DESTINATION
Postcard from Egypt
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... and no amount of reading or staring at pictures can prepare a visitor for the real thing, says GEETA VASUDEVAN.
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GEETHA VASUDEVAN
The temple of Philae...
MY first introduction to ancient Egypt was as a child when I followed the travels of Elmer Fudd as he went looking for a "Ware welic fwom the land of the Phawoes!" A visit to Egypt can be a humbling experience. Maybe we think we know enough of this ancient land, its mummies and pyramids. But no amount of reading or looking at pictures can prepare us for the real thing.
Cairo made us feel at home as just another Mumbai. And with the Egyptian generally Bollywood crazy, you can start a conversation with just about anyone by uttering "Amitabh Bachchan"! School children are a happy and friendly lot curious to know about bindis. An important exercise that visitors to Egypt should practice is in learning to look at everything backwards. "Lower Egypt" means northern Egypt and "Upper" Egypt is southern Egypt since the Nile river flows from the south to the north and enters the Mediterranean sea in the north. Amateur historians had a tough time calculating the years and had to understand that 2500 B.C. is actually earlier in time than 1250 B.C. One person asked if this also meant that Ramses II was older than Ramses I! Time has a different dimension in Egypt. They count millennia like we count centuries. Old means "ancient" in Egypt. The Greek and Roman periods are "only 2,000 years old while the pyramids are 4,500 years old!
For the present generation too, time seems to stand still as the men puff away at their seesha (hookahs) and watch the world go by, sitting in the cafes in the colourful souks while sipping bitter Turkish coffee!
... the temple of Karnak at Luxor...
Some beliefs are universal and timeless. The sculpture of the holy scarab (beetle) in Karnak has people going round it for thousands of years in the hope of having their prayers answered. We also learnt that Cleopatra was not really that celebrated a queen as the rest of the world has been made to believe. The beautiful queen Nefertiti and the powerful Hatshepsut are more famous.
Big is really "massive" in Egypt, like the pyramids of Gizeh and the temples of Karnak and Luxor with their huge columns and obelisks. Napoleon's scholars calculated that the limestone blocks in the three pyramids of Gizeh were sufficient to build a wall one foot wide and 10 feet high around the whole of France! The huge pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) alone contains about 2.3 million blocks of stone, each weighing an average of 2½ tons!
Covering an area of 13 acres and rising to an original height of 480 feet, the proportions and dignity of the structure were perfectly in sync with its funerary and religious functions. The masons who built the structure plastered the surface with limestone so perfectly that the eye is unable to discern the joints. Much of this plaster was unfortunately stripped to supply limestone for the Islamic builders of Cairo.
Ironically, such stupendous efforts could not prevent the ancient grave robbers from cutting pathways into the pyramids and stripping them of all the wealth which the mighty pharaohs had hoped would serve them in the afterlife! Every tomb in Egypt was vandalised almost as soon as it was sealed. So much for the glory of mighty kings! It was not until the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamen — a relatively minor pharaoh — was discovered with most of its treasures intact that the world woke up to the magnitude of wealth that would have been buried with the more important pharoahs. That King Tut's funerary finery was in itself breathtaking is to put it mildly.
... more splendour at Luxour.
As magnificent as the pyramids is the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri. She is the first female monarch in recorded history and a powerful, though controversial, ruler of ancient Egypt. She was the stepmother of Thutmose III who is considered the greatest ruler of Egypt and who ruled in the second half of the 15th Century B.C. She usurped power from her husband and established her rule for almost two decades. She projected herself as a man and her statues show her as a pharaoh complete with a false beard, a kilt and a royal headdress. It is only the sculptor's deft touches which give the statues a soft, feminine look. Her temple was built by the architect-engineer Senmut, who was probably her lover too. Built against the rising cliffs, the perfect symmetry of the construction blends remarkably with its natural setting. The temple rises from the valley floor in three colonnaded terraces connected by ramps. There were almost 200 larger-than-life statues in the round of the Queen. The reliefs in the temple tell the story of the queen's divine birth, (even one showing her suckling the goddess Hathor who is always depicted as a cow), her conquests and achievements. The breathtaking majesty of design of this temple makes Senmut the greatest architect of ancient Egypt next only to the legendary Imhotep who built the first stepped pyramid at Saqqara.
The expertise of the ancient Egyptians in the field of architecture, engineering, astronomy, art, sculpture, writing are all there for us to wonder. What we should realise though, is that these were the achievements of a bronze-age culture. Cutting limestone and hard granite into huge blocks for building and carving sculptures in the round without the use of iron tools is an extremely difficult feat. The beautifully carved hieroglyphics, painted with the most vibrant colours is in itself a work of art. Even more remarkable was the living standards of the kings and ruling classes. Elaborately carved and designed chairs, tables, cots, thrones, chests in cedar and other wood, metal craft, woodwork, pottery, jewellery making, all kinds of crafts were highly evolved at a time when most people of the world still lived in neolithic villages.
Western scholars have been judgmental when they dismissed the civilisations of the east as the cult of the dead and have argued that this obsessive concentration on death rituals was the reason for these cultures remaining stagnant and their ultimate eclipse. However, it is to be noted that western cultures have developed only in the last few centuries, while the great Egyptian civilisation flourished for several thousand years with near continuity in religious beliefs and practices, lifestyle and concepts of kingship. When a civilisation has peaked much ahead of the rest of the world, it had to necessarily remain in that position till the others finally caught up with it. And that took thousands of years! Holy Cow! I mean Hathor!
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