Back blog: Minya

I’m typing this entry on a bus on my way to Alexandria. I’ve realized that I’m on another adventure, and I haven’t even had time to write about the last one! Well, the last big one, anyway. The one involving a long journey.

About a month ago I joined some of my colleagues on a trip up to Minya in Middle Egypt. Quick Egypt lesson – the Nile flows south to north, so “up” the Nile means towards the headwaters, or south. Don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules.

Minya is a town right on the Nile. It’s got some heavy industry, quite a bit of agriculture, and some really spectacular Egyptian ruins. It’s also nearly impossible to get there, due to the ridiculous police presence intended to “protect” foreigners. I’ve already written about our absurd trip down there in my blog on the follies of the convoy system.

We stayed at the Nefertiti Hotel, right on the corniche. Sounds lovely, right? Well, across the corniche was the river … and the Venus Wedding Palace. So all night, both nights, the sounds of Egyptian music and ululating floated through the air, straight into our room. The funny thing is I’d even requested a room in the back of the hotel, but the management insisted that I actually wanted the Nile view. Very little irritates me as much as people telling me what I want. I should’ve made a fuss, but it seemed like a sleepy town at 2:30 am on a Thursday, so I let it go. Thank god for earplugs. Don’t leave home without ‘em.


Far too bright and early the next morning (technically I guess it was the same morning … ugh) we piled back into the bus and set out for Tell El Amarna. Amarna used to be called Akhetaten, back when it was the capital city of Egypt. The 18th Dynasty Pharoah Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten (1352-1336 BC) and revolutionized Egypt’s political, social, and religious systems. In a brash gesture of complete change, Akhenaten grabbed the wealth and power of the priests, destroyed Egypt’s divine pantheon, replaced it with a single god, Aten (the disk of the sun – and of course Akhenaten was the prime intermediary), and build a brand new capital city in the middle of nowhere. His wife was the famous Nefertiti, and his ultimate successor (possibly his son, although not by Nefertiti) was Tutankhamun, whose birth name was Tutankhaten. It’s thought that Tutankhamun’s burial trove was so rich in part to symbolize the return to the established religious and social order after the death of the “heretic” pharaoh Akhenaten.

These names, dates, and stories have swirled through my head from the time I was very little. I wanted to be an Egyptologist when I was young. While I think a lot of kids go through this phase, it was much more pronounced for me. My parents tolerated this for years, until finally my father said to me, “You’ll never make any money as an Egyptologist. Stop wasting your time. Why don’t you think about science?”

Ahem. Because now I’m a rich and famous scientist. Well done, Dad.

The point is, I’ve been thinking about Amarna, Akhenaten, and Tutankhamun for most of my life. I was incredibly excited to be making the trip to Amarna – it was a life trip for me. And after inexplicably changing our nice new bus for a filthy, jagged-metal model to cross the river, we finally arrived at Amarna. This is what I saw:


One and a half reconstructed pillars, a partially-excavated altar, and a whole lot of nothing. Ah, but I neglect our mandatory and oh-so-vigilant personal guard:


I screwed my eyes up to try to summon a vision of past grandeur. It was there, buried in my brain, but hard to overlay the reality.

We headed to the necropolis next, on the east side of the river. We saw some lovely tombs: Meryre I, Ahmose. I don’t have pictures of the inside of any tombs on this trip, because the government (read: Zahi) strictly controls photographic rights. My boss got special permission from Zahi himself to take some digital pictures, and I’m hoping I’ll come into them soon.



To my surprise and excitement, my boss decided to take us to the tomb of Akhenaten, which is back in a wadi set back from a cliff. I admit I’d made a bit of a fuss at breakfast when I found out we weren’t going. It turned out we were able to fit it into the schedule, so off we went. Lonely Planet described the journey as “very bumpy” – clearly things have changed since 2006, because I haven’t seen such beautiful blacktop in a year and a half of living here. I was thrilled to be driving into the remote desert, to find a royal tomb in a deserted wadi.

A busload of Japanese tourists was entering the tomb as we drove up.

