After an over-ample breakfast in our new hotel, the Philae, Lou and I arranged motorboat transportation across the Nile to a couple of places we wanted visit on the west side. Aswan is mostly on the east bank of the Nile with Elephantine Island in the middle before you can get to the west bank. The island creates a great visual from the east bank with a forest in the foreground on Elephantine and huge Saharan dunes crashing down to the river on the west. The island has Egyptian ruins from the earliest kingdom and was the border of between Egypt and Nubia for millennia, a distinction the locals still make. It was an important region to the pharaoahs.
We wanted to go to the west bank to visit the Old Kingdom tombs there. I guess that, since the sun sets in the west, nobles from pharaonic times put their tombs there in a symbolic match with the sun setting at the end of the day. Whatever the case, we met our motorboat on the east bank in front of our hotel and sailed up around Elephantine and across the river in the fresh morning. With a bright American flag flying from the prow and a Bob Marley flag behind that.
For their tombs, the nobles of Aswan chose the highest point on the west bank that’s visible from Elephantine Island, which meant that when we got to the west bank, Lou and I had a steep, sandy climb to get to the tombs. The first tomb we visited was actually a pair: one for a governor, Mekhu, and one for his son (and successor), Sabni. We had to give one of the guardians a bit of cash, but we got access to them.
We entered the tomb of the son, Sabni, first. The tomb was carved into the rock, and it was a real thrill to see the artifacts in situ that we’d both recently seen at the MET and at the Egyptian Museum. My first “false door” tomb! Tombs apparently became places to make offerings asking the noble to intercede in the afterlife. They’re equipped with an offering table placed in front of a “false door” that the deceased would pass through to accept the offering. The tombs of Sabni and his father Mekhu had long flights of stairs that led down to the Nile, and they would have looked impressive and given a ceremonial feel to the act of bringing an offering. They’re an incredible 4000 years old.
Since we’d already spent the money to get the caretaker to open the tomb, we invited another group of visitors to join us and were surprised to learn one of them was doing research for a TV documentary on the son, Sabni. Script in hand, he told us how Sabni’s father, Mekhu, had been killed on a military expedition into Nubia and how Sabni had gone to retrieve his father’s body and have him mummified to guarantee his eternal life. The future film uses Sabni’s story as a parallel to that of an Egyptian Navy Seal who returned to Eliat during the war with Israel to retrieve men he’d lost there. The persistence of symbolism.
We kept the cash flowing and got into two more tombs. The first was for another Old Kingdom governor, Sarenput II. Also about 4000 years old, it has an entry hall with six carved and painted statues of the governor lining the approach to the false door. And the paintings were in remarkable condition. We invited a British couple we’d seen the day before at the unfinished obelisk to join us here, and it turns out the man knew a lot about Egyptian art, so we got our own tour guide we didn’t have to tip. We invited them to join us at the last tomb we wanted to see, too, that of Sarenput I. This governor had been the grandfather of Sarenput II, and his tomb/temple was more interesting on the outside than the inside. Our new British friend pointed out things like the notch that a stone slab roof had apparently rested in and the places that slabs of the Egyptian carving had been cut away for sale. He also showed us Sarenput I heading into the afterlife trailed by his sandal bearer and dogs. And harem, wife and kids.
And that was only the first part of the day. We did a controlled fall down the side of the sand cliff to get back to the boat and had our crew take us up river through the boulders that make this the First Cataract. Our next stop on the west bank was a 7th-century monastery. Well, in the 7th century it was dedicated to a local St. Anba, but it was rebuilt in the 10th century and dedicated to St. Simeon. We hopped off below the monastery and trudged up a very sandy half-hour slug to the complex, our feet sinking up to our ankles in sand with each step. The monastery looked like a fort, and when we arrived, we missed the entrance. So we circled the place looking for a way in, Lou sifting through the millions of pottery shards while I took far too many pictures of the walls.
It’s hard to describe what a pleasure it was to wander through these ruins, seeing remains of cisterns, monk’s cells, chapels and kitchens. A noisy group of men were trying to erect a tarp over the main basilica, and it wasn’t hard to imagine boisterous monks in the background as we wandered around the ruins with a very hot wind blowing in from the Sahara.
That hot wind pretty much dried us out, so we headed right back to the hotel after the slough back to the boat. We snapped a few photos from the Nile as our boat passed the Old Cataract Hotel and the ruins of the ancient Abu on the south tip of Elephantine, but what we really wanted was rest and a beer. So we got back to the Philae, showered/soaked respectively, and took a nap. Then we went to a restaurant we’ve become very fond of here. We call it our Beer Barge since it’s the only place we’ve been able to find that libation, but the real name is Salah Ad-Din. It’s a classic terrace restaurant stretched along a section of the Nile, but we like to go down to the big, floating platform on the Nile and enjoy the waterside, especially at sunset. There, we watched a bored manager catch sardines out of the river and toss them on the platform for the cats to chase while we drank our Stella (not to be confused with Stella Artoise) and dined on Nubian tagine.
We wanted to go to the west bank to visit the Old Kingdom tombs there. I guess that, since the sun sets in the west, nobles from pharaonic times put their tombs there in a symbolic match with the sun setting at the end of the day. Whatever the case, we met our motorboat on the east bank in front of our hotel and sailed up around Elephantine and across the river in the fresh morning. With a bright American flag flying from the prow and a Bob Marley flag behind that.
For their tombs, the nobles of Aswan chose the highest point on the west bank that’s visible from Elephantine Island, which meant that when we got to the west bank, Lou and I had a steep, sandy climb to get to the tombs. The first tomb we visited was actually a pair: one for a governor, Mekhu, and one for his son (and successor), Sabni. We had to give one of the guardians a bit of cash, but we got access to them.
We entered the tomb of the son, Sabni, first. The tomb was carved into the rock, and it was a real thrill to see the artifacts in situ that we’d both recently seen at the MET and at the Egyptian Museum. My first “false door” tomb! Tombs apparently became places to make offerings asking the noble to intercede in the afterlife. They’re equipped with an offering table placed in front of a “false door” that the deceased would pass through to accept the offering. The tombs of Sabni and his father Mekhu had long flights of stairs that led down to the Nile, and they would have looked impressive and given a ceremonial feel to the act of bringing an offering. They’re an incredible 4000 years old.
Since we’d already spent the money to get the caretaker to open the tomb, we invited another group of visitors to join us and were surprised to learn one of them was doing research for a TV documentary on the son, Sabni. Script in hand, he told us how Sabni’s father, Mekhu, had been killed on a military expedition into Nubia and how Sabni had gone to retrieve his father’s body and have him mummified to guarantee his eternal life. The future film uses Sabni’s story as a parallel to that of an Egyptian Navy Seal who returned to Eliat during the war with Israel to retrieve men he’d lost there. The persistence of symbolism.
We kept the cash flowing and got into two more tombs. The first was for another Old Kingdom governor, Sarenput II. Also about 4000 years old, it has an entry hall with six carved and painted statues of the governor lining the approach to the false door. And the paintings were in remarkable condition. We invited a British couple we’d seen the day before at the unfinished obelisk to join us here, and it turns out the man knew a lot about Egyptian art, so we got our own tour guide we didn’t have to tip. We invited them to join us at the last tomb we wanted to see, too, that of Sarenput I. This governor had been the grandfather of Sarenput II, and his tomb/temple was more interesting on the outside than the inside. Our new British friend pointed out things like the notch that a stone slab roof had apparently rested in and the places that slabs of the Egyptian carving had been cut away for sale. He also showed us Sarenput I heading into the afterlife trailed by his sandal bearer and dogs. And harem, wife and kids.
And that was only the first part of the day. We did a controlled fall down the side of the sand cliff to get back to the boat and had our crew take us up river through the boulders that make this the First Cataract. Our next stop on the west bank was a 7th-century monastery. Well, in the 7th century it was dedicated to a local St. Anba, but it was rebuilt in the 10th century and dedicated to St. Simeon. We hopped off below the monastery and trudged up a very sandy half-hour slug to the complex, our feet sinking up to our ankles in sand with each step. The monastery looked like a fort, and when we arrived, we missed the entrance. So we circled the place looking for a way in, Lou sifting through the millions of pottery shards while I took far too many pictures of the walls.
It’s hard to describe what a pleasure it was to wander through these ruins, seeing remains of cisterns, monk’s cells, chapels and kitchens. A noisy group of men were trying to erect a tarp over the main basilica, and it wasn’t hard to imagine boisterous monks in the background as we wandered around the ruins with a very hot wind blowing in from the Sahara.
That hot wind pretty much dried us out, so we headed right back to the hotel after the slough back to the boat. We snapped a few photos from the Nile as our boat passed the Old Cataract Hotel and the ruins of the ancient Abu on the south tip of Elephantine, but what we really wanted was rest and a beer. So we got back to the Philae, showered/soaked respectively, and took a nap. Then we went to a restaurant we’ve become very fond of here. We call it our Beer Barge since it’s the only place we’ve been able to find that libation, but the real name is Salah Ad-Din. It’s a classic terrace restaurant stretched along a section of the Nile, but we like to go down to the big, floating platform on the Nile and enjoy the waterside, especially at sunset. There, we watched a bored manager catch sardines out of the river and toss them on the platform for the cats to chase while we drank our Stella (not to be confused with Stella Artoise) and dined on Nubian tagine.
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