Incredible Luxor

Our introductory exploration of an Ancient Egyptian temple took us this morning to Karnak, the largest temple complex in all of Egypt! Not a bad place to start, don't you think?

Once again our guide, Ibrahim Taha, walked us from shady spot to shady spot throughout the complex, extrapolating from the architectural and sculptural splendor everywhere surrounding us real meaning and understanding as we came to appreciate more and more all the, literally, thousands of years devoted by pharaoh after pharaoh to the perfecting of this enormous religious edifice.

As we wandered through the temple, we marveled at the hypostyle hall with its hundreds of pillars incised with hieroglyphs, some of which still retained their rich coloration. We wondered at the tall obelisks that seemed to touch the sky. We trudged dutifully from chapel to chapel as we listened to tales of how each succeeding pharaoh sought to put his (or her) own unique stamp on this religious marvel dedicated to Amun-Ra, the most important of all the Egyptian deities.

Throughout the day, here at Karnak and elsewhere, Lee managed to implement his vow to include actual human beings in his photographs (in sharp contrast to his usual practice of taking largely "people-free" pictures). Few photos of Egyptian antiquities incorporate people, if only to provide an historical neutral aspect, freed from the influence of fashion, hairstyle or any other link to a specific time period or cultural frame. Such an approach means, however, that one seldom has a sense of scale. So Lee decided that, this time around at least, people WOULD appear as often as needed to provide that missing sense of just how big these historical artifacts actually are.

For the major part of the afternoon we hid from the sun, napping in our air conditioned room and enjoying the relatively cool water in the hotel pool (located right on the bank of the Nile itself). In the early evening, right at dusk, we drove to visit the Temple of Luxor, one of only two ancient temples illuminated and open to the public into the (much cooler) evening hours. The illumination brought out details we might otherwise have missed and added a real sense of drama to our visit.

Here we learned how the efforts of two different pharaohs, ruling a hundred yeras apart, impacted the layout and aesthetic appeal of this stunning complex.

A delicious dinner followed at El Hussain, a local seafood restaurant. Then it was back to the hotel and to bed -- we have a five o'clock wake-up call tomorrow morning so we can get underway early, early, early for our trip across the Nile to the Valley of the Kings and other important sites on the West Bank.