ANCIENT EGYPT

There are so many different Egypts to see. Because I am a specialist in ancient texts, mine is full of voices. On every visit with a group, the royal monuments impress and startle me with their overpowering and magnificent beauty. But there is also another world that lurks behind these monuments, a world that belongs not to the kings, but to the little men whose lives can sometimes be read between the lines of these great works of hieroglyphic art. And whenever you are in Egypt itself, this world is quite easy to sense. For example, as we walk up through the great rocky valley towards the terraced temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri, you can also turn and look up for a moment to a small ruined tomb cut in the cliffs high above the modern path.

 

In the summer of 1910 BC a middle-aged priest called Heqanakht lost the package of letters he had got ready to send home, down this tomb-shaft. In these letters, the grumpy Heqanakht complains about his family’s squabbles, tries to resolve them (“Make sure the housemaid is thrown out as soon as you get this letter!”), and warns his children to stop resenting his new wife – so vividly that Agatha Christie used them as the basis of a murder mystery.

 

Or at the Step Pyramid complex at Saqqara, the earliest stone architecture in the world, you can look into one of the elegant chapels and see a graffito scribbled on the walls in 1243 BC by a young scribe who came when Ramses II was on the throne, exactly as we are doing now, to admire the monuments that were then already almost 1500 years old. These people wrote, joked, loved (sometimes rather too widely, like the scandalous Chief Workman Paneb in western Thebes around 1190 BC), and recited poetry as fine as any of ours (which learned scribe, I wonder, slipped a quotation from one classic poem into the inscriptions of the vast rock- cut temples of Ramses II at Abu Simbel?). Although only fragments survive of these people, they can still seem intensely alive to us when we are watching the same landscapes that they watched. The ancient Egypt of history books can seem rather dry, objective and colourless, but the dawn sliding over the desert hills at Aswan, and the sound of the small birds singing in the trees at dusk can tell us more about what it was like to be alive in Ancient Egypt than any book can. And if, surrounded by all this beauty and charm, we are still tempted to think of Egypt as nothing more than the world’s greatest archaeological site, the Egyptians will prevent this, with their warmth and hospitality, their irresistible teasing and smiles, their pride in all their ancient, medieval and modern culture.

 

Those ancient ‘people who built in granite’, as one ancient poem puts it, ‘who constructed those fair pyramids’ may have gone, but they were once as alive as us, and here they still meet us as equals, almost face to face.

 

We take care of all tipping

Baksheesh, or tipping, is a way of life in Egypt. To spare you the hassle, and also help you budget more accurately for your holiday, the Bales Tour Manager takes care of all the tipping on your behalf.