Egypt 2012: Some Final Words

Hal Higdon and his wife Rose will be traveling through Egypt and Israel from March 7 through March 27. In addition to our regular Tuesday Q&A postings, we will be hosting Hal's updates from his travels on this blog, under the tag "Egypt".

Departing from our hotel in Cairo we shared an elevator with several people, one a young man talking into his cell phone. When we reached the ground level, he rushed first off the elevator, leaving Rose to depart second. Had I detreched a small cultural difference between our two countries? In the United States, an American would probably defer to the woman, politely allowing her first exit.

But does this make any difference in a nation where the main question is, will the military continue to conttrol Egypt even after the demise of Mubarak, or can the people continue to maintain the momentum of the events that followed January 25?

This in a country where 54% of the college graduates are now female, 80% of them entering the work force with different hopes and aspirations than those held by their mothers and grandmothers. During our last days in Egypt, we met a woman, a Carleton graduate, who had lived and worked in Cairo for two decades. She talked abouty her hopes and her aspirations for her adopted country. But during her talk, one of our fellow tour members asked a pointed and political question. I have forgotten her answer--or don't want to reveal it--but she looked over her shoulder to the right, then looked over her shoulder to the left, then said cautiously, "I am not free to comment on certain subjects."

Egypt will be free only when people like her are free to talk.

Thank you for following my Egypt blog. I am in Jerusalem now on the final leg of our journey. I'll look forward to communicating with you all after we return to the US next week. Thanks to Gloria Liu of TrainingPeaks and our daughter-in-law Camille Higdon for helping with Egypt 2012.

Egypt 2012: The Last Days

Hal Higdon and his wife Rose will be traveling through Egypt and Israel from March 7 through March 27. In addition to our regular Tuesday Q&A postings, we will be hosting Hal's updates from his travels on this blog, under the tag "Egypt".

Our bags are packed and in the hall outside our room in the Cairo Marriott, waiting for our transfer to the airport. What an astounding last day. The Egyptian Museum. The King Tut headpiece is the most exquisite piece of art I have seen. Then for lunch at a public park that took the place of a garbage heap. Two mosques and an hour hanging around an Egyptian market with a cute little boy trying to sell Rose bracelets: "Two dollah! Two dollah!" He even followed her to the bus, but she resisted his advances. Finally a gala dinner and an early wake-up call.

I have some comments to make about Egypt and everything that has happened since January 25 of last year. I forgot to mention that we drove through Tahrir Square. I will save those for when I have more time, either in Jerusalem or back home again in Indiana. But I would suggest that the two words that most describe the attitude of Egyptians are "cautious optimism."

What a wonderful time to visit Egypt for so many reasons. You shoulda come with us.

Egypt 2012: Back in Cairo

Hal Higdon and his wife Rose will be traveling through Egypt and Israel from March 7 through March 27. In addition to our regular Tuesday Q&A postings, we will be hosting Hal's updates from his travels on this blog, under the tag "Egypt".

We are back in Cairo, having flown from Luxor this (Monday) morning. An hour flight. The ride in from the airport took almost that much. Traffic. We drove past an Olympic complex with a stadium that contained a track. In all honesty, I can't recall a single Egyptian track athlete, much less distance runner, who has been able to contest for an OIympic medal. Not one. Nobody at the level, certainly, of the North Africans to the West or the Ethiopians and Kenyans to the East and South. It must be a cultural thing more than genetics.

The Egyptians centuries ago certainly must have been strong, given the size of the huge blocks of limestone and granite they hauled and heaved, some of the block--Michael tells us--weighed five times as much as the 45-passenger bus carrying us from site to site.

Our last day in the Luxor area, we sailed north to see the Temple of Dandara, our last slice of outdoor antiquity, the Egyptian Museum being on our schedule tomorrow, our last day in town. What can I say about Dandara that will set it apart, both in my mind and yours, from everything else I have seen. Huge. Nearly every cubic meter covered with figures and hoeroglyphics. Dandara is so well restored, because it was found only recently, in the last century. It had been covered by sand until the French located it, then they rewarded themselves by stealing part of the roof to "res5tore" that part, but they returned only the copy and kept the original block, for the Louvre if I'm not mistaken.

Sadly, Dandara's art has been badly scarred by people who some centuries after its construction came in and chiseled away the features of most of the columns and relief statues to obscure the fact that they were gods or humans or humans who were gods. A later religion that wanted to obscure the memory of an earlier religion. Who it might be, Michael did not want to say--if he knew. The suspicion is that it could have been Christians.

Whoever, there should be a special level in Hades for people who deface the art that comes before them.

I have a lecture to attend. More later.

Egypt 2012: Luxor

Hal Higdon and his wife Rose will be traveling through Egypt and Israel from March 7 through March 27. In addition to our regular Tuesday Q&A postings, we will be hosting Hal's updates from his travels on this blog, under the tag "Egypt".

Approaching the locks at Endu, the rowboats surged toward us. There were three or four boats, two men in each boat, one of them rowing, the other one standing in the stern waving towels and various other items for sale at us. And as we close on the lock, which would lower us to the level of the river past the dam, I worried that the boats might be crushed, but obviously these vendors had been doing this for a while. Quickly, they began hurling items in plastic bags onto the top deck and members in our party began hurling them back. That didn't discourage the vendors, who continued to propel sale items at us. I couldn't help thinking that there was an opening for a quarterback in Indianapolis.

