No visit to an Egyptian’s house is complete without food and drink. The obligatory mint tea—strong and dark, with masses of sugar—was soon forthcoming, together with assorted snacks. (I was too preoccupied with the view to remember the food.) The conversation seemed to flow easily, even though the family had little English and I had less Arabic. All too soon it was time to leave. No house visit, before or since, has ever left quite the same impression.
Three years later, and I am once again being entertained at the Hassans’ house—but everything has changed. In the face of constant harassment, they eventually gave up their battle with the authorities and accepted the offer of a concrete house in New Qurna. It is certainly more spacious, and the walls feel a great deal more solid. It must be cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter than their old hillside house. Yet, for all its modern conveniences, it is a soulless house in a soulless community. There is no panorama from the front door, and the view from the roof terrace is a line of identical roof terraces. The hospitality is as generous as before—tea and dinner (the details of which I remember well: dishes of spicy fava beans, courgettes and peppers stuffed with her-bed rice, roast pigeons and plenty of home-made flatbread)—and the conversation still flows. But there is a void at the heart of this house, and at the heart of New Qurna. The people have been uprooted from their ancestral homes, and they are now exiles in their own land.
Eight years later still, and I return to Thebes after a long absence. Visiting the Ramesseum, I walk through the romantic ruins to the back of the temple, to look at my favourite view on the west bank: the hillside of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna in the bright Egyptian sunlight. But it feels as though I have taken a wrong turning, come to the wrong place. In place of the colourful houses of Old Qurna, there are just scars: vestiges of painted wood and mud brick, empty spaces where once families lived and visitors were entertained. The forced relocation of the villagers has been completed, and with it the wanton destruction of a part of Egypt’s history. Instead of pristine and antique, the hillside looks violated and incomplete. I can’t bring myself to track down the Hassan family. It would feel like visiting ghosts.
AS THE STORY of Old and New Qurna demonstrates, life on the west bank of Thebes has been intimately bound up with the demands of tourism—and not just in the last two centuries. Egypt in general and western Thebes in particular has been a tourist destination for two thousand years. The earliest visitors came not so much to marvel at the temples and tombs themselves, but to witness an other-worldly phenomenon famous throughout the ancient world: the singing of Memnon.
Early in his reign in the fourteenth century BC, the pharaoh Amenhotep III built himself an immense funerary temple on the plain of western Thebes. Even by ancient Egyptian standards, it was a monumental edifice, covering an area of ninety-three acres. Every court and gateway was adorned with colossal sculpture: figures of the striding king, processional avenues of sphinxes and jackals, an enormous seated statue of Amenhotep and his wife Tiye. Most impressive of all was the pair of statues framing the temple’s easternmost gateway. Measuring over sixty feet tall, each statue depicted the king enthroned, flanked by diminutive figures of his female relatives: an embodiment in stone of untramelled royal power. They imparted a subtler message, too. During the annual inundation, the statues were partially submerged in water for several months each year, only to emerge again as symbols of rebirth. They also faced the rising sun, adding yet another layer to their rejuvenating symbolism. Ever since their erection, the twin statues have dominated the Theban plain, evoking awe in all observers.
Their popularity as a tourist destination in Roman times was, however, the result of an accident. In 27 BC, the northernmost of the two colossi was partly shattered by an earthquake. Thereafter, at sunrise, vibrations created inside the stone by the changing temperature and humidity caused the statue to emit a curious, twanging sound. Classical commentators linked this curious phenomenon with the legend of the warrior-king Memnon, crying to his mother Aurora, goddess of the dawn. The statues were thus identified as images of Memnon (they are known to this day as the Colossi of Memnon), and visitors came from far and wide to hear them “sing.” Like countless tourists since, the Romans could not resist leaving their mark for posterity, and the colossi are carved with 107 inscriptions, 61 in Greek, 45 in Latin, and one bilingual text. Dated inscriptions span the reigns of Tiberius to Septimius Severus (20–205 AD). In a nice illustration of the cultural distinctions in Roman Egypt, most of the epigrams and poetic inscriptions are written in Greek, while the texts in Latin are more matter-of-fact. But all record the wonder experienced by their authors at hearing the singing of Memnon.
A typical inscription reads: “I, Servius … Clemens, in the consulate of M. Aurelius Cotta Messalinus, heard the voice of Memnon and gave thanks.”5 Another visitor wrote of the strange sound that “my very ears seized it and I recognised a song.”6 In the early days of tourism, visitors were mostly high-ranking individuals: five Roman prefects of Egypt came to hear the statue between AD 71 and 104. The other group of regular visitors was the military: the colossi were a popular excursion for soldiers en route from Alexandria to the Roman garrison south of Thebes. The down-to-earth, no-nonsense attitude of the senior military commander is summed up by the inscription of Lucius Junius Calvinus, commander of the mountain of Berenice: “I heard Memnon, with my wife Minicia Rustica, on the fifteenth of the calends of April, at the second hour, in the fourth year of our emperor Vespasian Augustus.”7
What made the statue even more mysterious—and alluring—was its unpredictability. It did not perform every sunrise, and certainly not to order. While some pilgrims claimed to have heard the statue twice on a single morning, one prefect’s wife had to wait until her third visit before Memnon uttered his baleful cry. For a few tourists, hearing the statue sing became something of an obsession. Lucius Tanicius, a centurion of the third legion of Cyrenaica (stationed in Upper Egypt), came fourteen times in a single year. The zenith of Memnon-mania—and, indeed, of the Roman interest in ancient Egyptian civilisation—was the reign of Hadrian. During his twenty-one years as emperor, all sorts of senior administrators came to Thebes and left their mark on the statues. Hadrian himself came to hear Memnon during his fateful visit up the Nile in AD 130 (see Chapter 8). When the statue duly performed, the officials in his retinue believed (or were encouraged to believe) that Memnon was recognising a fellow deity: “He noticed Hadrian, sovereign king, before the sun rose, and saluted him as he could.”8 Hadrian’s long-suffering wife, Sabina Augusta, left her own inscription—in Greek. Not all Roman emperors were as lucky, though, in hearing Memnon. When Septimius Severus visited in AD 202, the colossus failed to perform, so he promptly repaired it … and succeeded in silencing it for ever.
The Colossi of Memnon are not the only statues in western Thebes to have inspired poetic thoughts. Equally famous in the English-speaking world is the fallen colossus of Ramesses II which lies, toppled by an earthquake, in his mortuary temple, the Ramesseum, half a mile to the north of the colossi. The Ramesseum and its gargantuan statuary first attracted the attention of the Roman historian Diodorus Siculus, who felt moved to mention them in his Histories:
Beside the entrance are three statues, each of a single block of black stone from Syene, of which one, that is seated, is the largest of any in Egypt, the foot alone measuring over seven cubits … it is not merely for its size that this work merits approbation, but it is also marvellous by reason of its artistic quality and excellent because of the nature of the stone … The inscription upon it runs: “King of Kings am I, Osymandyas. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”9
Nearly two millennia later, in 1817, the young English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley attended a display in the British Museum of “Young Memnon,” the head and torso of another statue of Ramesses II, recently brought to London from Thebes. That same year, inspired by Diodorus Siculus and moved by his own encounter with ancient Egypt, h
e published his most famous poem, “Ozymandias of Egypt.” Although he had never seen the Ramesseum or the fallen colossus, his lines remain the most telling evocation in the English language of the transience of power:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.10
From the Ramesseum, it is but a short taxi-ride past the ravaged hillside of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna to the most striking architectural ensemble in all of Egypt, the terraced temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri. Excavated from mounds of debris in the 1920s and painstakingly restored over the next seven decades, it is the only west bank temple clearly visible from the other side of the river. Again, its history as a visitor attraction is a long one. Before Hatshepsut chose the dramatic embayment in the cliffs for the construction of her “holy of holies,” the site was already revered as a dwelling place of Hathor, divine mother and royal protectress, worshipped in these parts as the goddess of the western mountain. Nowhere was more appropriate for a temple designed to perpetuate the eternal memory of a female pharaoh. The fact that the site also lay directly opposite Hatshepsut’s additions to the great temple of Karnak lent it added symbolic potency.
