Where Moses Was Coming From

Luxor, March 18-19

I fly from Cairo 400 miles south to Luxor, the "hassle-capital" of Egypt and 100 degrees. The place quickly lives up to its reputation. It has an infrastructure built to move 20,000 tourists a day in season and now there are less that 1000. Every taxi- and motor-boat driver and restaurant owner and vendor is living at the edge and a tourist will be accosted at least once a minute. My hotel manager tries hard to up-sell me on tours. I decide to at least eat in the hotel rooftop restaurant every evening, as she is a nice person, just pressured.

My experience has been that every Egyptian I've interacted with in a non-commercial way is very friendly and helpful; every interaction that could result in money passing is a hustle, and almost always the price is jacked up 30% minimally and usually to whatever the seller thinks is achievable. A liter of water costs an Egyptian 16-32 cents; I'm regularly asked 80 cents but if I walk away the price starts to fall. Tiring in 100 degrees.

I must add that the people I interact with on the street, asking directions or simply saying hello to, are in the most part middle-class. Those trying to con me are usually poor, and simply can't afford to exhibit dignity. One I speak with explains that he has no opportunities and that his options are to spend his days trying for tourist business or to sit home depressed and essentially starving. It is that bad and you see it in their eyes.

Luxor city is dusty, noisy, with no public riverfront. Its souk is irritating, its street food tasteless, its hundreds of tourist boats with bad diesel engines pollute the Nile. All around are the ruins of dynastic Egypt, which I expect to dislike. I meet no English-speaking tourists in my hotel. So, no city pictures. I have four days to spend before flying to Istanbul.

My first morning I walk 3 kilometers to Karnak, following in part a line of sphinxes that once ran from Luxor Temple to Karnak Temple, and was used once in year in a ceremonial procession. I forget to get a picture of them but then see this after paying to enter Karnak:

and this:

Karnak itself was the cult center of Egypt for 1500 years. Many pharaohs added to the temple infrastructure but the greatest builders were the line of Ramses that included the one played by Yul Brenner in the movie. Here in a nutshell is what the place was about:

The temple and everything in it are gigantic, which I read as signaling the power of the imperial religion:

Almost everything is barren of color, but originally all of the illustrations were painted and colorful:

Two god figures:

I'm put off by Karnak, just as I am by Aztec and Mayan ruins. Imperial religion, where the ruler is god or the priesthood is the only entity with god's ear, must have always been a con to at least some of its perpetrators. Upstream, in Aswan, I hope to see a Nilometer, which measured the Nile's level as it entered Egypt. Each spring the pharaoh used the Nilometer reading to announce a revelation forecasting the year's coming crop.

A woman I speak with at the ruins tells me, though , that a common icon in Egypt was a scale that weighed the pharaoh's heart, symbolizing his just treatment of his people, against a feather. She says this idea of just rule anticipates the Hebrews and Christians. But as far as I understand Pharonic culture the individual had neither identity or individual dignity. One more image of the power of the gods: