Walking the Bible (19 page)

Perhaps the best expression of this universality came when I arrived on the river that afternoon and started speaking with some of the local workers on board the ship. I asked what they thought of the Nile. One said it was a trunk, another an arm, another a backbone. Mohammed, a shopkeeper, said it was “the only thing we have.”

“What about your girlfriend,” I asked, “or your mother?”

“I think it’s bigger than those,” he said. “I only see my mother once every four months.”

“You’re saying the Nile’s more important than your mother?”

“The river doesn’t ask for money.”

Our first stop after leaving the airport that morning was the city of Qena and the temple compound of Dendera. Situated at the top of a congested stretch of the Nile Valley, fifty miles north of Luxor, Qena has long been something of a frontier. In the nineteenth century it was home to vice, as Cairo strongman Mohammed Ali exiled prostitutes and belly dancers here. Recently it’s been home to fundamentalism. In 1992, Qena was the site of the first attack on tourists, when militants ambushed a tour bus, killing, among others, a fourteen-year-old boy. The government responded by razing a nearby village.

Security was tight as we approached, and reminded me of Hebron. Dendera is one of dozens of temples dangled along this serpentine span of the river like charms on a bracelet. The thousands of tombs and
scores of pharaonic monuments make the Nile Valley the largest open-air museum in the world. As such, it continues to attract tourists, despite the terror. The group I was meeting was composed largely of retirees from Manchester, England. Their guide was a well-dressed twenty-six-year-old Cairene named Basem, who had a master’s degree in Egyptology, spoke the Queen’s English, and, had it been cooler, probably would have worn a tweed blazer with elbow patches. As it was, he was the only person wearing long sleeves. “I feel it’s a great duty to teach people about the history of Egypt,” he said. “I love to say good things about my country. Generally speaking, about the Middle East, the world has very bad images.”

He led the group inside the gates and stopped in the open plaza. Compared to the flat, matzohlike ruins of Israel, the monuments of Egypt are remarkably intact. They’re plump, multilayered biscuits of antiquity, full of flavor. One reason is sand. When archaeologists started searching the Nile Valley in the nineteenth century, the temples were largely underground, covered by centuries of Saharan sand blown from the west. When they removed the dunes, not only the buildings were preserved but also the hieroglyphics, and sometimes even the paint.

Dendera is a sterling example of preservation, mostly because it was built late, around 125
B.C.E.
It’s a reconstruction of an earlier temple dedicated to Hathor, the cow goddess known for her milk-giving fertility, and was designed to emulate its predecessors in an attempt to legitimize Egypt’s then-foreign rulers. The building’s trademark is a relief of the most famous of those carpetbaggers, Cleopatra, the last pharaoh from the line of Greek-born Ptolemys. Her chubby-cheeked face is far removed from what she really looked like, Basem noted—beak nose, high cheekbones, prominent chin—but far closer to the image created by Elizabeth Taylor.

Because they’re so well preserved, Egyptian temples are virtual textbooks of ancient religion, three-dimensional scrolls. Each temple was built in the image of the cosmos. Egyptian creation stories show similarities to Mesopotamian stories, and thus to Genesis. In the beginning were the Great Waters, full of serpents and frogs, and the Great Egg. The Egg split into two, out of which arose Amen-Re, the god of light, who
in turn created a pantheon of gods who controlled the sun, moon, land, plants, animals, and humans. Each temple was constructed as a reverse expression of this story, a moving from the human world to the divine. First one passes through a doorway showing the pharaoh making offerings to the gods. Next comes an outer hall, or hypostyle hall, whose forest of columns was designed to evoke a papyrus thicket. In Dendera, these columns require three sets of arms to encircle them. Beyond this room lie a series of vestibules and ultimately the sanctuary, with images of the deity. The sanctuary was said to rest on the original hill of creation. In deference, floors got higher and ceilings got lower the closer they got to the holy of holies. As Basem pointed out, this gradual elevation meant that each temple was like a pyramid on its side.

After exploring the site for a while, I ventured up a set of stairs to the rooftop sanctuary, where every New Year’s Eve Hathor’s statue was carried to await dawn. Touched by the rays of her father, the sun god Amen-Re, Hathor’s soul would be revitalized for the coming year. While I was admiring the view of the Nile, Basem walked up next to me. I asked him what interested him most about ancient Egypt. Was it the river, the religion, the buildings?

