Capital of the Pharaohs
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Instead we went to see the house of the famous archeologist who discovered Tutankhamun’s treasures in 1922. It was a few miles away. In the middle of barren land a pleasant garden hosted a domed one-story adobe.
Howard Carter lived here. He spent six years searching and digging for the tomb of Tutankhamun. The man who financed his work, Lord Carnarvon, almost gave up on him.
In one Hathor was depicted as a cow with a crown of horns and sun’s disc (in her guise as the sun god’s daughter)...
In another Hatshepsut was shown drinking directly from Hathor’s udder. In yet another relief Hatshepsut was in the presence of Horus, the god of the sky, who was depicted as a man with a falcon head.
The Chapel of Anubis the jackal-faced god who protected the dead, at the end of the north colonnade on the first floor.
We boarded the tuf-tuf (windowless little electric cabins) to go from the visitors’ center to the tombs which were on both sides of the Valley, a dry canyon enclosed by limestone hills.
Hatshepsut’s names and images had been erased in this temple; as they were also in the Temple of Karnak.
A custodian in the traditional galabeya dress who spoke no English took me to see Hatshepsut’s disfigured image.
What we were seeing were the Colossi of Memnon, the two largest monolithic statues ever carved, each from a single block of stone fifty feet high and weighing nearly one thousand tons.
Located at the site of an old shrine to Hathor (the Goddess of Love), it directly faces the Temple of Amun at Karnak across the Nile.
One reason for the attraction is the dramatic setting. The backdrop for the temple is the lion-colored limestone cliffs that rise about 1000 feet from the desert plain. They hug a monument partly carved from the cliffs that oddly appears contemporary today.
The Governor of Luxor sent a van to take us to the pharaohs’ Funerary Temples and Tombs on the West Bank of the Nile. The few miles we drove by the river to the bridge that crossed over from the West Bank were surprisingly verdant.
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