Our visit to the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, AKA the Deir el-Bahri (“Northern Monastery”) was the highlight of the visit to Luxor, a happy wrap to a long day mostly spent peering into a raft of dark, underground Egyptian burial tombs in the nearby Valley of the Kings. From the Queen’s monastery entrance gate near the West Bank of the Nile we were ferried out to the site in “people-movers”, open transit E-vehicles. This sublime gem of a temple stands out from the others for several reasons! First of all – the fun-sounding name, we were informed by Bakr that it is correctly pronounced “Hat-cheap-suit” which is a pretty good memory device to resort to, but the quipsters in our tour party were quick to translate it into “Hot n’chicken-soup” or even more absurdly “Hot-chip’n’soup”! (in the dusty air and baking heat of the Valley, lunch was never far from our minds!). It was special too because remarkably Queen Hatshepsut was only one of two female pharaohs in Ancient Egyptian history (d.1458 BCE, 18th Dynasty). The first, Sobekneferu (d.1802 BCE, 12th Dynasty) was a more shadowy figure and a much less substantive ruler. Hatshepsut first ascended the imperial throne as co-regent with her half-brother but assumed full pharaonic powers after his death. Her reign was notable for its building projects, especially around Thebes (her crowning glory this memorial temple, Deir el-Bahri, built in Western Thebes) and for extending the kingdom’s trading links possibly as far as Punt (Eritrea) in the Horn of Africa. In the contemporary images, statues and sculptures of Hatshepsut✱, she is depicted (on her own orders) as a man, eg, the free-standing colonnade sculptures of the Queen in her showcase Thebes temple show her with a manly build and a characteristic pharaoh’s beard and attire. Lastly there is its peerless aesthetic appeal. Most of the other mortuary houses in Luxor’s valley look drab and unprepossessing by comparison. The temple is magnificently set in a natural valley against a towering backdrop of massive craggy mountains. Though upward of 3,500 years old in some ways it looks strangely modern with its ramps, two-tired terraces and the simplicity of clean, white, sharp lines of the colonnades and facade…the simplicity of the building and the way it blends into the landscape reminds me a bit of the architecture of Chicago’s Prairie School. Hatshepsut’s pet name for the temple was Djeser Djeseru (“splendour of Splendours”), in the ancient era the elegant simplicity of Deir el-Bahri was enhanced by a number of aesthetic features and elements that haven’t survived to the present day (eg, an avenue of sphinxes, fountains, lines of myrrh trees from the land of Punt) [The Rough Guide to Egypt (2007 Ed.)]. The distressing, tragic contemporary association with this sublimely beautiful monument is that it was here that 58 international tourists as well as four Egyptians were massacred by terrorists in 1997, a further 26 visitors or more were injured in the onslaught (the worst-ever terrorist atrocity involving tourists in Egypt). The terrorist group, suspected to be a splinter arm of al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya (Egyptian Sunni Islamist organisation)✥ entered the complex in the guise of security guards, trapping the victims inside the temple and setting on them with knives and guns. The murderers later fled and committed suicide in the surrounding hills. The largest proportion (>60%) of the murdered tourists came from Switzerland (later on Swiss intelligence ‘determined’ that Osama Bin Laden had bankrolled the operation). A direct consequent of the Luxor massacre was both a beefing up of tourist security and a drop in Egypt’s tourist numbers. Subsequent terrorist attacks elsewhere within the country has ensured the maintenance of high levels of security by the Egyptian authorities to this day.
