A Trip Down the Nile...Edfu & Kom Ombo

And this is the only picture of a sunrise I got while in Egypt.  Even the night we drove out of the Nubian desert I watched for the sun going down. It was just like light faded and went away but none of the beautiful drama one usually expects from sunrises or sunsets. The smoke you see is sugar cane burning.

Now we begin Friday, February 21st.  Our cruise ship was at Edfu when we awoke.  The view from our state room was the dock at Edfu. The dock was really steps going up the hill to the street.  The street was already beginning to fill with carriages.  Our first outing would be to the Temple at Edfu, also known as the Temple of Horus.  To get there we would all take a carriage ride from the dock through the streets of Edfu to the temple.

Claude and I were assigned carriage #99.  

Here are a few pictures of the streets of Edfu.

 

 

Osiris was the father.  Isis was the mother.  Their son was Horus.  They were all gods of the Egyptians.  Usually a temple would focus on one god. This temple focused on Horus. Here are a few pictures of this temple.  

 

One of the neat things in this temple was a hieroglyph with an ark born on the shoulders of men holding staves that the ark is fit on. This is the same type of ark as the Ark of the Covenant that the children of Israel carried in the wilderness. After seeing this hieroglyph, we went into the sanctuary portion of the temple where there was an ark.

There was also a little portion called the Sun Court. The picture I share from the Sun Court was one of my favorite hieroglyphs. It is the spread wings of a falcon. Many of the tops of door frames had these wings. Isis was sometimes portrayed with these wings fully opened. This hieroglyph on the Sun Court door is the winged sun which represented divinity, royalty and power.

We were given time to wander through the temple at our leisure as long as we were back at the entry at a certain time. Claude and I managed to find the outer wall of the temple and the inner wall of the outer wall that surround the temple area.  This is Claude walking between these walls. Even though this was probably a less used area of the temple site, these walls were still covered with hieroglyphs top to bottom.

Another lesson in understanding hieroglyphs can be seen on the front pylon (gate) to the Temple of Horus. It is the 'double crown'.  This crown features a white portion that is in the shape of a bowling pin and a red portions that looks like a fez with a tall piece on the back. The white bowling pin portion represented the Upper Kingdom. The red fez portion represented the Lower Kingdom.  The Upper Kingdom was actually the bottom portion of Egypt and went from the Aswan/Nubia area to Cairo.  The Lower Kingdom was the delta area above Cairo. This seemed very reversed to me until I understood the Nile River flows from the south to the north so the Upper Kingdom would have been closer to the beginning of the Nile River and the Lower Kingdom, while really north of everything, would have been the closer to where the Nile River empties into the Mediterranean.  The king or pharaoh would wear this double crown when they ruled over both the Upper and the Lower Kingdoms. 

After touring the temple, we passed back through the shops.  This time almost all in our tour group would purchase clothing to wear to dinner that evening. Claude and I found a shop and looked for something large enough to fit my Great Viking. The shop keeper showed us one thing and I was sure it would not fit. I asked if he had anything larger. He assured me he did and pulled out this number all the while calling my Great Viking 'Alibaba'. He also managed to find a dress large enough for me. We were ready to attend dinner that evening in style.

We returned to our cruise ship and enjoyed lunch and a lazy afternoon ride to Kom Ombo. Here are a few of the Nile River pictures from this portion of the cruise.

 

 

 

 

 

Our second tour for Friday was the temple in Kom Ombo. I must post this picture of the dock. 

The importance of this dock is how graphically it shows the lack of tourism in Egypt.  Normally this dock would have had cruise ships packed end to end and maybe even side by side. Every one of the little shops would have been open and bustling with tourist trying to find souvenirs. Ours was the only cruise ship until we finished our tour and then one other ship had arrived.  There were only four stalls open for business.  Tourism is a major portion of the income for this part of the country and there is precious little happening.  It was sad to me, very, very sad.

We left our ship and walked to the temple. The top of it can be seen just over the trees on the right side of the picture above.  Alan showed us a picture of the sand covering the front of the temple and the ruins it was in when it was found.

 This temple was a little different. There were two doors and two hallways throughout.  This temple was actually for two gods. The southern portion of the temple was dedicated to the crocodile god, Sobek. The northern portion of the temple was dedicated to the falcon god, Haroeris, or Horus the Elder.  Here are pictures of the interior of this temple.

Osman pointed out an interesting hieroglyph that was actually a calendar.  Beside the date was the event that happened on that date.  This is one way they can determine when things actually happened and what the real history was of some of the sites.

Claude found this beautiful hieroglyph of alabaster essential oil bottles. 

The temples in Egypt had an additional purpose besides just being a temple. They were schools or hospitals. The Temple at Kom Ombo was a hospital that specialized in bone and leg injuries. Osman took us to the back wall of the temple where there were hieroglyphs explaining this. One of the hieroglyphs was of the medical instruments of the day.

The final lesson we learned here was about the Nileometer.

 

The Nileometer was important in the days when the Nile flooded every year.  This hole in the ground would fill with water as the Nile rose indicating when a flood was imminent and how bad it was going to flood.

The Temple at Kom Ombo was a lot like the others but there were enough differences to make this one very interesting in its own right.

 Back down the hill our merry little tour group would trudge to see the Crocodile Museum.  It is home to a lot of mummified crocodiles. The top picture is mummified crocodiles without their linen wrappings. The middle picture is a baby crocodile with a crocodile egg on the glass cube.  The bottom picture is crocodile mummies in their linen wrappings.

 

 

We boarded our cruise ship and dressed for dinner in our nifty outfits we purchased at Edfu.  For Claude and I the difficulty was trying to get that turban wrapped around Claude's head like the vendor did it. We didn't quite get it the same but it looked okay nonetheless. These are supposed to be Egyptian poses we are in for the pictures. This was great fun.

 

 

 

Then it was finally time for some sleep before our next full day in Egypt.