A Few Snapshots and Remarks
Rather than another panorama of Luxor or the Valley of the Kings, I want to show a few details that caught my eye during my March 2023 visit. What we notice depends so much on what we bring to a place. The same was true of the stones and sand in my previous post.
A Closer Look in the Valley of the Kings
I knew hieroglyphs from photographs and an earlier visit, but I had never quite registered the care given to individual signs: the curve of a bird’s neck, an eye, the legs of an animal. So much remains vivid after more than three thousand years. The tomb decoration belongs to a world of funerary texts and images concerned with the journey into the afterlife.[1]
And how does one get a smile like the one below? There is a very present-day magic word: baksheesh — a tip. I could not resist this cheerful portrait.
Another photograph records a quiet chamber I was able to enter. Its worn surfaces and narrow proportions impressed me; I cannot reliably identify its original function from my photograph.
After leaving Tutankhamun’s tomb, I seemed to meet the pharaoh once more — this time in the grain of the wooden staircase. Once an image is in the mind, it turns up in unlikely places.
A few more details that made me stop: a profile, the line of a staff, a bird reduced to a handful of precise cuts.
On my earlier visit I had not noticed how strange some of the compositions could feel to a modern eye. Repeated forms, abrupt changes of scale and improbable bodies sometimes bring abstraction or Surrealism to my mind. Those are my associations, rather than ancient Egyptian categories.
As someone who paints, I keep asking: how would I have approached this? How could I make an image of departure, death or a journey beyond what can be seen? I do not pretend to decipher every scene. The question is what these arrangements of figures and signs can still make me feel.
On the Road
The people I met were generous, well beyond the hotel staff. On the way to the Valley of the Kings we stopped while the driver fetched cigarettes. This boy came over and brought me two bananas.
The return journey was even more memorable. It was Ramadan, and evening had fallen. For kilometres, groups of people, young and old, offered water, fruit and packages of food through car windows. Some invited us to dinner. They included me, a non-Muslim, without hesitation.
I came away with pictures of old walls, but also with those small encounters. They belong to the same journey.
Footnotes
[1] For the setting of the royal tomb imagery, see the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities’ account of the tomb of Ramesses VI (KV9), begun under Ramesses V. Its decoration draws on several funerary books. This background does not identify the exact source of every detail photographed here. ↩
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