ABU MENA, ITS PORT AND A PILGRIMS’ STOP EN ROUTE

Our visit to Abu Mena in the heat and sun was rather exhausting; we toured two additional sites, the port city associated with Abu Mena and a village of temporary lodgings for pilgrims on their way to the main site, for a grand total of about six hours.

We first passed by an enormous Christian town or monastery, which obscured the site from view if you’re traveling on the main road.  The evidence of an ancient site at Abu Mena is hard to find, nestled between mounds of dirt and spiky bushes, covered with semisoft mud under a crispy crust.  We walked around to try and orientate ourselves, finally ending up at the town’s shops, which are now mere shells of limestone and mortar.  It’s hard to imagine these places busy with people, since time has taken away much of their character.

The ground is littered with green glass and pot sherds, and an occasional marble column (very skillfully crafted) crosses the path every now and then.  Coming upon one of the baked-brick bath complexes, I was finally able to figure out what I was looking at—they’re very recognizable by their material, you know.  Arches and cylinders of brick, part of a huge system.

Up ahead, a man with a radio sat on a ledge at the end of a dirt road, looking up at us as we toured.  The praying and singing of the contemporary church, built on the site of the basilica lined with marble statue and pillar bases, made for some nice background music.  As we approached the church, I noticed that this group of Copts prays in the same fashion as Muslims, bowing all the way to the floor with their heads on the ground.  I’m not exactly sure how this tradition fits into the timeline of the Muslims’ evolution of prayer styles, but it was incredibly interesting to watch.

Behind us was the baptistery, set off along with the church from the “secular” market area by the pilgrims’ court.  The court and other spaces are directional, in that they served to guide visitors efficiently from place to place on the holy site.  But they are also entities of separation, as they make a clear divide between the sacred and the secular at Abu Mena.

The second set of baths looked like a small brick maze sitting in a shallow pool of water.  I know that Abu Mena is sinking, but an old water line on the structures (shown by a layer of dry salt deposits) is above the current water level: how this could have happened, I don’t know.  It could be that although Abu Mena is sinking, the water level rises and falls independently of the course towards the ultimate fate of the site.

When we finished exploring Abu Mena, we drove to a pilgrims’ village between the site and its port.  This village had several latrines and many half-standing limestone structures, which we took the time to explore, but the main event was a wine press, restored to a near-usable state (it just needed a little cleaning).

The press is coated in rosy-beige plaster, which encases its baked-brick inner structure.  The stomping room is a short-walled, waterproofed space next to the wine basin (so deep it has steps on the sides).  Two shallow bowls with spouts letting out into the basin were presumably for additives or fermenting agents.

At about this time, it began to get a bit too hot for our liking, so we quickly drove to the port city associated with Abu Mena for a quick look-around.

Abu Mena’s port is covered in medical waste from a nearby plant.  As Asharaff put it, those who dump here are helping the earth by creating these products, while at the same time destroying the earth by depositing them on an open-air site.  In addition to avoiding needles and glass bottles on the ground, we had to step around small mounds of grass for fear of exposing snake dwellings under our feet.

The city had its own baked-brick bath complex, with a large limestone water wheel nearby.  The track an animal working the wheel would have walked on gets too narrow at one point to have functioned properly, so it was probably modified at one point after it ceased being used for its original purpose.  There were also some nice red granite grinding stones, and white limestone structures with thin bands of red brick running through them (in the same manner as the design on the walls of the “school room” at Amheida).

The day came to a rather nice end with a walk down to the end of an ancient pier, whitened from the sun in a pool of clear, shallow lake water.  I would’ve gone swimming if I’d thought to bring a towel.

KOM EL-DIKKA AND THE ALEXANDRIA NATIONAL MUSEUM

We were treated to a nice late wake-up this morning before heading off to Kom el-Dikka, a site in use roughly from the mid-4th through mid-7th centuries.  The director of the project, Grzegorz Majcherek, led us around the place on an exclusive tour (other tourists were jealous and kept following us around, only to be deterred by Monika, our Lady Defender).

Kom el-Dikka is centrally located, and at the same time representative of ruins from the Ptolemaic Era through the Islamic Period.  There is a great (I think the biggest we’ve seen) baked-brick bath complex, the kilns from the construction of which were uncovered under meters of neatly-layered ash across the dirt road in the center of the site.  Examining the ash layers was such a treat for us (and probably for Dr. Majcherek) because they are so clean-cut!

