travelswithalice

February 26, 2007

Karnak

Our guidebooks suggest that we do our buying outside of Cairo; that everything is cheaper in the provincial capitals like Aswan and Luxor. Not so. I found very limited buying opportunities in Aswan.

In Luxor, do not even bother with the much hyped and spruced up Souk. Shops stock mostly kitsch and vendors are insufferably brash and pushy. We couldn't wait to get out of there. We jumped into the first available taxi and set off for the temple at Karnak.

A lot of the original coloring remains in many of Karnak's columns, beams, and sanctuary walls. Hypostyle columns are exceptionally thick, stand very close together, and are topped by a variety of different capitals.

Apart from this, there are precious few unique features to distinguish Karnak from other temples.

By this point in our tour, the vocabulary of hypostyle halls, pylons, sanctuaries, and colossi has become predictable. So while the previous evening's encounter with Luxor had put me back on temple chasing mode, Karnak failed to sustain my enthusiasm.

This must be the height of disrespect coming from a layman. But that's just the point. For non-Egyptologists like me, there had to be a temple saturation point.

The constant theme of egomaniacal excess began to grate. I came away feeling frustrated by the pointlessness of all this futile effort to live forever.

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley