Oct 5: Egyptian Museum
Today my Egyptology professor, Salima Ikram, took us around the Egyptian Museum for the first time. Highlights included a disturbing stone mask from the predynastic period and below-the-waist statue of Min, the fertility god, with pillar-sized legs and baseball-sized...yeah. Anything above that was removed awhile ago and is now elsewhere, but I've heard it was the length of a ruler and gilded.
Got on the train to Aswan at 10. Ihsaan and I sat with some Australians, one white guy who was married to an Asian-Australian, and her brother. A train worker came into our car asking if we wanted dinner, saw these foreigners, and said, "Ah, you from Japan!" (They were ethnically Chinese but of course it's the same thing here.)
We endured a 14-hour freezing-cold train ride (see above) to Aswan, which is close to the Sudanese border. Upon arriving in Aswan around 12pm the next day, we left the station and were immediately solicited by at least ten felucca captains who wanted us to take a ride with them. Their prices were ridiculous. It's hard when you want to see if you can get a good price but at the same time don't want to seem too interested, because then they will NOT stop following you. One guy followed us almost to our hotel about a half mile away, telling us he was giving us a good price (not really) and that we had to go with him now.
After checking into our hotel we put our stuff down and went out to explore, taking a 2-minute felucca ride to Elephantine Island. There were some cool artifacts there including a 3-D model of the island's temples and some cool inscriptions.
Major props if you can tell me what this script is. It looks almost like a cross between Hebrew script, Hindi, Phoenician and Greek. My guess is Hieratic?
We went over to the Temple of Isis after walking through a nice garden on the other side of the museum...it's a huge complex which has artifacts from the Greek and Roman periods, as well as earlier times where Elephantine housed a community of Jewish mercenaries hired by the Egyptians to fight the Nubians in the south.
Once we had had our fill of monuments, we trudged south to go to Sehel Island, home of the famous Famine Stela carved by King Djoser to commemorate his prayers to the god Khnum to stop a terrible famine. We didn't make it to Sehel because the felucca guy wanted to charge 120 LE for everyone, so we opted for the Nubian Museum instead.
We had to present our IDs at the ticket counter. When the man saw my last name, he asked if I was Jewish. Tired of lying, I said yes, but not Israeli. He asked me aren't they the same thing. I told him no, of course not. Not wanting to get into an intense discussion (all this was in Egyptian Arabic), I promised I'd talk to him later when we left the museum.
The Nubian Museum itself was unlike any museum I'd seen so far in Egypt--well-lit, clearly labeled artifacts, nice displays...
Who were the Nubians? You actually probably know at least one: the late Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat.
In ancient times before today's borders were drawn, the Nubians were Egypt's perennial friends and enemies in the South, historically occupying what is now northern Sudan and extreme southern Egypt, past Aswan. For ancient Egypt, Aswan was the last defense outpost before reaching Nubia. Depending on the period of time, Egypt either had complete control over the Nubians and ruthlessly extracted their raw materials for use in their empire, or the two groups were somewhat friendly.
In a dramatic reversal of fortune in 760 BCE, the Nubians took over parts of southern Egypt when a dispute between dynasties in the Delta led Egypt to become rocked by instability. The Nubians eventually took over all of Egypt for a period of about 100 years, fighting off repeated Assyrian invasions from the Near East until they were finally defeated and pushed back to Nubia. Ironically, during this period they tried to "restore" ancient Egyptian traditions and artistic/architectural styles, probably so they could claim legitimacy as the inheritors of the Pharaohs' dynasties. There was a lot of cultural exchange between the two powers; you can see the influence the Egyptians had on Nubia by these pyramid-like tombs, located in northern Sudan at Meroe.
On the way out I had that 30-minute Arabic discussion with the ticket guy about Jews and Israel. I'd like to say I enlightened him, but after all we'd said, he just suggested I read the Qur'an so I could become enlightened. Sigh.
Abu Simbel bright and early tomorrow. Leaving at 2:45 AM!
No comments:
Post a Comment