🔼 Pharaoh and Queen, Hatshepsut
_______________________________________________________________ ✱ the statues of Hatshepsut that survive that is, many at the temple were predictably decimated by later male pharaohs in a chauvinist attempt to erase her from the annals of Egypt’s pharaonic ‘pantheon’ ✥ although this charge has continued to be denied by al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya itself
The island containing the Temple of Philae and other significant, associated monuments from antiquity is a definite starter on the list of essential things to see when in the Nubian region of Egypt. So, after the tour guide had taken us to the Aswan High Dam to get a sighter from the bridge of the vast reservoirs of water, we made for the island✱. The temple and other monuments we were going to see were originally on Philae island, but by the 1960s the Egyptian government, concerned at the harmful effect the periodical flooding of the island was having on the monuments and its archaeological relics (a by-product of the Aswan Low Dam), decided to relocate them to a more optimal place – mirroring the story with the Abu Simbel Tow Temples and the Aswan High Dam. The nearby island of Aglika was chosen as the new site and in a logistics exercise that consumed virtually all the seventies, Philae’s temples and monuments “island-hopped” to Aglika. There was some inexplicable delay (becoming quite the norm) when we got to the wharf in getting a boat to ferry us to the new island. One of the random fellow passengers on the boat ride was perhaps the most exotic ‘apparition’ we had encountered in all our time in Egypt. I say ‘apparition’ because although she was real, so oddly and eccentrically was she decked out in extravagant garb and paraphernalia, she was totally out-of-place with everyone else in the sweltering heat of the day. The image that occurred to me when I saw her was of a kind of Egyptian “Mary Poppins”. She was covered from head to foot in multi-layers of gaily coloured clothing, fancy “Sunday-best” gloves, etc, the whole kit! Yes and of course the obligatory umbrella as well! She also looked like she could seamlessly slot into the cast of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, no problems. We were all melting in the oppressive tropical heat in our thin cotton T-shirts, shorts and sandals, so I can’t imagine how she was feeling it. As it transpired, ‘Maryam’ Poppins had an eccentric personality to match her flamboyant attire. She tried to blame us for the boat’s delay and then wanted to use us as money-changers. I couldn’t quite fathom what exactly the proverbial bee in her over-veiled bonnet was! As the boat neared the island the vision was an enchanting one, the central complex of buildings seemed to be growing out of the lush green band of trees and bushes which surround it! It was easy to spot the distinctive twin pylons of the Temple of Isis. Philae was one of the strongholds for the cult of worshipping the all-empowering Egyptian goddess. Once you set foot on the island you find its full of fascinating monuments and artefacts which reveal a rich and varied history and an assortment of diverse cultural influences. The earliest religious structures reach back to the 4th century BCE and the Pharaonic era. Others date to the Ptolemaic Kingdom (Alexander the Great’s Graeco-Egyptian successors from Ptolemy I up to Cleopatra). A number of the buildings still extant were erected under the aegis and command of Roman emperors, eg, the Kiosk of Trajan (above). Even the early century Byzantine rulers have left an imprint on Philae as did the Coptic Christians. Most impressive of all perhaps is the forecourt of the main temple with its splendid colonnaded, the courtyard is an irenic atmosphere-evoking space. Also calming and softening the setting was the afternoon sunlight filtering in between the temple’s columns and reflecting on the still waters of the river in the background. The temple’s stand-out for me remains the striking reliefs of Egyptian deities (especially) on the Second Pylon (above), sharply defined sculptures which have been exceptionally well-preserved (or restored) bearing in mind that the temple walls had been half-submerged for considerable periods when it was still located on the vulnerable Philae island. In addition to the Temple of Isis and the Kiosk of Trajan, the island contains five lesser temples, two Roman gates, the Portico of (Emperor) Augustus and the Pavilion or Vestibule of (Pharaoh) Nactanebo I. The site’s various buildings are rich in the representation of pictographic narratives…the trained eye of Egyptologist Biko drew our attention to other, unauthorised markings on the monuments – various graffiti inscriptions is left by past visitors from the Roman epoch through to the Napoleonic period…which is visual confirmation – if we needed it – that graffiti has been around for just about forever (‘How Old is Graffiti?‘, www.wonderopolis.org).
▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ ✱ 8.8km south of Aswan as the Nubian Corvus flies!
The stock standard, organised tour of Egypt offered by x-plus one number of tour operators and agents typically has an itinerary which comprises Cairo, Gaza Pyramids, Saqqara, a Nile cruise, Luxor and the Valley of the Kings (and maybe Queens), and Karnak, maybe Aswan if you’re lucky and Alexandria, less likely to be included. Sinai doesn’t score a guernsey and the Temples of Abu Simbel, way down in the Nubian south close to the border with Sudan, is often only available as a cost add-on option. But worth it…if you were permitted to visit just one archaeological site in Egypt, Abu Simbel should be the one!
The trip south to Upper Nile
We left bustling, teeming Cairo and journeyed to the Giza Railway Station preceded by a short stop at the Canadian Youth Hostel for a refresher/change of clothes. There was no rush as it turned out, we twiddled our thumbs while the overnight train to Aswan waited dormant on the platform for two hours before it departed. Egyptian Railways’ so-called Abela “Sleeping Train” was on the whole relatively comfortable, but it took a torturous 13½ hours to get to Aswan, and although we had our own separate (small) compartments I got very little sleep in the night in the noisy, overcrowded carriage with the jerky motion of the train. The on-board toilets were a bit dire and the railway staff gave us something cold and rubbery to eat…though they were very polite about it. As least we fared better than the other half of our tour group, their (following) ER train broke down on route in the heat for five hours, standing still, no air con!