Certainly the most unexpected elements of the site were the limestone amphitheater-shaped classrooms built along a central portico, proof that some university system existed at this time in Alexandria (there were several laws during the 5th century that forbade the teaching of law in the city and made it illegal for state-sponsored professors to teach privately, if I’m not mistaken, so it was refreshing to see it still flourishing).

Another interesting element was the rock grid laid out on the dirt surface next to the ash pit: it’s the remnant (and ongoing remains) of a contemporary solution to the age-old problem of pottery sorting.  The ceramicists working at Kom el-Dikka use stones to form outlines around piles of pottery and marble found in each sector; I never got to watch the other students sort pottery on-site, but I think this is a great way to go about sorting on location, which certainly beats those rubber buckets.

At the far end of the site is a glass room enclosing the remains of part of a Roman villa, with very detailed second-century mosaic floors.  I couldn’t help but compare the display method employed here, which involved constructing wooden ramps above the mosaics as a sort of viewing platform, with that which I saw in Cyprus at a Roman villa near Kourion.  In Cyprus, they used the same ramp design for the same purpose of viewing mosaic floors; the only difference is that the Cypriot display is much more extensive, and includes ramps that allow visitors to explore the tops of the limestone structures which still survive on the site.

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After our visit to Kom el-Dikka, we went to the Alexandria National Museum.  Housed in the old American Consulate building, it’s quite picturesque from the outside (an off-white exterior with lovely tall windows and black treatments).  On the inside, what looks like a very expensive, well-organized display turns out to be a hassle to get through because of its angular design; it’s also filled with incomplete or incorrect labels!

The basement level is a dark maze of ancient Egyptian pieces, while upstairs a female tomb effigy is dated to 500 BCE when it’s actually from the Flavian dynastic period (I can thank the statues I studied at Kom el-Shoqafa for that identification)!

My verdict is that the Alexandria National Museum spent too much money trying to create a fancy, “modern” display, whilst neglecting to give visitors correct information and good directions to get around.

THE MONASTERY OF SAINT ANTONY

The Monastery of Saint Antony is a gated space composed of light limestone architecture and bright glass mosaics.  Trees are scattered from place to place, and the surrounding natural hills where Antony once lived as a hermit serve as a lovely backdrop.

Father Maximus invited us into his living quarters, where we sat in a long room with white walls covered in matte prints of the paintings in the Church of Saint Antony.  Décor in this space includes an incense holder, which adds a sacred flair to an otherwise secular space.  Mirrors and crosses of various sizes and materials fill in the blank spaces on the walls.

This is the space where the conservators working on the Church of Saint Antony stayed during their project, and on one of the coffee tables in the sitting room is the book that resulted from the conservation work, which I also saw for sale at Deir el-Medina (I thumbed through it, but decided not to buy it and regret that at this moment).  We passed the book around while we sipped tea from cups printed with the Monastery’s name.  (Cliché?  The commercialization of sacred space?)

Father Maximus himself is quite a character: tall, soft-spoken yet assertive, and dressed rather casually for a Man of the Church (in loafers and with his sleeves rolled up).  He has a very dry sense of humor and the tendency to slip a joke in here and there in a small voice during serious conversations.  He gave us a tour of the major spaces at the Monastery, including a room with two mills, the Church of the Apostles and the Church of Saint Antony.

What I liked most about our tour was the honesty, interest and grateful attitude expressed by Father Maximus concerning restoration and archaeology inside the Church of the Apostles.  Firstly, I must note that the glass floor placed over the recently-uncovered remains of 4th-century structures is a great way to allow visitors insight into the layering effect created by construction-over-construction.  Archaeology is the uncovering of these layers, and the exposure of older ones in a church functioning in the present offers an interesting look at how science and religion can function successfully as coexisting institutions.  But my main point here is that Father Maximus is so involved in the project at this Church that he knows enough to guide a group of archaeology students around the place; not only is he accepting of the need for preservation via archaeology at Saint Antony’s—he’s also enthusiastic about it.

Father Maximus told us that when the project is finished, the glass floor will be covered by a carpet during services.  The carpet will be removed at all other times, so that visitors may take advantage of the dual function of the space (display and ritual) at different times.

