Our Late Summer Cruise to Egypt

Over the next couple of weeks, I am going to be posting about our cruise on the Nile. 

I will do a day by day account, but it will show up in reverse order as I do new posts. (Don't forget you can click on the pictures to make them larger.)

All my life I have wanted to visit Egypt to see the temples and the tombs. I started off as a child being fascinated by the ancient gods of Egypt and even painted a bathroom to look like an Egyptian tomb. (I actually never finished it, so it almost looks like a ruin that has been excavated and I don't have pictures of the cabinets which make the room look a little more complete).

My parents would always take us to the Chicago Art Institute to see the reliefs and artifacts and so my interest grew with time.  

                                                                   

Stela of Mersumaat, New Kingdom 1340-1295 BCE - Chicago Art Institute  (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/34432/stela-of-mersumaat)

                                                                            

Amulet of Tawaret - Third Intermediate Period (circa 1069-332 BCE)   Chicago Art Institute (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/135989/amulet-of-taweret)                                       

When studying at a German University in Munich I was able to take a course on Hieroglyphics from a fairly well-known German Egyptologist and of course I simply had to visit not only the British Museum to see the mummies on the top floor, but also the Egyptian Museum in East Germany when I got a chance to cross into the GDR. 

Akhenaten from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)

My plan for this set of posts is to put everything in reverse order so that the events can be read chronologically from the top of the blog to bottom, but this may mean that things as they appear will be the last half of the trip first. Bear with me until I get all 17 days up and organized. I hope people will find my blog about the trip informative and interesting. If you do, think about donating money to the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, the Antiquities Endowment Fund,  https://arce.org/antiquities-endowment-fund-aef-projects/or maybe the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation doing research until 1928 on the tombs of Quebec El Hawa North, the West Bank of the Nile near Aswan) to help further the research and excavations that are on-going. There is still SO much to learn about ancient Egypt and there is never enough money to fund the excavations that are continuously going on.