The spectacular setting—a vast natural amphitheatre in the Theban Hills, backed by a towering vertical cliff face—demanded an equally spectacular design. The building that Senenmut created for Hatshepsut remains unique, and uniquely impressive, the perfect marriage of natural landscape and man-made edifice. Long after Hatshepsut’s demise, her temple—especially the chapel dedicated to Hathor—remained a place of pilgrimage. In the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, women from the workers’ village walked over the mountains to pray here to the goddess. They sought help and protection, for themselves and their babies. In a society where death in childbirth was common and infant mortality tragically high, divine assistance was eagerly sought in matters of family life. The small votive objects left at Deir el-Bahri—crude statues, amulets and scraps of cloth—bring us face to face with the hopes and fears of ordinary ancient Egyptians, far removed from the lofty, cosmic concerns of their rulers.
Visitors now come to Deir el-Bahri for different reasons, but—if the crowds and the trinket-sellers permit—can still be moved by the spirit of the place. Despite what the tour guides say, the best time of day to visit the temple (and just about any temple in Egypt) is between noon and two o’clock in the afternoon. The morning crowds have left, to return to their hotels for lunch, while the afternoon groups have not yet arrived. It is the hottest part of the day, so not for the faint-hearted, but also the quietest. To visit in the morning, as many do, is to run the gauntlet of legions of hawkers, plying their trade in souvenirs and fake antiquities, and of other tour groups, led by sergeant-major guides with flags or coloured umbrellas. It is not a pleasant experience. For the groups of mostly Swiss and Japanese tourists who were visiting Deir el-Bahri on the morning of Monday 17 November 1997, however, the usual ordeal was to turn into a nightmare.
Unbeknown to the guides and the tourist police on duty at the temple that morning, six armed members of the extremist group Gama’a al-Islamiyya had disguised themselves as policemen and lay in wait for the first busloads of tourists to arrive. As visitors strolled along the terraces, admiring the art and architecture, the terrorists opened fire. Terrified visitors rushed for cover, and equally terrified temple guards simply fled the scene. The Egyptian security forces were nowhere to be seen. The attack lasted an agonising forty-five minutes. Eventually, the gunmen were pursued and apprehended by the traders and other local inhabitants, aghast at the attack on their community and their livelihoods. At the end of the massacre, fifty-eight tourists and ten Egyptians lay dead. The Deir el-Bahri atrocity marked the nadir of terrorist attacks in Egypt. Over the preceding years, gunmen had attacked a bus near Nagada and had taken pot shots at a Nile cruiser in Middle Egypt. Security had been tightened—roadblocks increased, armed escorts provided for tourist buses, unauthorised travel restricted, cruises prevented from sailing north of Luxor—but the extremists had not gone away. The incident at Deir el-Bahri changed everything. The tourist industry suffered a massive decline from which it took years to recover. Scores of Theban families lost their jobs. Egyptian outrage at the attack spelled the end of support for Gama’a al-Islamiyya. After 1997, its military chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri, decided to pursue his jihad outside Egypt, as a leader of al-Qaeda.
Visitors have returned to Deir el-Bahri, but the security is tighter than ever. Now, tourists have to pass through airport-style metal detectors before they can enter the temple complex: an incongruous juxtaposition, symptomatic of the complex relationship between Egypt’s ancient past and its troubled present.
Another legacy of the Deir el-Bahri massacre is that it is no longer possible to climb the cliff behind the temple and follow the ancient route over the mountain into the Valley of the Kings. Instead, visitors must now take the modern road, past the obligatory alabaster factories selling vases, model pyramids and lamp-stands cut from the distinctive, banded, translucent, honey-coloured stone. The sheer number of outlets emphasises the size of the Theban tourist industry. The names of the various factories also provide a fascinating commentary on contemporary culture. Beside the perennial stalwarts—Ramesses, Cleopatra, Nefertiti—others change their name in tune with the latest contemporary (Western) fashions. In the 1980s and ’90s, one of the most prominent emporia on the west bank was the Princess Diana Alabaster Factory. It is still there, dilapidated and hanging on by a thread, but one suspects that its days, under that name at least, are numbered. It can’t be long before there is a William & Kate or a David Beckham factory. Perhaps there already is.