I feel like I might get carried away in describing the paintings in the Church of Saint Antony if I allow myself to write about it for too long; so instead, I’ll make some very simple statements about what I gathered from our visit there today:

• The paint is remarkably well-preserved, or at least has the appearance of having been well-preserved thanks to the Italian team I’ve spoken about in several other entries.  The use of “dirty water” to camouflage areas of missing paint within the larger scheme of the painting works as well here as it does in the Red Monastery and elsewhere.
• The painting of Mary and the infant Jesus on the far left as you walk through the nave towards the apse is missing the IC XC I expected to find there.  All of the other figures are labeled—why not this one?
• I was able to identify several of the equestrian martyrs and other saints when inside the church from the images I saw in the book before our tour!  Exciting!
• The graffiti on the walls (in 9 languages, according to Father Maximus,) provides a striking example of the craftsmanship of the writings of those visiting the Monastery; some of the inscriptions are so well-executed that they fit right in with the rest of the décor!
• There is a very funny painting (which I’m sure wasn’t intended to be funny at the time) of a Jew stealing furniture from the church.  I say that it’s funny because I want to look at the anti-Semitism of yore with a lighthearted attitude, something everyone else seemed to agree with.  Adam took a picture of this painting as a souvenir.
• The paintings in the space right before the apse (“horos”) are in a style comparable to those found in Cyprus (they’re very Byzantine); William noted that the artist who executed these works may actually have been trained there.
• There’s a lot of red in this church (the rugs, the paint…): is red symbolic of martyrdom, sacrifice or religious fervor in the Coptic church?

What a day.  I really wish I could recap it all, but I’d be here all day describing the direction Saint George’s eyes are facing and the patterns on the robes of the martyrs.  Let’s save that for when I’m a church-art analyst!

NARMOUTHIS AND TEBTUNIS

Mumkin day off, minfadluk?

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When I first heard that we were going to visit the Fayyum, I was stoked. I’m really interested in the Fayyum Portraits, and I wanted to see where they came from (plus, other material from the area is a complex mix between Greek and ancient Egyptian cultures). But after getting lost for two hours due to a road closing, we were all a little skeptical about driving further into the region. Narmouthis proved to be pretty interesting, but Tebtunis was certainly not worth the drive.

Narmouthis is the site of a temple to Renenoutet, the cobra goddess associated with the harvest (most likely because snakes kept mice and other animals from eating the grain). Lining the approach to the temple are alternating yellowy-limestone sphinxes and small step-pyramid-like structures. The walkway looks like that of an area I saw last summer in Cyprus.

Walking into the temple, it’s apparent that the level of preservation in the area is incredibly high. All of the stone work we saw was original, including the bottom courses of several pylons. I really couldn’t tell that these were gates, since all that remains of them are their sides; it appears that the top half of the city was wiped out by erosion and moving sand, though the bottom layers are in near-perfect condition. On the left side of one of the pylons was a stone lion with a cartoonish face, a comical addition to the otherwise barren structure. The statue of a man’s body, dressed in Greek-style clothing, stands on the left side of the next pylon. The occasional low relief, probably left over from the Middle Kingdom core of the original structure here, adorned stones here and there. The mudbrick walls are in great condition, too.

The masonry showed clear signs of having been done the same way as in the Late Period, where the borders of the stones were dressed before the architecture was created, and the reliefs added afterwards. At Narmouthis, the centers of these stones are raised without reliefs, except for a strange imitation cartouche and glyph sequence on the opposite face of one of the walls (added during the Roman Period). In a corner created by a pylon and a wall, bits of a floor mosaic were visible. The floor could have been covered in mosaic tiles, but the huge stone floor blocks found everywhere else would probably not have held these tiles too well. At one location, columns are constructed to fit into the crevices in a large wall.

Inside the sanctuary, I was able to deduce a couple things about Middle Kingdom temples (we haven’t seen any yet):

• The sanctuaries during this period were very small with a short approach to the shrines, because there was less emphasis on procession and the performance of rituals for the purpose of mystifying the temple activities–the whole thing was very personal.
• The cornice seems to have moved from the tops of shrines during the Middle Kingdom to the tops of pylons in later periods.

