a couple of snapshots and remarks
The Valley of the Kings: Showing photos of Luxor & Co, especially panorama or the well-known murals, doesn’t make much sense. We know them and the internet is of course full of them. I would therefore like to show a few detailed shots that are less well-known or that are easily overlooked. Of course, it is always our mindset that decides what we let through our eyeballs. This of course also applies to my last post about stones and sand.
So first a few photos of the Valley of the Kings.
Even if I knew hieroglyphs as photos and from an earlier trip, I had never realized how infinitely beautiful, detailed, and artistic many are. And they were crafted more than 3000 years ago.
And how do you get such a radiant smile in a photo like the one below? With a secrete Egyptian magic word that probably already showed its magical power in the time of the pharaohs: بخشش Baksheesh
And this magic can bring you to a room which visitors don’t generally get to see – where the dead pharaohs were mummified.
And how could it be otherwise, when I left Pahrao Tutankhamun’s tomb, he meets me again on the wooden staircase that leads outside.
A few more details that really impressed me.
Also, I hadn’t noticed on my previous visit that some passages are quite abstract, bordering on surreal – almost extraterrestrial in touch.
It is in the nature of things that, as someone who also tries to paint, I look at pictures like the following from a different perspective. How would I have done it? How would I have represented the period of time when the soul leaves the slowly striving body and embarks on the long journey into the unknown? How would I have represented the farewell? Would I even have come close to what these experts recognized more than 3000 years ago and implemented in the picture?
on the road
The people here are very friendly and I don’t just mean the hotel staff. When we took a short break on the way to the Valley of the Kings because the driver got us cigarettes, this boy came straight away and brought me two bananas.
The trip back was even more spectacular. It was Ramadan and since evening had fallen, groups of Egyptians, from young to old, were standing for many kilometers and handed water bottles, fruit, and even whole packages of food through the car window. Even to me, as a non-Muslim. Or they invited to dinner.
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