, products were exchanged.

Ancient Egyptian Gods of the Inundation