As the road bends round to the west, towards the Valley of the Kings, it enters the heart of the Theban Hills. A narrow defile between sheer rock walls is the only route in and out of the royal necropolis, and it is easy to understand why the security-conscious pharaohs of the New Kingdom selected this place for their tombs. The remoteness and seclusion are also complemented by the particular topography of the area, which displays a host of symbolic associations so beloved of the ancient Egyptians. When viewed from across the Nile, the Theban Hills—the place of sunset—also resemble a giant hieroglyph for “horizon,” and therefore rebirth. The Valley of the Kings lies directly behind the dip between the two massifs, at the very horizon point itself. And, to cap it all, towering over the valley is a majestic peak (known today as the Qurn), a natural pyramid to preside over the tombs of kings.
Tourists have been drawn to the royal necropolis since early Ptolemaic times—when the New Kingdom was already ancient history. A Greek graffito sums up the combination of emotions that many visitors feel when faced by such magnificent monuments to the dead: “I, Philastrios the Alexandrian, who have come to Thebes, and who have seen with my eyes the work of these tombs of astounding horror, have spent a delightful day.”11 Although the Colossi of Memnon were the main attraction in the Roman period, some visitors took the opportunity to explore the tombs of the “Memnonia,” as western Thebes was called. Strabo recounted his visit to “tombs of kings, which are stone-hewn, are about forty in number, are marvellously constructed, and are a spectacle worth seeing”;12 while Pausanias marvelled at the steep, winding corridors of the Valley of the Kings, which he dubbed the “syrinxes.” In classical times, the most prominent and easily accessible tombs attracted numerous graffiti: there are 656 Greek and Latin inscriptions in the tomb of Ramesses IV and nearly a thousand in the tomb of Ramesses VI, who was identified by the Greeks as Memnon himself. Visitors gazed in wonder at the tombs but, like many tourists today, were utterly bemused by their construction and meaning. One Roman wrote: “I have seen the peculiarly excellent workmanship of these tombs, which is unutterable to us.”13 Altogether, over two thousand Greek and Latin graffiti have bee
n recorded in the Valley of the Kings, alongside inscriptions in Phoenician, Cypriot and Lycian, a testament to Egypt’s attractiveness as an international tourist destination, even in ancient times.
By the time Orion, Governor of Upper Egypt, carved his own name in AD 537, the Roman Empire had been Christianised and a small Christian community had settled in the Valley of the Kings, converting one of the tombs into a chapel for their daily worship. The valley in summer is an unforgiving place, the steep sides of bare rock reflecting and magnifying the sun’s rays, raising temperatures in the shade (if any shade can be found) to nearly 50°C. The early Coptic inhabitants chewed on the hallucinatory Balinites nut to afford them some relief from the harsh conditions and the oppressive solitude. Today, the only respite on offer is the shabby and overpriced rest-house, with its bottles of lukewarm lemonade. (To judge from their graffiti, most Greek and Roman visitors were sensible enough to visit in the cooler winter months.)
The valley’s Christian inhabitants seem to have sought it out as a place of quiet contemplation and isolation; they took little interest in the tombs themselves. A millennium passed before the necropolis began, once again, to attract the attention and curiosity of foreign visitors. The first European to recognise the significance of this isolated wadi was Father Claude Sicard, head of the Jesuit mission in Cairo, who visited in 1708. He located ten open tombs, and remarked on their colourful wall paintings, which he said were “almost as fresh as the day they were done.”14 The first published account of the Valley of the Kings appeared in 1743, by the English traveller Richard Pococke. Others soon followed in his footsteps. When William Browne visited in 1792, he reported that the site had been dug over in recent decades by the son of a local sheikh, “in expectation of finding treasure.”15 It was the harbinger of things to come. For the next century and a half, the Valley of the Kings would be the focus of attention for treasure-hunters from across the Western world.
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