A small chamber with papyrus columns and a partial staircase to the roof serves as an anteroom. The Renenoutet shrine in the center of the sanctuary is accompanied by two others, to Sobek and Horus, on its sides. Strange tidbit: the bottom of the Renenoutet statue remains, showing her feet–but judging by the size of the statue and the height of the ceiling above the shrines, it would have been impossible for the cult statue to fit in the space where its remains currently stand. So why is the ceiling so low?

The temenos wall at Narmouthis does not stand, and it seems like it had nowhere to go: immediately to the left of the temple is a row of presumably domestic structures, made of grey mudbrick and filled with sand. Next to the yellow limestone blocks, the whole place looks like one huge sepia photograph.

As we explored the scattered remnants of a colonnade hall behind the temple, Nick found two pot sherds with blackened resin traces inside. Intricately-carved capitals have been placed on either side of a row of lintels outside the temple structure.

On the way back towards the front end of the temple, I noticed a large mudbrick structure with barrel-vaulted ceilings. If this was a storage area as William suggests (possibly a grannery because of the cobra association), then its close association with the temple points to a form of redistributional control over the people on the part of the priests.

A Ptolemaic structure nearby houses a double shrine, probably used for the storage of crocodile mummies.

One of the last sections of the site we visited today was a mudbrick temple structure, where the upper course of bricks has been added by conservators to preserve the courses below. But in the “priest’s house” next door, beautifully painted plaster peels off the walls with no help from restorers. These people need to get their priorities straight: the original wood and plaster are going to waste away into nothing!

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Tebtunis, as I mentioned earlier, wasn’t much of a thrill. I think that the main reason for my not being enchanted by the site was its restoration job: everything was rebuilt using new materials, and in such a way that none of the architecture could be explained, save what appears to be a bath house. The reconstruction work is quite tacky. There isn’t even a plaque explaining the nature of the site to visitors! I know the Fayyum is remote, but the team working at Tebtunis needs to do a public service and make the drive from Cairo worthwhile.

(The whole site is outlined with a dotted-line border made of mudbricks, so I imagine that it looks like a huge coupon from above.)

The baked-brick bath house was the most interesting part of the site for me, because it reminded me of the hammam at the Dragoman Mansion. In fact, as I explained to Leigh that this bath seems only to have a tepidarium and caldarium, and no room for cold air, William noted that Turkish baths have this third type of room.

Did you know that the baked bricks used to build the bath house are the same size as those used to build apartment buildings in New York? Weird…

We walked on the tops of walls in a (probably, but who knows) domestic area, and noticed that the restorers didn’t include any doors! There was also a strange stone structure between this are and the bath that looked a little like Stonehenge covered in plaster. The roof was unevenly constructed, and there was no staircase down. William speculated that it was a cistern, but its shape doesn’t seem to have a purpose if that’s so.

Over all, I was thoroughly unimpressed by the reconstruction at Tebtunis. I really would have loved to have seen the city as-was.

(THE GAYER-ANDERSON HOUSE MUSEUM IN) ISLAMIC CAIRO, PART I

Our visit to the Gayer-Anderson House Museum was certainly the highlight of my day! I really love old houses; in fact, I had the pleasure of giving a tour of one just like this (or these two) at the Dragoman Mansion in Nicosia last summer—I had a field day comparing them this morning!

Here’s the rundown.

Basically, Mr. Gayer-Anderson was a British megalomaniac who loved to collect old things and arrange them in his Oriental fantasy world with a total disregard for their provenance. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not angry at the man for purchasing looted antiquities (well, I am…); instead, I was pretty excited to pick out the little details over each and every inch of his combination 16th- and 17th-century Ottoman-style home. The beauty of the museum is that it’s an exhibit on a crazy 20th-century collector, and not on his property.

Gayer-Anderson lived in the house from 1935 to 1942, surprisingly late, I think, for someone who bought into the façade of Orientalism. The collector appears to have had a fascination with naming rooms for different genres and periods of time, like in the guest mansion of a cheesy murder-mystery film, or at the White House. He had a taste for “Oriental” objects, from places traditionally considered Oriental, like Egypt, and also from Asian countries (he even had some modern American art…).

On the front face of the museum are two kiosks, or closed additions to a house that jut over the street. In Cyprus, these were for Peeping Toms. Here, they’re for house-ridden women.

We first walked into a room with large glazed pots in neat stands, and an antique china cabinet. Just ahead is an open courtyard with original arches and added decoration. There are grates on the windows, and a marble fountain in the center.

Side note: the place smells like the hallways at Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn. Just a thought.

The next room is lined with before-and-after pictures of the house when Gayer-Anderson was still adding to it, as well as drawings by none other than the lovely Nick Warner of the DOP. The hallway that follows this room is painted bright yellow, with plates (not unlike those you can purchase in the market in Luxor) sunken into the plaster.

The next room was a public water dispensary, older than the house; our guide slid a small wooden centerpiece off of its base and revealed a deep well right in the middle of the room! Of course, we all began shouting into the well…

The same room is plastered with glass display cases housing silver dishes against a red background—strangely, the displays in the Dragoman Mansion are arranged in exactly the same way. The windows are lined with metal grating, in the exact style of those on the windows of the ground floor of Hewitt Hall at Barnard. The ceiling is carved and painted in an abstract design, as in the main reception room (oda, from my notes,) at the Mansion.

(It was right about this point when Page picked up a cat that had been wandering around and declared it the 11th member of our tour group.)

…And it was right about this point when I realized that, although neatly displayed, this collection is a glorified mess.

In the next short hallway with an open-air staircase, tiles that are so over-melted they look like cake frosting are pushed into the yellow walls. The next room has nice stained glass windows, though clearly not original.

The next room was the loggia, an outdoor balcony with raised benches against the walls where The Spy Who Loved Me was filmed. People would originally have sat on pillows on the floor, as the benches are newer additions to the room. It has a nice full-room feel, though it’s only a balcony.

The next room was the Painting Room (here come the names), with a hodgepodge of art on the walls, followed by an outside staircase.

Next came the main reception room (oda, if I remember correctly from the Dragoman Mansion). It really looks like the one in the Mansion! The heater is even in the same place in the middle of the floor. Oh, wait… the difference is that this room has Chinese pieces next to Ottoman pieces, while the Mansion has authentic material (cough).

Stairs up; the Writing Room (kuttab). This room is surrounded by tiny, winding hallways and is filled with freakish wares, like death masks Gayer-Anderson liked to make of his friends. The Who’s-Who of Cairene society during the 30s and 40s are depicted in the display cases!

In the original kuttab next door, Nick Warner has placed a lovely new display. It’s quite spik-and-span, with a quaint little library, though it smells like insecticide.

Stairs up; pass the Persian Room. I can only imagine.

Up to the roof, where a random maze of wooden grates litters the place. The collector liked fountains and sinks, judging by the stash of dozens up there. It looks like a Bed, Bath and Beyond, and you can see the Mosque of Mohammad Ali from the top.

Back down; I found out that the Persian Room serves as a bridge to the second house that combines with the one we just saw to make the museum. The next house begins…

The Byzantine Room is a painting hall with low, cushioned benches with a stolen Hathor capital between them. Hanging above is a blue glass chandelier, which appears to be from the early 19th century. I honestly can’t tell you what’s “Byzantine” about this room.

Next is the Museum of the House (ironically, not a museum of the house’s history or its construction), which is filled with fake ancient Egyptian chatchkis. Among the real material, though, are another Hathor capital and two reliefs, one sunken into a wall and the other into a bench. There are some “magic bowls” for casting spells in a glass case on the wall, suggesting that Gayer-Anderson was one of those trendily-superstitious folks who held séances in his home (the man did have a collection of death masks). Nearby is a 1930s watercolor of a World War I soldier.

In the next hall, the stone face of a Greek statue rests on a shelf. Monika complained that its hairstyle could make it unique if it were from a certain period, but it’s of no use to us because we’ll never know where it came from. Opposite the mask, the full-length cartonnage masks of two mummies are framed on either side of a door. Walking through the door, I came upon the Pharaonic Room, where I finally got a sense of the collector’s preferences: the man liked to steal the beards and arms off of statues and mummy-casings. How phallic. Did I mention that he had an obsession with his young, male Nubian servant?

By the way, I forgot to mention that there’s some information about each room on a framed paper beside each door.

