It’s been far too long that we have had a good rom-com in the theaters truly worth going to see.  You know, one with star power (in this case Julia Roberts and George Clooney yet again, this time as a divorced couple who have to go their pending daughter’s wedding in paradise).  Also one with real romance, in this case a Romeo and Juliet kind of young romance, and yet also something more for the older crowd.  In fact this... Read more

Cairo is a huge city of 9.5 million people, with extremes of wealth and poverty. The face they want you to see looks like this… A city of large private residences and beautiful acacia trees… But our focus is on the Giza plateau north of the city, and the pyramids. The two on the left were members of my tour group, the guy on the right, burning up in a suit, bless his heart, is our security guard. Of all... Read more

St. Simon’s monastery aka the Cave Church, aka the church built on the garbage dump in Cairo is world famous, and rightly so, not least because it illustrates how God can use people to turn trash into treasure.  This church is built in the neighborhood of the city garbage collectors, and you have to ride through piles and piles of stacked up garbage of various sorts to get to the church.  The Christians here make their living doing tasks no... Read more

When you go to Sakkara, you get to see the early attempts at pyramids, including the step down pyramid of Djoser (pronounced Zoser). Yes there is a burial chamber in there.  The debate of course is this based on the Babylonian step back temples of the early period.  This tomb was likely built in 2600 B.C. or a bit earlier. This is much earlier than the ones you see in Giza.   There has been lots of recent archaeological work done... Read more

The capital city of Egypt in Moses’ time or even before that in Joseph’s time seems to have been Memphis, not Luxor or Giza or even Sakkara, and this despite the fact that we find no pyramid tombs in Memphis, and the first pyramid attempts were in Sakkara anyway.  So we need to visit those two early sites before moving on to Cairo and the Giza plateau.  Let’s start with Memphis… no not the one that is the home of... Read more

It is an interesting fact that Luxor, not Memphis, nor Sakkara nor Geza became the go to location for the pharaohs when it comes to a temple.  In some ways this makes sense during the middle dynasties when the burials of pharaoh began to focus on the Valley of the Kings and Queens across the Nile.  And there were in fact two major temples, and a processional avenue of lions with rams heads between them.  The temple of Karnak and... Read more

Lest you think our tour of Egypt was all serious archaeological stuff all the time… I present to you our time in hot air balloons at dawn and on a faluka as well.  All this transpired at Luxor.  The balloon ride takes place on the west side of the Nile and you have to get going at 4 a.m. but it is totally worth it. In part you fly over the valley of the Queens and of the Kings The... Read more

The closer one gets to the burial chamber, which remember, will have been decorated first, and then the hallway to it, the more intense the images become, the more representations of gods demanding the truth (holding the feathers in their hands) the more even the pharaoh needs the wings of protection over their heads to make it to the positive afterlife, and finally the more we see the images of slaves bringing food, and of course doing the heavy lifting... Read more

For the ancient Egyptians, various creatures we might not care for, were sacred to these people and frequently show up in the images in the tombs– scarabs (i.e. beetles), snakes,  alligators, cats, wasps, even baboons did not have any negative connotations for the Egyptians, theological or otherwise. See how many of these critters you can find in the following tomb paintings… Read more

This we visited three major tombs in the Valley of the Kings— first Merneptah’s tomb,  then Ramses III, and Ramses VI.  These are all spectacular tombs.   Here is a schematic of the tombs in the. Valley of the Kings. As I mentioned, Merneptah’s tomb is one of the deepest ones. What grave robbers were looking for is not just the sarcophagus, but they knew there would be valuables in it, but also for the things a king was buried with. ... Read more