“The people,” he said. “The people are the ones who made these things. Certainly the river made civilization possible, but it was the people who tamed the river and utilized its resources. Personally speaking, when I take groups to the temples, I usually talk about the pharaoh, I talk about the gods, because the people want to know that. But in my own private reading I prefer to read about how the people were living. How a farmer used to wake up, go to the fields, go to the temple once a year for the festival.”

“So do you think they’re like you?” I said.

“This country has been invaded many times,” he said. “The Persians came here in 336
B.C.E.
Then the Greeks arrived, and the Romans. The Romans left, the Arabs came. Then we got the French, the Turks, the English. We’re all a mixture. Part of me is from Saudi Arabia and another part from Turkey.”

“Does that mean you can’t relate to ancient Egyptians?”

“Physically I do. I was brought up in this country. I drank its waters,
I saw its fields. But I don’t relate to the ancient people in their way of thinking, because my religion is totally different. They used to worship many gods. They worshiped the sun, because it’s powerful. They worshiped the water, because it gave them irrigation. They worshiped the crocodile, because it was strong. They looked at nature and took their religious views from it. Now we don’t do that. We’re Christian or Muslim, and in neither do we take our religious views from nature.”

“So where do you take them from?”

“We have the Bible and the Koran,” he said. “We take guidance from God.”

After the tour we boarded a bus and headed to the boat for lunch. Ever since the advent of leisure travel in the nineteenth century, the Nile has been a popular destination. Baedeker published its first guidebook to Egypt in 1878. Its eighth edition, published in 1929, touted the salutary effects of the dry winter climate. “Phthisis (if not too far advanced), asthma, chronic bronchitis, rheumatoid arthritis, gout, Bright’s disease, and other diseases of the kidneys are some of the most important ailments that are at least alleviated by a visit to Egypt. Invalids should remember that a stay of a few weeks only is not sufficient and should remain from the beginning of November to the middle of April.”

Today almost three hundred cruise ships are licensed to take tourists along the 150-mile stretch between Luxor and Aswan, the Champs-Élysées of the ancient world. Since these vessels don’t need to be seaworthy, they’re not exactly enormous cruise liners à la
The Love Boat
. Instead they’re closer to luxury barges with several floors of cabins, ornate rooms for dining and dancing, and a deck for indulging the antipsoriatic qualities of the sun. Our boat, the
Royal Rhapsody,
had a particularly impressive array of charms, including chandeliers that swayed as we ate, an in-house video system that favored Disney’s
101 Dalmatians,
and towels folded every night on the beds in the shape of mountains, rivers, even crocodiles.

But for all the luxury, there was something surreal about the experience. Just going ashore was something of an enterprise. The crew lowered
a touring boat onto the water, lowered a gangplank onto that, then lowered a ladder to the start of the plank. A dozen or so passengers would wobble down to their places, followed by a half-dozen guards dressed in
galabiyah
robes carrying AK-47s, several supervisors dressed in coat and tie, and a porter wearing a tuxedo and balancing a silver tray with tiny glasses of lemonade covered in plastic wrap. The atmosphere was somewhere between Agatha Christie and Mad Max.

Later, when I ventured south of the Aswan Dam and joined an even larger boat, designed to replicate a Mississippi River paddleboat, that had only eight people on board, the experience was even more post-apocalyptic. If the world ends, this is how it will happen: six nationalities dressed in vermilion and white-lace Egyptian robes and assorted unflattering headgear—cardboard fezzes, red-and-white-checked kaf-fiyeh—eating London broil, French onion soup, and baked Alaska, followed by dancing in a blue-and-orange flashing disco as the bartender, naked except for a grass skirt and African mask, gyrates with drunk passengers to tomba chants, French chansons, and, how could it be otherwise, Celine Dion singing “My Heart Will Go On,” the theme song from
Titanic
. If Burton and Livingstone had expected this when they uncovered the source of the Nile in the late nineteenth century they might have decided to stay at home and read a good book. As one Londoner on board said:“There is no end to the humiliation of tourists on holiday.”

