One of the most amazing sites we visited in Egypt was the "Valley of the Kings," a wide, long area of desert containing King Tut's tomb, and the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, the only female pharaoh. In addition to these and several other royal tombs, they have excavated an entire village of workers homes. The contents left behind in these homes indicated that the workers who built many of the fabulous monuments were certainly not slaves but well paid skilled artisans. Comparable, in my mind, to the builders of the great cathedrals of Europe.
This is Hatshepsut's funerary temple, three stories high and lavishly decorated inside and out.
Two paintings from the walls of King Tut's tomb. His mummy was there but all of the lavish wealth with which he was buried is now in the fabulous new museum in Cairo. The brand new GEM, Grand Egyptian Museum, deserves a page of it's own and I will write about it in detail tomorrow.
King Tut became pharaoh at the age of nine and died when he was nineteen, of illness not murder as was once believed.
No comments:
Post a Comment