⇩ Tourist stalls outside entrance to Abu Simbel site
The four Ramses II statues ⇧
The next morning we had to rise and leave our Aswan hotel just after 3am to drive to Abu Simbel. It was a four-hour drive to the site and we needed to get there early enough to be in and out before the severe heat of the day hit. Our bus together with several other tour buses travelled through the desert in a convoy escorted by armed soldiers in the front and rear vehicles (a corollary of the spike in terrorist attacks on Egyptian tourist sites in recent years). We arrived at the AS monument complex at around 7am.
Leaving the car park and side-stepping through the souvenir wallahs trying to steer us towards their goods stalls, we walked along a curved access road down a slight incline. As we rounded a corner, we get our first sighting of what we had come to see. Superimposed on the cliff face of a mountain were two sets of monumental carved figures, it is an amazing spectacle that greets you, the sheer scale is jaw-dropping, breathtaking…no superlatives you can think of seem adequate at the moment. The first wonder you come to are a set of four colossal (20m high) statues representing Rameses II, the famous pharaoh of the New Kingdom (19th Dynasty), seated on his throne. The four❈ monumental figures are set in rock relief, a niche carved out of the mountain wall. Behind the tetrad of Rameses’ is a temple dedicated to the pharaoh. Further along the mountain is a companion monument to Rameses’ consort, the Temple of Queen Nefertari. One hundred metres to the right of Rameses’ monument, also built on an extended arm of the artificial hill, is the smaller Temple of (the Goddess Hathor and) Queen Nefertari. In front of the temple is a frieze comprising large sculptures of figures (Rameses and Nefertari who unusually was rendered to be of equal height to the pharaoh).
⇧ Queen Neferari Monument
Moving the monuments– the engineering marvelof a miracle
Almost as fascinating as the Abu Simbel monuments themselves is the back story of how they were forgotten, lost, re-found and then moved. Engulfed by shifting sands and lost for millennia, the temples were discovered by a Swiss orientalist, Johann-Ludwig Burckhardt, in 1813. And there they sat until the Aswan High Dam project of the 1960s…the rising levels of the Nile and the creation of Lake Nasser meant that the Abu Simbel monuments would be submerged in the river. A UN-funded salvage operation (coordinated by Swedish company Impreglio) used engineers and archaeologists from around the world and Egyptian labour⌀ to rescue the 3,200 year-old-monuments and re-position them slightly further south on higher ground that is back a bit from the rushing waters of the Nile.
How to move enormous solid objects of such colossal weight and density was the challenge facing the team. The ingenious solution was to cut the statues into manageable (up to 20-ton) blocks (some sections so delicate that handsaws had to be used) that could be then transported to the temples’ new home and there carefully reassembled. For this to succeed required absolute mathematical precision, patience and a long time…but it worked and the statues were rejoined remarkably without recourse to glue or any form of adhesive substance [‘1964-1968 Rescuing Rameses II’, Amanda Uren, http://mashable.com]
Inside the temples
Concrete domes and arched doorways were integrated into the construction of the artificial hills to create the two temples in the new location. Inside are treasury rooms, sculptures and numerous wall and column decorations in honour of Egypt’s most long-lived pharaoh. Photography within the Greater and Lesser Temples is not permitted, but packets of postcards depicting pictures of the interior treasures and of the 1960s relocation project can be purchased at the site.
We spent two hours exploring Abu Simbel but could have stayed longer, Biko however was quick to hurry us back to our mini-bus with his now familiar cry of yalla-beena! The temple site was becoming people top-heavy with new tourist buses arriving every hour, we knew that we needed to make tracks in the desert – especially if we were to avoid, as much as we could, having to travel in full tropical sun. We left happy and content that we had witnessed one of the best ancient complexes we would see. So many of Egypt’s archaeological monuments are magnificent, but very few of them can be said to match the rarefied atmosphere of Abu Simbel Tow Temples.
A note on nomenclature: The traditional speculation is that the name Abu Simbel derives from the name of the Nubian boy who guided Burckhardt (and later Italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni) to the location of the lost treasure temples…regardless of this claims’ merits it should be noted that Abu Simbel literally means “Father (Abu) of the Ear of Corn”.