Given this atmosphere, the most delightful part of the trip upriver was sitting on the deck, watching the banks of the Nile. The absence of development was striking, especially compared to Cairo. Ninety-five percent of Egyptians live on only 5 percent of the land, and most of those live in Lower Egypt. Upper Egypt, by contrast, which earned its name because it’s“up river,” is an agricultural backwater. In the course of several days, I could count on one hand the number of buildings I saw higher than one story. The number of crops was greater: corn, sugar-cane, sesame, dates, figs, pomegranates, pistachios, bananas, mangoes, garlic, and onions. The proximity of Egypt to the Promised Land was most evident in the vegetation, including the acacia tree, which the Bible says was used to make the ark; the
Ziziphus Spina Christi,
which was used to
make Christ’s crown of thorns; and the carob, also called St. John’s bread.

I was sitting on the deck at the end of the first day when Basem appeared and asked if he could sit down next to me. Though he was fasting during daylight hours in honor of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, he didn’t seem to lose energy as the day went along. If anything, he seemed to welcome the opportunity, even at this late hour, to engage in an impromptu tutorial.

What was even more remarkable about Basem was his knowledge of the ancient Near East. He was like a younger Egyptian version of Avner, only neater and in linen pants. I mentioned that I could detect echoes of Canaan, and more of Mesopotamia, in what we had already seen, and asked how much contact ancient Egypt had with its neighbors. “It depends on which millennium you’re talking about,” he said.

Though settlements existed in the Nile Valley as early as the Neolithic Age, around 6000
B.C.E.
, Egyptian history is said to begin around 3100
B.C.E.
, when the quasi-historical ruler Menes first unified Upper and Lower Egypt and began the dynastic tradition that dominated the country for the next three thousand years. Under the pharaonic code, the king was not merely the political leader, he was the embodiment of the gods; to rebel against him was to reject divine order. During the Old Kingdom, which began around 2686
B.C.E.
, the pharaohs leveraged their power, along with that of the Nile, to create unprecedented technological advances and perhaps the most unified culture in the Fertile Crescent, with myths, religious practices, and elaborate monuments. It was during this period that the pyramids of Giza redefined the relationship between the earth and sky. Unlike the Tower of Babel, here some men, at least, could climb to heaven.

During this period, there was little struggle between Egypt and its counterparts in Mesopotamia, since both civilizations were still being established. “Egyptians were lucky,” Basem noted. “The Nile gave them easy communication and helped unify them.” By contrast, the Tigris and Euphrates were harder to control. Since they’re not surrounded by desert, the two rivers could support more people, which meant cities developed at a faster rate. Eventually those cities started to fight one
another. “They were older than we were, but we lasted longer,” he said. “Why? Because they clashed more than us. They had the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Assyrians, and each one wanted control. Here, Upper or Lower Egypt always dominated the other; it was never a prolonged struggle.”

Though some early pharaohs traded with Canaan, it was not until the Middle Kingdom (2050–1786
B.C.E.
) that Egypt began exerting a stronger hand in these areas. During this period, which corresponds to the time of the patriarchs, Assyria, to the north, was still the greater influence in Canaan. Egypt, though, because of its regular floods, would have been an easy place to escape to during a drought, as both Abraham and Jacob do. A more intriguing period in Egyptian history followed, a sort of Dark Ages, during which the country was overtaken by a mysterious sect of outsiders called the Hyksos. Many believe this time corresponded to the period when Joseph and his brothers came to Egypt. The Hyksos, who were probably Canaanites fleeing hardship, controlled the country for about 150 years beginning in the eighteenth century
B.C.E.
and, if nothing else, awakened the giant within Egypt. Once the foreigners had been expelled, the newly emboldened pharaohs of the New Kingdom (1570–1070
B.C.E.
) began an aggressive military surge into Canaan and Assyria, all the way to the banks of the Euphrates.

“First the pharaohs built fortresses in the Sinai,” Basem said. “Then, for the first time, they conscripted people into the army. Finally they went out to see if any other people were stronger than they were. From that day, every Egyptian king for six hundred years was leaving the country, exploiting other people, trying to conquer them. In the beginning it was for safety, then it was for wealth. Ultimately it was for power. That’s when the struggle with Mesopotamia began.”