I glanced at a mirror in the staircase ahead of me, then turned back and went up another staircase, gated by a swinging screen made of wood, to the Damascus Room. This room has a nice lintel with Arabic script engraved on it, and wide arches above a canopy bed. I played with the funky door-knockers before going to the next set of rooms.

The Turkish Room is decorated in 19th-century Ottoman baroque style. Next door is the Queen Anne Room, or the room of things that don’t belong anywhere else, alienated by Gayer-Anderson’s specific names. It has a weird cherub door-knocker, which reminds me of his obsession with little boys. In the Chinese Room are three Japanese panels.

Here’s where it gets weird.

In the library there is a framed sketch of Gayer-Anderson as the Sphinx.

On the wall are three icons, two Coptic 18th-century pieces and one early Renaissance one. Sketches of his Nubian servant cover the walls. There’s also a large collection of travelogues, which may have been for show. Maybe he read Penthouse instead?

We all exited the room quite weirded-out, and continued down the hall to the staircase with the mirror on its landing. On our way down the stairs I noticed that the collector had wooden shelves built to fit in the corners of the landings, though they held nothing.

Downstairs were a few very open rooms with a lot less clutter than the rest. Our guide showed us a secret passage to a viewing room that looks over the Celebration Hall (creepy… this guy liked to spy on his guests). In the next hall, light blue circles were pushed into the plaster above the arches. This may have been representative of the Evil Eye. After that is another viewing room with folding chairs inside. Looks like Gayer-Anderson spent a lot of time watching people!

We walked downstairs into an outdoor side room, and then into the Celebration Hall (where Dov was spying on us from above). Next door is a nice open court.

Lastly, we saw two very strange rooms: the Birthing Room and the Bridal Room. The Birthing Room is, as one might think but would be afraid to say, a room filled with wooden birthing chairs. William called it the maternity ward. The Bridal Room houses a collection of spoons and combs in glass cases, and not much else. What gives?

On the way out, we passed the lintels and statues that the current caretakers couldn’t find space for (hide your excess or find a respectful place for it, people).

The whole experience made me think about how authentic the Ottoman Dragoman Mansion is. The House Museum, on the other hand, is a hodgepodge of amazing finds, creepy artifacts and strange obsessions of the collector; it is not authentic, and not Ottoman.

I’m not sure if anybody else enjoyed our visit to the museum, but I loved it! I’m sure you can tell by the detail of my notes…

TINIS (AKORIS)

Tinis (or Akoris, if you’re Greek) has inspired me to seek out more fieldwork opportunities in Egypt. The site is currently being excavated by a Japanese mission—when I heard those words leave William’s mouth, I did what Page did when she first saw the Valley of the Kings: I squeaked with joy, complete with that hands-covering-mouth motion Page whips out at only the most exciting moments.

Apparently (so says Dr. Bagnall’s book, according to William), the site is home to Old Kingdom tombs and a rock-cut Ptolemaic Temple, as well as some architecture dating to Nero’s time. What we saw appears to be Ancient History Stew: a temple gate with inscriptions that point to a Judeo-Claudian origin, an unfinished room with one capital (bearing Hathor’s head) as its only decoration, a shrine on the second level with high reliefs of Egyptian gods, and a long hall with a series of rectangular doorways and two strange, blocky, roughly crocodile-shaped niches carved opposite each other. The site is a mix of strange architecture and earthquake collapse debris; there is a gated room filled with crocodile carcasses, and in front of each doorway (and elsewhere) are shafts so deep they probably end in China. Foot-wide circular imprints dot the floors of the courtyard. Hilly with the remains of mudbrick architecture, white millstones and pot sherds, Tinis is a mess. I love a good mess.

The Japanese team has found several mummies at Tinis, all of which belong to women. Not only does this tickle my inner necrophiliac, but also my inner sociologist: if the women are in the tombs, are the men in the shafts? Are there crocodiles in those shafts?

The Japanese mission digs each July. I have already looked them up, and am currently composing an email to the director in Japanglish.

VALLEY OF THE KINGS, DEIR EL-MEDINA, MEDINET HABU AND THE COLOSSI OF MEMNON

We did a lot of running around today! We left the hotel at 8:00 (after a fabulous breakfast, might I add,) and went to the west bank of the Nile to explore the Valley of the Kings. We visited three tombs: those belonging to Tesert, Rameses IX, and Thutmoses III. Page was squealing with delight the entire time.

