Valley of the Kings

I already wrote about how being in the Valley of the Kings was a scary existential experience for me, but while I was freaking out confronting my mortality, I was also having a great time wandering around in 3000-year-old graves.

I will assume you know as much as I did going in: that Pharaohs wanted really elaborate tombs filled with treasure because they believed they would need it all in their next life. Maybe Egyptian geography gives everyone existential crises about their mortality. Earlier Pharaohs built pyramids, which turned out to be like big neon signs saying "Grave robbers, here you go!" So later Pharaohs decided to take a different tack and be buried inside mountains. No less treasure, still big rocks pointing skyward, but hopefully, with this new approach, they would be less vulnerable to the not-dead-yet.

So they set their minions to carving out tombs in the limestone and sandstone of the mountains west of the Nile near Luxor. So far over sixty of them have been found, including one (only one!) that the grave robbers never found their way into -- Tutankhamen's. You have to pay extra to see his, even though, what the grave robbers missed, modern museums have scoured out, so there's not a lot left inside to look at.

And, incidentally, looking is all you can do. Photography of all kinds is strictly forbidden in the Valley of the Kings, not only inside the tombs but outside in the parking lot as well. No one is quite sure why this is the case. The current most popular theory blames an exclusive deal between the government and National Geographic. We were ordered to leave all cameras in the bus under threat of having them confiscated by the tourism police. And I'm not making that up, there really are police cars driving around labeled "Tourism Police". I cannot testify one way or the other as to whether they confiscate cameras.

The first grave was a finished one. The Pharaoh buried there had managed to hold onto the throne and not be poisoned by any ambitious brothers or sons for long enough that the plans for his tomb were brought to fruition. I walked down a long, sloping hallway whose walls were decorated with hieroglyphics painted in red and blue and yellow and black telling the Pharaoh's life story, illustrated with paintings, also in color. The colors were vivid and bright and 3000 years old. Part of the credit probably has to go to no sunshine, but even so. It wasn't perfectly preserved, of course -- the "Do Not Touch Anything!" signs were of recent vintage. And it was so tempting -- to my surprise, I found the wall paintings very appealing, lively and even good-humored, and I caught myself thinking, "Oh surely just one quick touch... " I resisted, but it took more will-power than I would have thought.

And no, I was not being seduced by the spirit of the mummy. Those hieroglyphics were just way more likable than I had expected.

At the bottom of the tomb was the Pharaoh's sarcophagus, a Chevy Suburban sized stone coffin with a statue of his body carved on top. To see the statue, I had to stand on a little wooden step stool and use a flashlight offered by a man I thought was an attendant. He turned out to be just another vendor who helped me down off the stool and immediately had his hand out for a tip. I figured, what the heck, how often do I get to see the top of a Pharaoh's coffin, and gave him a dollar.

On the way back out, I happened to look up. The ceiling was painted dark blue with hundreds of white stars drawn like five-pointed asterisks. I wonder why people think of stars as five-pointed. Thousands of years and a huge difference in cultures, and the Pharaoh's artists and I draw stars the same way.

After that, I went to see the tomb of a Pharaoh who wasn't as lucky or well-protected. He died before his tomb was completed. Apparently, the custom in such cases was to give the tomb-building team 70 days -- the length of time it took to mummify the recently deceased -- to finish up as best they could, after which they were to turn their attention to making an even fancier tomb for the successor. It meant walls left only roughly finished, areas without inscriptions or paintings, side tunnels barely begun. No sarcophagus. I don't know whether they just dumped the mummy into the bottom of the excavation, sealed it up, and moved on, or what. I also don't know whether the new guy substituted cheap imitations for the treasure the old guy planned to have. I know that, on exterior carvings, Pharaoh successors were known to scratch out the names of their Pharaoh predecessors, apparently holding grudges way past where it made much sense. Or maybe they just felt there was only room in the universe for one Glorious All-powerful Immortal Invincible Ever-Victorious Divinity.

After we left the Valley of the Kings, we visited three or four temples full of huge stone pillars, bas-relief carvings, and supersized sculptures of whichever Pharaoh was financing the effort. Here too were remnants of bright colors on ceilings -- the temples must have been magnificent before time and weather and vindictive successors wore them down. But the temples didn't appeal to me as much. Probably the same lack of enthusiasm I felt for the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, which I wrote about, and the Forbidden City in Beijing, which I didn't. I just don't grok gargantuan, I guess.