Egypt trip, Dec 2008 - Colossi of Memnon and the Valley of the Kings

After spending a lovely evening in Luxor, we have booked ourselves on an early morning hot air balloon ride. Unfortunately, the wind was too strong that morning and after waiting for about an hour, we turned back and headed back to the hotel :-(

The hot air balloon company employs a large number of people. I wonder whether these people made any money that morning. (We received a refund)

Another balloon company tried to set the balloon up. After testing the wind speed with little balloons, they also decided to cancel the ride.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped by the Colossi of Memnon, which are two massive stone statues of Pharaoh Amenhotep III (14th century BCE). The original function of the Colossi was to stand guard at the entrance to Amenhotep's memorial temple (which is almost completely destroyed)

The statues are made from blocks of quartzite sandstone and it was quarried near modern day Cairo. The stone blocks weight about 700 tons each and they were too heavy to be transport upstream on the Nile. So it was transported 420 miles over land.

We then moved on to visit the Valley of the Kings. The valley stands on the west bank of the Nile, opposite Thebes (modern Luxor).

For a period of nearly 500 years (from 16th to 11th Century BCE or the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Dynasties of Ancient Egypt), the kings and powerful nobles of ancient Egypt built their tombs in the valley.

All of the tombs appears to have been opened and robbed over the many years, so there was nothing much left except the wall decorations and some mummies. In 1922, however, Howard Carter discovered an intact tomb and since then, our understanding of the ancient Egyptian funerary rituals have increased significantly.

The hills around the valley are dominated by the peak of al-Qurn. It looks like a pyramid when viewed from the entrance to the Valley of the Kings, and therefore some Egyptologists believe it may have been the reason for choosing the location as a Royal Necropolis.

The royal tombs are decorated with scenes from Egyptian mythology and give clues to the beliefs and funerary rituals of the period. Here is our guide explaining the story behind the scenes.

This is a very impressive model of the valley. It shows the entrances of each tombs....

...as well as how the tombs look underground.

Exploration, excavation and conservation continues in the valley today

It is very labour intensive though and it takes a lot of patience! I don't think I will make a good archaeologist :-p

We visited three tombs and the wall decorations are amazing. The colours have been preserved in certain tombs and these tombs show the amount of effort that the ancient Egyptians put into decorating their king's tombs.

Unfortunately, We were not supposed to take photos in the tombs so we don't have much to show.