I pitched a fit like a sulky child who’s had a toy taken away. We hadn’t seen a single other tourist since we arrived, and we only found the other group 15 km from anything else in the “deserted” wadi?? I started hiking up the wadi, kicking rocks in frustration. My guard flew at me and tried to dissuade me from walking away. A friend joined me as I launched into a tirade in my dreadful Arabic, waving my arms, jabbing my finger at the tourists, and shouting about how I hadn’t come into the desert to look at Japanese people. The guard looked at me, clearly amused, and then waved me up the wadi. There wasn’t far to go, but I was gratified. After the Japanese left, we descended into the tomb. Not a lot to see, although I found some really interesting salt crystal formations on the wall. If the water table keeps rising, they’re going to lose the tomb altogether. Somehow we picked up a hitchhiker on the way back. I can imagine neither where the guy was going nor how’d he gotten out that far on his own. At least he held the door on the van as we jounced to a rendezvous with a totally different, dilapidated bus. I kid you not – we stopped in the middle of nowhere and switched buses. God forbid someone misses out on some baksheesh.

Next on the itinerary was Tuna El Gebel, the necropolis of ancient Hermopolis. We visited a few tombs here – Petosiris (350 BC), an interesting example of the synthesis of Greek and Egyptian art, and Isadora, a mummy-containing tomb of a woman who drowned herself in the Nile (150 AD). Far and away most interesting were the vast underground galleries containing mummified ibises and baboons. Very very creepy and very very cool.

We dashed over to Hermopolis, trying to beat the sunset. There’s nothing much left at Hermopolis; they’ve made a little statuary park, kind of like Memphis outside Cairo. Far and away the main attraction is the two colossal statues of baboons with mutilated genitalia:


I’m not used to being a tourist in Egypt. One of my standard Arabic expressions of disgust involves a contemptuous assertion that I’m not a tourist. So it was extremely odd for me, seeing small children running along the side of the road, waving at our bus. Even adults would come out of stores and homes to stare, and then wave, as we squeezed through the tiny Middle Egyptian streets. The kids up above were waiting for us in Hermopolis, wanting to shout and wave and have their pictures taken. It felt like something out of a movie, where the oh-so-philanthropic white people help the less-fortunate brownies, blackies, or yellows.

Day 3 was our last day in Middle Egypt. We started by driving out to Beni Hassan, a spectacular set of tombs cut into the cliff face up above the river. Visiting the site was a hassle – baksheesh, “security”, blah blah – they wonder why more people don’t come?? We toured four tombs: Kheti, Baqet, Khnumhotep, and Amenemhat. Each tomb was a rectangular space covered floor to ceiling with exquisite painted scenes. The paintings in Khnumhotep’s tomb were so outstanding, I insisted that the guards reopen the tomb after we’d finished all four so we could look at the images again. It was a biologist's paradise; across the top of the left wall, a virtual catalog of local desert animals paraded below the ceiling. Hunting dogs, deer, leopards, hedgehogs, rabbits – I was blown away. One of the more famous paintings in Egypt is there too, a tree filled with birds drawn so realistically that you can differentiate between the male and female of the species! On our return entry, my boss took my flashlight and closely examined a depiction close to the door. He found what he was looking for: a scene of monkeys picking figs from trees and giving them to their human handlers. Truly spectacular all around.

Lining the road to Beni Hassan are literally thousands of Christian mud tombs, each capped with a perfect dome. They pack the land from the edge of the cultivated land to the steepest incline of the cliff face. I’ve never seen anything like it.




Our last stop was a bonus: a strange site called Kom Al-Ahmar, the Red Hill. It’s by the side of the Beni Hassan road. The site has the remains of a pyramid – rather anticlimactic, considering the country. I guess I’ve become something of a pyramid connoisseur – Egypt, Israel, Peru, Mexico. Strange.

Kom Al-Ahmar earns its name from the stupefying amount of broken potsherds on the ground. The reddish ceramic makes the ground appear rusted. The site is a set of tombs and burial areas that have been used for millennia. To our surprise, we were allowed to climb the hill and visit one of the tombs (Nefersekheru) – which, of course, was itself anticlimactic after the splendor of Beni Hassan. Cool nonetheless.


Then finally we were homeward bound, although a few unexpectedly lovely sights still awaited us on the drive home. Despite her massive flaws, Egypt is blessed with the remarkable ability to take my breath away.