Flashback: Egypt 2009

I am currently in the middle of five different books (not including the textbook I'm supposed to be reading but have yet to open), at least half a dozen TV shows, and a couple of movies. I am having a hard time paying attention to anything for more than five minutes.

But I did read this article from The Guardian about the trove of fifty sarcophagi recently discovered in Saqqara, Egypt, after more than a hundred had been found just a few months ago. You wouldn't think there could possibly be that much undiscovered treasure left in Egypt after all these centuries, and although these sarcophagi are from the so-called New Kingdom and so a mere 3000-3500 years old, they're almost unimaginably old compared to, well, almost anything else. And they just keep finding them!

That inspired me to look for my own pictures from Saqqara. I only posted a few of them at the time, still being new at this whole blogging thing, so here's a picture of the Step Pyramid, the most famous landmark there. It's even older than the pyramids at Giza, and more than a thousand years older than those sarcophagi everyone's so excited about.

I only had a point-and-shoot camera in those days, and a limited number of software tools, and I spent a couple of happy hours this afternoon cleaning up and cropping this image and making the lighting more dramatic. Now maybe I can settle down to re-reading The Two Towers for the tenth or so time feeling as though I've accomplished something today.

Under African skies

Horses overlooking the ruins at Saqqara at dusk.

The desert begins

I saw many many pyramids -- Great, not quite as great, step, bent and red -- and I took pictures of them all, but everyone knows what the pyramids look like.

This is something you don't usually see, the way the fertile land around the Nile gives way abruptly to the Sahara, though you no doubt learned something about the flooding making agriculture possible back in fourth grade geography class.

But it is as dramatic as it looks in this picture (taken at Saqqara): on one side, lush date palms and mango trees, thick as a jungle, and on the other side, sandy brown moonscape without so much as a blade of grass. Click to see better.