We awoke docked outside Luxor. Leaving early, we drove to the Valley of the Kings, passing by hot air balloons lifting skyward. Pulling into the parking lot, we were greeted with a nice surprise: we were the first ones there! Time to visit some tombs without other pesky people popping into my pictures! What is the Valley of the Kings? Remember the pyramid fad? That eventually went away. Building gigantic structures with treasure inside was a thief magnet. “Buried treasure here if you can figure out how to get in!” The New Kingdom pharaohs decided for a more subtle burial, […]
Tag Archives: Valley of the Kings
Temples and Titans
So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said to him, “This is what the LORD, the God of the Hebrews, says: ‘How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me? Let my people go, so that they may worship me.’” Exodus 10:3 The west bank of Thebes is home to many temples to various Pharaohs. After visiting the Valley of the Kings, we poked around some of them. Our first stop was Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri. Hatshepsut was one of the few female Pharaohs. When her husband, Thutmose II, died, his heir, Thutmose III, was not old […]
Tombs and Treasures
They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?”~Exodus 14:11 Our next day (Wednesday) we went across the Nile to the west bank across from Thebes. On the east side they built their cities and palaces. On the west they built their tombs and temples. Just as the sun sets in west and is reborn again in the east every morning, so they would be buried in the west in order to likewise be reborn in the afterlife. I already talked about the pyramids at Giza and […]