8th December - Luxor

The Nile at sunset

The first day at Luxor when we arrived in Egypt was a packed day for the entire tour group, packed because we were to visit 2 sites in Luxor, the early capital of Egypt.
Originally called Thebes, it is packed with many temples of which we visited the 2 of the most well known, Karnak Temple and the Temple of Luxor.As earlier mentioned in my other post, Egypt had 31 dynasties spanning 3000 years BC and they were mostly Egyptian pharoahs or kings who ruled Egypt. There was 1 female pharoah, Hatshepsut and 1 pharoah who died very young, Tutankhamun. The most famous was Ramses II who ruled for 67 years too.


Me and Ramses II

Luxor temple has a very grand entrance facing east and it is fronted by a huge pylon and 2 seated statues of Ramses II. The ability of the Egyptians to acertain the direction East by using the stars as a guide, to a very high accuracy is amazing.In addition, the pylons,columns and statues are easily 60 - 80 feet high and how did the Egyptians manage to build such huge structures when they had no scaffolding ? The normally piled blocks of stone easily weighing 1 ton one on top of the other to reach the perfect height. How did they hoist up the columns and aboelisks ? They improvised by boring at the base of the stone using highly accurate tools and going deeper and deeper to establish some lever. At the top of the obelisk or column, they tied ropes and with teams of hundreds maybe thousands of labourers and slaves, hoisted up the columns with great difficulty.


Huge columns at Luxor temple, the maginificence of these temples even today are still evident

To live in those times as an ordinary person must have been quite terrible as living conditions and working areas were marshalled by many team leaders or chief wardens. Life was probably very cheap in those days and haundreds of thousands would have died from the hard labour after toiling in the desert sun for years even decades. The historians are still debating on whether the labourers were forced conscripts,slaves or paid contract workers.


Obelisk at Luxor Temple, a very similar one was given to France and is at the Place du la Concorder in Paris.

The rulers had all the titles and fanciful names and must have prepared for their deaths ever since they arose to become pharoah, this was evident as the great pyramid must have taken maybe 20 - 25 years to build, and the average lifespan of an Egyptian person in those days was probably 40+ to 50+. The desert climate means that it is hot and dry in the summer June - August and cool and dry in the winter months of Nov. - February.


Statue of Ramses II with one of his daughters at his feet ; Size : 20m (66 feet)

As we checked in on our cruise ship at the end ofthe first day, we were all dog-tired from the 2 visits and ready to rest. I, on the other hand, decided to go for a 5 km run in Luxor just for the experience and it was a run well worth remembering.

I started just outside the cruise ship and ran for almost 30 minutes along the Nile all the way past the Luuxor temple and the Winter Palace and almost to the center of town. Luxor is a smallish city of about 2 million,spread over a wide area. The biggest first impression I got from the first day at the run was that Egyptian people were friendly but could not be trusted, as they had this sense of deviousness in their eyes. It was an interesting start to my tour of Egypt.