Footnote: Remoteness of Abu Simbel – deep in the Nubian South, around 35–50km from the Sudanese border, Abu Simbel is literally in the middle of nowhere…the location of this monumental, eponymous structure was intended as the marker signifying the southern border of Rameses II’s empire
⇧ Night viewings of the spotlighted Rameses II monument are spectacular and popular
⊷⊷⊷⊶⊶⊶⊷⊷⊷⊶⊶⊶⊷⊷⊷⊶⊶⊶⊷⊷⊷⊶⊶⊶⊷⊷⊷⊶
❈ the head and torso of one of the four Rameses lies at the feet of the statue – this was how Burckhardt found it in 1813, the fissure is thought to have been caused by an earthquake. Another point of difference within the foursome is that Rameses #4 (counting from left to right) is missing the pharaoh’s trademark shaving brush beard
⌀ the project used around 3,000 workers, cost $US42M in 1960s money and nearly five years to complete
⊡ during the project a perhaps surprising decision was made to not replace the detached head and torso of Rameses #2 in its original position, rather it was placed on the ground at the statue’s feet exactly as it was found when re-discovered in 1813
⌂ Ball court at C-Itzá (southern end-zone & temple)
Our group tour of Yucatán’s archaeological Maravilla, Chichén-Itzá, ended with an informative stroll through the long-abandoned ball court. As we slowly walked from one end of the former playing field to the other, we got a feel for the atmosphere of the place as our guide Henrique told us about the religious symbolism and the savage practices associated with the court. Chichén-Itzá’s Gran cancha de pelotá (the Great Ball Court), the venue in pre-modern times for Mesoamerica’s Jugeo de Pelotá (literally: “Game of ball”), is the best surviving example of the court used by the Maya and other indigenous Mesoamerican peoples for their ancient versions of the ball game✱.
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image-20.jpg”> Olmec heartland – arcing from San Lorenzo to the Gulf[/Roots of competitive sport?
Much about the game, thought to be the world’s first organised team sport, is uncertain. The Mesoamerican ball game (MBG) seems to have had its origins with the Olmecs, the earliest known major civilisation in Mexíco, around 1,600 BCE✺. The Olmecs, whose empire centred around the Gulf of Mexíco’s southern coast area, were renowned producers of rubber (the raw material that the latex balls used in the game were made of). Most of the evidence for what the sport was about, comes from the discovery of items such as the bog-preserved balls themselves, and from ceramic pieces interred in tombs – figurines portraying ball players, sculpted miniatures of the game and its paraphernalia, or from architectural decorations, carvings and the like on the ball court walls (around 1,300 erstwhile ball courts have been discovered in or around Central America – the northernmost in the US state of Arizona).
ef=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image-22.jpg”> The basic ‘⌶’ shape of the Ancient Mexícan ball court[/capThe non-standardised Mesoamerican ball court
The dimensions of the ball court at Chichén-Itzá are quite large, at least 545’L x 225’W, a long, roughly rectangular space with an ⌶-shaped playing surface…whilst this ⌶-shape is the norm for Mesoamerican ball courts, other ball courts discovered elsewhere in the region show that there was no standardised size for courts, some are tiny by comparison to Chichén-Itzá, effectively alleys rather than fields. Tikal’s ball court (in present-day Guatemala) for instance is only ⅙th the size of the Chichén-Itzá field [‘Mesoamerican ballcourt’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The courts themselves were masonry structures, composed of stone, rubble, abode, etc materials.
“http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image-23.jpg”> The court with the Bearded Man Temple (L) & the Jaguar Temple (R)[/captioThe C-I court’s side walls
The side walls at Chichén-Itzá are high (a full 8m) and completely perpendicular except for a small sloping bench which extends a metre-and-a-half up from the ground. The walls are decorated with bas-relief carvings which mirror Mayan society. Many other court walls elsewhere in Meso-America are considerably lower and some have angled walls which are much more acutely diagonal, sloping sharply inward. Forming part of one of the side walls at Chichén-Itzá is a famous, two-tiered temple, Templo del jaguar (Temple of the Jaguar). At both ends of the field there are small temples, the best known being the Templo de hombre barbado (Temple of the Bearded Man).
⌂ Clay model of ball court from Nayarit: more spectators than players! [LA County Museum of Art]
Rules of the game?
