Middle-Egypt trip : Part 1

5/12 : Beni Suef and Akoris

We left early on our Middle-Egypt trip, all excited to see the much promising sites. Ilona had brought a friend with her, Elizabeth, who is specialised in Coptic vandalism (to which she refers lovingly as Late Antique reuse) and works at the British Museum. Our first stop was at the Beni Suef museum. It had some nice pieces, like sarcophagi, tomb models and Coptic stuff. The director showed us some drawings of little children, who often come here with their teacher to learn about their cultural heritage. That surprised me a lot, since so far every Egyptian I’ve met who pretends to know something about his own country, goes like : “Ramses, Nefrtit, pyrmids!”.

Then off to Tihna el-Gebel, aka Akoris, where Kenny gave his presentation. It was such a cool site! It contained a rock-cut temple from the reign of Ramses II, and the rock was shaped like a lion! Hakuna Matata! Isabel, I have a message for you : I dropped the My Little Pony pencil in a shaft inside this very cool temple, and I made a film of it. I’ll show it to you once I get back.

At night we stayed in the Akhnaton hotel in El-Minya. I shared a room with Amy. We had dinner in Seven-Eleven, a restaurant with sweet decoration, but terribly slow serving and rather bad food, in my opinion. Elizabeth and Ilona ordered Fajita, which was just steaming hot, the smoke rose from it.

6/12 : Meir and Quseir el-Amarna

Zie ginds komt de stoomboot uit Spanje weer aan... That’s how we started the day, singing the famous Sinterklaas song in the bus. The Dutch people introduced me into the wonderful world of Pepernoten. Delicious!
First we went to the necropolis of Meir. We visited the excavations of Dr. Kanawati, who showed us the beautifully decorated Old Kingdom (jeej) tomb of Pepyanch. It contained wonderful coloured scenes of animals and offering bearers. We all climbed into shafts and burial chambers, very heroically. Then we took a look at the Middle Kingdom tombs, and I had to revise my whole theory about Old Kingdom is good, the rest is modern trash, because these tombs were AMAZING! Definitely one of the best things I’ve seen in Egypt so far. They contained beautiful paintings and reliefs of daily life : old people, African people, procreating animals, turtles and other wildlife, plants,... I became so enthousiastic about it that I just wanted to stay in these tombs forever.

Next we stopped at Quseir el-Amarna, to see some more Old and Middle Kingdom tombs, but they were less impressive. We got confused about the family history of the tomb owners; we mixed all the names up.

Then we got to the Akhnaton hotel in... Asyut. (With the ancient city of Amarna nearby, EVERYTHING is called Akhnaton in Middle-Egypt, so it seems) Asyut was described in my guide book as “Palermo on the Nile”, and “harbour to maffia and islam extremists”. We couldn’t move a foot without being escorted by policemen. Sandra and I wanted to get some water at a shop which was 5 metres from our hotel, across the street, and a police guy came to protect us! Quite handy, ‘cause he helped me carry my water =)