And soon it got worse as we entered the lock and became prey for the dozens of vendors standing on the concrete walls on eah side of us. Items reined upon us, particularly as the water level dropped and the sellers were on the same level. But we eventually passed through the lock and some within our group did buy towels, and scarves and sheath dresses and various items.

Vendors; they are the scurge of the tourists visiting the monuments of Egypt. One has to feel sorry for them, since the tourist industry is down, way down, many who might otherwise visit Egypt postponing trips because of fears following the Revolution. Some say that instead of 12 million visitors last year, only 2 million came, and in many ways that is good for us, because there are no long lines or crowds of shoulder to shoulder people getting in our way. But it is bad for the vendors, because their business has to be way down too, and they have to survive, and we feel sorry for them, and sometimes buy, but they buzz around us like paparazzi around Lady GaGa, and it can be irritating at times having to fend off people pushing items in our faces and saying, "One dollar. One dollar."

We are in Luxor, or rather on the river off Luxor, our boat the MISR being our hotel. Without question, Luxor has more fine art than any other city in the world, and I am including Paris, and Rome and Athens. The tombs in the Valley of the Kings are breathtaking, the size of the temples at Karnak so huge as to make one wonder how could they have been built without the cranes of today. And the colors! Particularly in the deep tombs the drawings and hieroglyphics on the walls are comic book bright when it comes to colors.

I asked Michael how the artists could see to work in an era before electricity and they couldn't have used torches otherwise they would have choked on the smoke. Mirrors, he said. Mirrors that reflected the light of the Sun into the darkest chambers, even when there were 90-degree corners from one tunnel to another.

We have only one more day on the river and we will be back to Cairo for a wrap-up of our tour.

The Lessons of the Chicken Hawk

Hal Higdon and his wife Rose will be traveling through Egypt and Israel from March 7 through March 27. In addition to our regular Tuesday Q&A postings, we will be hosting Hal's updates from his travels on this blog, under the tag "Egypt".

Rose claims that all of the temples have begun to merge in her mind. She no longer can tell apart the sculpted images of gods with heads male and female and of animals and the hieroglyphics between and whether the massive block of granite was carved by Rameses II, who seems to be responsible for half the art in Egypt or did it come out of the Ptolemaic age and what about the hieroglyphics, their message and meaning, and I am going to submit to you--and I susect that Rob our peerless leader would agree--that it doesn't make any difference.

It is simply great Egyptian art, so accept it at that level and do not try to put a name or a date on it.

Anyway, it s early on a morning--Friday, I think--and we pushed off from the deck and Endu a half hour ago and yesterday we visited the temple at Kom Ondu, or some such name, but we didn't visit the cattle market, but that is a rather a long strory involving security issues, and the sun rising above the East bank of the aisle is in my eyes and this laptop has Arabic letters instead of English, plus the chair I'm sitting on is too low and two soft, but I am going to tell you the lesson of the chicken hawk.

Rob said in his lecture yesterday that when he visits a friend in South Dakota, near where he was born, they often drive past a certain ridge, and the friend will say, "There's that damn chicken hawk." But, of course, it is not the same chicken hawk as the year before. There is a chicken hawk, but it is a different chicken hawk and was the year before that and the year before that and maybe all the way back to the time of the pharaohs. It is enough that there is a chicken hawk, and whether the animal has a name or an identity may not matter.

And it is the same with Egyptian art.

There were, according to the most frequently cited organizational chart, three kingdoms, each with intermediate periods between them, and 31 dynasties and a couple of hundred pharaohs, or kings if you prefer that term, and they are all the same and they are all different. But unless you are an Egyptologist and studying for a degree which will allow you to work for some great museum, it doesn't make any difference. You simply need to relax and enjoy the art, such as the vultures on the ceiling at whatever temple it was we saw yesterday and to note that they are colored--red and blue--not the black and white that we see pictured in books, and isn't that right.

Beginning around the time of the Great Pyramids of Cheops and ending just before Cleopatra sat on the throne and the Romans came in and changed everything, it took the Egyptians about 2500 years to perfect their art. Twenty-five hundred years of chicken hawks in the skies over what would be named South Dakota and that many years of wokers banging away with chisels on blocks of granite that took Herculean efforts to quarry and move and tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of workers who were not slaves but were employed because they wanted to carve statues and maybe contribute to their mortality and hte mortality of their masters, but more important the immortality of MISR, Egypt, and they got it right.

Consider the fact that in the Renaissance there was only one Leonardo da Vinci who produced a single Mona Lisa, and one Michelangelo who produced a single David statue and one Brunaleschi who unless my memory of Jean Vincent's Art History class is flawed, produced a single St. Peter's, but Egypt has thousands of works of art which whether or not they all look the same are equally as good, right up there with the Renaissance, maybe higher than art of that era, and all this is good and all that is the reason I am on a cruise ship contributing much needed currency to an economy that is stressed following the Revolution. Egyptian art is the le plus ultra of everything I leared in Miss Vincent's class, even if I try to connect it to a chicken hawk flying above a ridge in South Dakota.

I could continue with my theory of why we should not try to read hieroglyphics, but instead accept them as the splatter of paint on a Jackson Pollock canvas, beautiful as much from their pattern as for what they contribute to our knowledge of the three kingdoms and 31 dynasties, but we are cruising down the river toward Luxor, and I must go.