No lists of codified rules for the sport have survived…leaving the notion of how games were conducted open to speculation. Many theories abound…the most common view is that the players used their right hip to strike the ball…the traditional game of ulama still played in Central America today with the hip is believed to have descended from the archaic indigenous game. Other views postulate that players could use their chests, shoulders, elbows, knees and forearms to propel the ball, or a hand-stone called a manopla or even some kind of racket or (hockey-like) stick. Possibly all of these are correct…the rudimentary ball game seems to have had differences from region to region, and between the different civilisations. An echo of this can be seen in the varying names used for the sport – pok-ta-pok and pitz, Pelotá Maya and ōllamaliztli (the Aztec ball game). Each team had a capitan (team captain) but again there is variance as to how many players constituted a team, some sources say between two to four athletes, although others say six or seven✥. Players (and officials) often donned flamboyant, feathered head-dresses for the games [‘Mesoamerican ball game’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
⌂ Feathered serpent stone ring
Scoring and winning?
On the high walls at the Chichén-Itzá court, seven metres up, are stone-rings which the Maya introduced to the ball court. Because they resemble hoops, many observers have speculated that these rings decorated by intertwining feathered serpents are goals. While they may well be, it is problematic as to how significant the circular goals may have been in the context of a match…players at Chichén-Itzá, unable to use their hands and feet, would need a Herculean effort to propel a heavy ball through the relatively small hoops seven metres high, it would be extremely difficult to manoeuvre the (basketball-sized) ball through the hole!✾ The more likely avenue of scoring was to propel the ball over a centre line into your opponents’ territory, if it bounced more than twice before they played it or if they failed to return it to your side, you were awarded points. Victory therefore, unless a player was lucky enough to land a ringer, tended to be determined by the number of points each side scored [‘The Ball Game of Mesoamerica’ (Mark Cartwright), 16-Sept-2013, Ancient History Encyclopedia, www.ancient.eu (‘Pre-Hispanic City of Teothihuacan (UNESCO/NHK) video)].
Another version of how MBG was played, favoured by the Maya warriors, involved putting the ball in motion by using only the right hip, right knee and right elbow and players were penalised for letting the ball hit the ground…sometimes this involved bouncing it off the side wall, and eventually getting it through the stone ring to win the contest. Surviving artwork from different Mesoamerican communities suggest that hip-players also exclusively used the right hip [‘Mayan ball game’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
⌂ M/Amer ballplayer (with ball approx the size of a 10-pin bowling ball) [Source: MMA]
MBG equipment:
The way ball-players dressed to take part in games was a product of the ball used in Meso-America – balls were made of solid rubber and weighed up to nine pounds (about four kilos). Some were as large as a basketball, others more the size of a softball. Propelled through the air at a good rate of knots the heavy orb could inflict a lot of harm on the human body, so from (an attempt at) self-preservation, players wore protective gear…including a sort of yoke or a loincloth reinforced with leather (occasionally they also wore a sort of girdle); sometimes helmuts; gloves and guards on their arms, legs and torsos⌖. Even so, serious injuries from the hurtling ball were known to be common, even on occasions death resulted.
MBG, real life and death ball games
George Orwell said that football was “war by other means” – a description that might be as apt for MBG as it is for modern football. Ball games for indigenous Mesoamericans served several purposes. The Maya used ball games as a proxy for war, to settle territorial disputes, and to foretell the future. Games were appended to religious ceremonies involving human sacrifice…some but not all culminated in the ritualistic execution of the captain or players on the losing side. Our guide at Chichén-Itzá pointed out the ball court’s carved stone friezes which depicted the winners making human sacrifices by decapitating the losing captain…conveyed both graphically and imaginatively with spurts of blood from the victim’s severed head turning into wriggling serpents! MBG had many martial associations, warriors took part in the games, war captives were forced to play in rigged games which inevitably resulted in their being sacrificed to the gods [‘The Bloody and Brutal History of the Mesoamerican Ball Game, Where Sometimes Loss was Death’ (Monica Petrus), Atlasobscura, 09-Jan-2014, www.altasobscura.com].