The most striking part of Tesert’s tomb was the relief of Knum with outspread wings on a large wall immediately inside. A strange green-checker pattern was painted on most of the clothing worn by servants in the reliefs; it may have been ceremonial garb. Most of the carvings towards the front of the tomb were painted, but as one walks further and further into the tomb (I’m making it sound endlessly long–well, it wasn’t–it was actually kind of short,) it becomes apparent that nearly everything else is unfinished. Some of the walls are covered in black and white sketches, where reliefs were meant to be sunk. It’s interesting to see these in obvious places, because it points to the importance of symbolic locations over those that would be more readily accessible to mortal viewers. In the burial chamber is a fully-restored sarcophagus in the shape of a cartouche (weird, right?) under a barrel-vaulted ceiling.

Tuthmoses III’s tomb was covered almost entirely with black and red “stick-figure” figures and grids of glyphs, as if most of it was never destined for paint. Judging by the layers of watery blue and green paint I was able to examine, it seems like the artists used black and red to make rough yet well-thought-out sketches, and then used other colors as overlays. I can sort of imagine a drawing school from the look of this art, where students learned to use simple shapes like triangles and S-shaped lines to make composite figures.

Rameses IX’s tomb, from the 20th dynasty, was in sharp contrast to the 18th dynasty tombs. At the end of a small, not-too-slopey dromos, I found myself staring up at a brilliant ceiling of blue and gold. The figures on the walls are immense in comparison with those in Tuthmoses’s tomb, and wearing varied fabrics painted in great detail. Several faces were depicted from the front, though not with much skill–clearly, there is a reason why the ancient Egyptians stuck to drawing people from the side.

Deep inside I found what looked like a shelf-tomb, with two levels of rectangular benches along the perimeter of the room. The tomb is at a much lower elevation than the rest, which may explain why everything had to be cut down into the rock, as opposed to up or straight across it. My guess is that the sarcophagus fit between these benches at one time.

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Page gave her presentation on Dier el-Medina, the workmen’s village for the Valley of the Kings. I have to say that it was very nice to hear about domestic architecture, and about the builders of the great structures we attribute to kings (“this temple was built by Rameses II…”). Based on students’ texts found at Dier el-Medina (like at Amheida), the town had its own school; this means that learning was localized, and that many of the activities carried out by the people of the village could be done right on this site.

Since the people living in the village were professional tomb artists and scribes, their own resting places proved to be incredibly detailed and painted with the utmost care. The people have curly hair and realistic noses. Bright, complex patterns cover their clothing. A couple frightening animals, one of which looks like the rabbit from Donnie Darko, are also depicted. The new scenes painted in these tombs show a reservation by the artisans of Dier el-Medina to give the men in power their best work; instead, they appear to have saved it for themselves. This shows an interesting hidden struggle between the workers and their bosses. (The only exception is the long, flowing cloak on Anubis at the local temple, which was very well-executed.)

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Medinet Habu, our next stop, is the mortuary temple of Rameses III. I was expecting a mammoth, elaborate structure, given the Rameses’ arrogant building practices. Needless to say, I was correct.

When I walked towards the gate, which is modeled after an Assyrian style and rests in place of a traditional pylon, a basalt (or dark-grey stone) statue of Sekmet (?) greeted me to my left. The gate ahead of me was used by the king to watch his army march forth into the distance (so like a Rameses).

Interesting motifs within the sanctuary include an ankh with arms, repeated in a linear pattern. Rows of three-dimensional captives’ heads sit on stone shelves at eye level, jutting out from the walls. There was also a scene showing the collection of the phalluses of the king’s enemies after a battle. How tasteful.

Several areas of this temple show evidence of occupation during the post-Pharonic period, which was common and occurred at most of the sites we’ve visited so far. For example, holes dug into the floor where people could tie down their animals dot the sanctuary. The ceilings are blackened with smoke from fires, to warm or perhaps to cook.

I was interrupted from my examination of the structure by a group of schoolboys visiting the temple. They were carrying a boom-box, blasting “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely” by the Backstreet Boys. Ah, the spread of early-90s American pop culture through the modern Arab world…

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On the way back to Luxor, we stopped to see the Colossi of Memnon. They sure are large, but they didn’t look too pleasant covered in scaffolding.