Hi guys! Like the tan? Now I know why the Egyptians had them!
Well, as you all may or may not know, awhile back I had an opportunity that I just couldn't pass up. So I packed my bags and went on a Nile boat ride! Unfortunately, you can't see alot in just one week, so it went rather quick.
But, while I was there, I was able to take some great snapshots of all the cool buildings and paintings still left behind from the Ancient Egyptians. I'm not as good at Egyptian art, architecture and mythology as Kal is, but I'm sure that I'll be able to walk you through these prints just fine. Hey, why are you shaking your head?!
Well, got the camera, the film, and the tacky Hawaiian shirt. Let's Go!!
We
first started off in the city of Cairo (Nice place, but you can't drink
the water. Eugh!) and I went to go see the exhibits that they had at their
museum. It was really cool, they had practically every single thing from
the tomb of Tutankhamon there for everyone to see, including the mask that
was on his mummy when they opened the case up!
But, that wasn't all they had. They
had frescoes and paintings from all over Egypt. 
If
archeologists found it, they had it, that type of thing. They had this
really neat painting over what looks like the entranceway to a death chamber
for a Pharaoh. It was a Pharaoh because it had the two symbols of Upper
and Lower Egypt, the cobra and the vulture, over it. And if you look really
good, you can see the sarcophagus inside. Cool!
Alright,
this is what art critics call an intaglio carving. This means that the
characters are drawn away from the wall, like they were right beside you.
The egyptians carved many things to show that they were theirs. The carvings
were mostly done by priest and scribes and stuff, because they were the
main ones that knew how to write in hieroglyphs. But artists were the ones
that did carvings like this, showing people and objects. The Egyptians
didn't know how to show depth in their art, so they used a form of art
called frontality, where they used the front view of the eyes and the chest,
and the side views for the rest of the body. Walk like an Egyptian, anyone?
^_^
This really isn't that important,
but it was really cool, so I decided to put it in. As 
you
can plainly see, this is a Sphinx. Ya, it doesn't really look like a Sphinx,
because the really famous Sphinx has the head of a man. But this is actually
what most sphinxes in Egypt look like. They most commonly had heads of
rams and bulls, and only on rare occasion had heads of humans. These statues
were about ten feet tall. The man under his chin was actually life sized,
about five feet tall, which was about average height for an Egyptian.
Ah,
here we go, the famous Pyramids of Giza! This is the place where there
are three pyramids all neatly set in the desert sand, and are clearly seen
from the city of Cairo. This isn't the largest pyramid here, the largest
pyramid was built by the Pharaoh Khufu, or "Cheops". It took ten years
to built, and was built with over two million slabs of rock! The pyramids,
thousands of years ago would have had a limestone casing over the crumbly
sandstone that remains now. So they would have shone a bright white in
the Egyptian sun. Only a very small part on the pyramid of Kahfre still
has it's white rock still on it. Ten years ago, they allowed people to
climb the structure, but because of the pollution from Cairo, and the soft
rock, they were beginning to 
crumble,
so they didn't let us climb them =(
And, whenever you hear the word pyramid, you automatically think about the great Sphinx of Kahfre, still bearing the Pharaoh's face. You can tell the size of the statue by the man walking towards it in the photo. This sphinx has had a very interesting past. After being constructed, and all through the centuries, sand build-up buried the sphinx from the nose down, and it remained that was until into the 1700's. When Napoleon traveled to Egypt with his armies and weapons, he was amazed at the great stone head that was sticking out of the ground. But that didn't matter, for only a little while later, the sphinx's nose was shot off by one of the french dignitaries cannons. The rest of the statue has long been dug out, but the nose was never replaced. Today, some people believe that there's a small compartment inside the sphinx, which may hold Ancient Egyptian treasure!
Kay, um, I can't quite remember
where this was taken, but I think it was at a 
temple
to the god Sobek, the crocodile god of the Nile. See, the Egyptians were
something that we call polytheists. That means that they believed in more
that one god. So, for every god, they decided to put up some temples dedicate
to them. And boy, did they put up temples! There's a temple at Luxor that's
over three football fields long, with 60 foot diameter columns to support
the roof! Whoops, better catch up with the group, eh?
This's just another Egyptian temple, one that's seen better days by the looks of it! You can tell if a temple's egyptian or not by two things- the statues and the columns. This was a temple to the goddess Isis, you can still see her figure standing out front. The columns are big and solid, unlike greek columns which were made up of different parts. If you look to the right of the big statue, you could see the feet of another that used to be beside it, but was destroyed awhile ago.
Aw,
the end of the tour =( Dang it! It's been a good week. The tour guides
finished off with one of the best parts. The famous temple of Abu Simbel,
built for the Pharaoh Ramses ll around 1000bc I think. Look at the size
of those statues right there. Whoa! They are about 60 feet high, and each
one was cut out of a side of a mountain that used to be near the Nile.
It isn't anymore, and this's why: In 1960, the Egyptian government decided
to build a dam at Aswan, but there were problems with this. Aswan housed
many, 
many
ancient temples that were big tourist attractions, especially the big temple
of Abu Simbel. So, alot of country's got together and tried to find ways
to make sure that the temple wouldn't go underwater when they built the
dam. So, what they did was, they cut the entire mountain up into 1 meter
cubes and moved the whole thing up to the desert. Then, they put it back
together like a puzzle. Now, you can't even tell that it was ever cut up!!
How did those egyptians do it?! Hmm... maybe they did have magic powers
after all ~_^
.
Well, it's been fun. Egypt's really
a great place, and if you have a chance, I think you should go see it.
That's all for the scrapbook for now, but who knows, maybe in the future,
there'll be another trip...