⌶⌶⌶⌶⌶⌶⌶⌶⌶
PostScript: An inclusive, multi-purpose sport – religious, political, conflict resolution, cathartic, social, astronomical
The games could be social and recreational⊟ (allowing women and children to play) but normally they were formal and ceremonial events. The Maya elite for example would use them to act out their creation myths, MBG featured in their sacred legends – such as the Hunahpu Hero Twins Myth in which twin boys get lured into Xibalba (the Maya underworld) while playing the game… within the framework of the Maya religious beliefs, ball courts like at Chichén-Itzá were thought to provide (symbolically at least) a portal into the Underworld. MBG was tied into cosmological events, the orbits of the sun and the moon, and games were performed with symbolic resonance, as allegorical battles between “good and evil” [‘The Maya Ball Game’, History on the Net, www.historyontheney.com]
▲ Ball court at Xochicalco (Morelos, Mex.): note the vast difference to Gran cancha de pelotá…Xochicalco is on an infinitely smaller scale, characterised by low, staggered side walls comprising earth mounds
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✱ one of the panels on the side wall depicts the leader of one team with the decapitated head of his opposing captain
✺ the earliest unearthed ball court ruins is at Paso de la Amada in the Soconusco region of Chiapas (circa 1,400 BCE)
✥ seven – the Maya lucky number. More plausibly there may have been six-a-side plus a referee
✾ although pictorial evidence indicates that the stone rings in the Aztec ball game were at ground level and much more accessible
⌖ a player’s equipment could weight up to 20lbs
⊟ gambling on the outcome of games was prevalent
Our visit to the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, AKA the Deir el-Bahri (“Northern Monastery”) was the highlight of the visit to Luxor, a happy wrap to a long day mostly spent peering into a raft of dark, underground Egyptian burial tombs in the nearby Valley of the Kings. 
From the Queen’s monastery entrance gate near the West Bank of the Nile we were ferried out to the site in “people-movers”, open transit E-vehicles. This sublime gem of a temple stands out from the others for several reasons! First of all – the fun-sounding name, we were informed by Bakr that it is correctly pronounced “Hat-cheap-suit” which is a pretty good memory device to resort to, but the quipsters in our tour party were quick to translate it into “Hot n’chicken-soup” or even more absurdly “Hot-chip’n’soup”! (in the dusty air and baking heat of the Valley, lunch was never far from our minds!). It was special too because remarkably Queen Hatshepsut was only one of two female pharaohs in Ancient Egyptian history (d.1458 BCE, 18th Dynasty). 
The first, Sobekneferu (d.1802 BCE, 12th Dynasty) was a more shadowy figure and a much less substantive ruler. Hatshepsut first ascended the imperial throne as co-regent with her half-brother but assumed full pharaonic powers after his death. Her reign was notable for its building projects, especially around Thebes (her crowning glory this memorial temple, Deir el-Bahri, built in Western Thebes) and for extending the kingdom’s trading links possibly as far as Punt (Eritrea) in the Horn of Africa. 
In the contemporary images, statues and sculptures of Hatshepsut✱, she is depicted (on her own orders) as a man, eg, the free-standing colonnade sculptures of the Queen in her showcase Thebes temple show her with a manly build and a characteristic pharaoh’s beard and attire. Lastly there is its peerless aesthetic appeal. Most of the other mortuary houses in Luxor’s valley look drab and unprepossessing by comparison. The temple is magnificently set in a natural valley against a towering backdrop of massive craggy mountains. Though upward of 3,500 years old in some ways it looks strangely modern with its ramps, two-tired terraces and the simplicity of clean, white, sharp lines of the colonnades and facade…the simplicity of the building and the way it blends into the landscape reminds me a bit of the architecture of Chicago’s Prairie School. Hatshepsut’s pet name for the temple was Djeser Djeseru (“splendour of Splendours”), in the ancient era the elegant simplicity of Deir el-Bahri was enhanced by a number of aesthetic features and elements that haven’t survived to the present day (eg, an avenue of sphinxes, fountains, lines of myrrh trees from the land of Punt) [The Rough Guide to Egypt (2007 Ed.)]. 
The distressing, tragic contemporary association with this sublimely beautiful monument is that it was here that 58 international tourists as well as four Egyptians were massacred by terrorists in 1997, a further 26 visitors or more were injured in the onslaught (the worst-ever terrorist atrocity involving tourists in Egypt). The terrorist group, suspected to be a splinter arm of al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya (Egyptian Sunni Islamist organisation)✥ entered the complex in the guise of security guards, trapping the victims inside the temple and setting on them with knives and guns. The murderers later fled and committed suicide in the surrounding hills. The largest proportion (>60%) of the murdered tourists came from Switzerland (later on Swiss intelligence ‘determined’ that Osama Bin Laden had bankrolled the operation). A direct consequent of the Luxor massacre was both a beefing up of tourist security and a drop in Egypt’s tourist numbers. Subsequent terrorist attacks elsewhere within the country has ensured the maintenance of high levels of security by the Egyptian authorities to this day.
Inside the temples
