Day Five: Luxor and Qena - Denderah

April 22nd, 2008

The morning of our fifth day in Egypt the cruise boat well...cruised...to Qena. It was nice to have a slow morning on the pool deck watching the landscape drift by - mornings in Egypt are often hazy - the air is full of khaki-colored dust. In the early mornings the air is cool enough to raise goosebumps on your skin - especially if you happen to be dressed only in a bikini and lyin' out on the top deck fully exposed to the headwinds. It was, after the previous day spent broiling in the Valley of the Kings, incredibly delicious.

Arriving in Qena we traveled to see the temple of Denderah - the temple sacred to Hathor and Horus. Hathor and Horus share a special relationship - while Isis was hiding the child Horus from Seth, Hathor nursed him. I believe she ALSO gave birth to his child later on...and Denderah is the temple where she supposedly did so. It's all very metaphysical.

Anyway, Denderah was ALSO the site of our most heart-poundingly exciting adventure, which I shall relate later on.

In the above, Pharoah makes offerings to Hathor and Horus...

The above is a symbol which means "Lord of Power, Lord of Life"

The scarab pushing the sun, and the winged solar disk with cobras...symbols of protection

The temple has no pylons so the entrance IS the hypostyle hall - fronted by columns adorned with the face of Hathor on all four sides.

There are two mammisi, or ritual birthing temples, attached to the main temple complex. The first is a roman mammisi, the second the mammisi of the Pharoah Nectanebo. There is also, growl snarl hiss, a coptic basilica.

I'm pretty sure this is the roman mammisi.

This guy is fun...this is the dwarf god Bes - god of children and amusement. He's supposedly a god borrowed from the Nubians and Africans but he would be associated with Hathor in her guise as the goddess of Motherhood...

An inscription on the mammisi showing either Isis or Hathor nursing Horus on her lap while Thoth and someone else bring her offerings.

A side view of the temple - it's very fine and there are large lions in alcoves built into the outer walls...

Because of Horus, Isis and Hathor were often considered tied together in the mythology - and at most temples to Hathor, you can find a small temple dedicated to Isis - and vice versa. Here is the temple to Isis...

Our Egyptologist told us that this depicted Cleopatra and her first husband, (her brother), with her son Caesarion at her feet making offerings...

I rather liked the detail on this pharoah's skirt of a griffon sphinx trampling enemies..

Inside the hypostyle hall, the ceiling has been defaced by the smoke of Roman military campfires -

but there are restoration specialists carefully swabbing the smoke away from the ceiling and walls and revealing the original colors...

This ceiling is very famous - it's a representation of Nut swallowing and giving birth to the sun, along with the symbols of the horoscope.

Here is Nut, giving birth to the sun which shines its rays down on the head of Hathor.

and here is Nut's head, swallowing the winged sun...

The temple of Hathor was used for the New Years Celebration - which involved the statue of Hathor being removed from her inner sanctuary and brought up onto the roof to receive the blessings of the sun. But before it was brought to the roof it was brought here, to the New Years Chapel, for a ritual.

on the ceiling of the New Years chapel is another picture of Nut giving birth to the sun.

The open air kiosk on the roof where the statue would have been brought to receive the blessing of the sun

Hathor:

An interesting aspect of the temple are the empty cartouches - during the building of the temple the political climate was less than certain - the decorators left the cartouches blank because they weren't sure who was going to be ruling from one minute to the next...

The Ba, or portion of the soul, was often depicted as a human-headed bird...

After we checked out the roof we descended back into the temple, and it was then that we had our most exciting adventure in Egypt...

Our guide brought us to the crypt where the archaeologists discovered many mummified cats beneath the temple. But as we approached, the Baksheesh Pirates responsible for that portion of the temple told him that, alas, the lights were out in the crypt.

We all looked at the entrance - a steep stairway led to a dark hole measuring three feet wide by three feet high. There was no way to tell where it led, and absolutely NO light.

Sandy making his way down to the entrance to the crypt...and climbing in - which gives you a fair idea of how small the entrance was.

Our guide handed us his cell phone. Harley crawled in first, holding the cell phone screen in front of her. I was right behind her, and everyone else was behind me. Even with the cell phone, we couldn't see ANYTHING. The entrance hole in the wall was about four feet long so we were crawling for a bit before we came out into a very, VERY narrow passage. It extended for a short bit to the left, before it dead-ended, so we turned right. Largely we were feeling our way, because the cell phone gave practically no illumination. The passage suddenly turned into a stairwell descending down. We followed it, having no idea of where it was leading or what it would turn into, and shouting directions over our shoulders to the rest of our family about what the passage was doing.

At the bottom of the stairwell the passage T'd, as we edged into it in a careful crouch - not really being able to see how high the ceiling was or anything else, for that matter, suddenly there was a ruckus behind us. We'd been hearing the occasional exclamation from everyone else as they either bumped into things or tripped down the stairs but this was louder - then we were pushed aside gently as a Baksheesh Pirate (guard) came rushing through the passageway, holding a match carefully in front of him. We could see!

The guard felt really, really strongly about the carving in the next picture. He referred to it as the "beautiful alabaster necklace!" about 30 times.

Tomb Raiders...

You can see in this picture how tight quarters were in that passageway. Now imagine crawling around in it in the pitch dark with no idea of what the floor is doing.

Note also that as the Baksheesh Pirate rapidly ran out of matches, a la The Little Matchgirl, suddenly the lights came on! While it was very nice to be able to see everything, it did rather ruin the fun...

Then it was back to the boat for lunch while we powered back to Luxor. That afternoon we visited the second of Luxor's great temples - the Luxor Temple. But, (and this will come as no surprise at this point), I shall write about that...later.