Ancient Egypt Day 10

In the morning we visited first the Valley of the Kings, part of the Theban necropolis.

There is a fabulous website here made by the team who are excavating the valley. It includes info on KV5, a huge tomb (200+ rooms?!) which was discovered in the 1990s to be the tomb of some of the sons of Ramses II.

Most of the tombs are closed to the public so there is a crush to enter those that are open, especially this one, the tomb of Ramses V and VI. Fortunately, we visited this tomb an hour before the big crowds arrived.

Next, the temple of Hatshepsut. The most remarkable feature of King Hatshepsut is that this king was in fact a woman.

It was on the second terrace of this temple that about 60 German tourists were executed by Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in 1997 - it took the Egyptian tourist industry many years to recover.

In the multiple representation of Hatshepsut below you can clearly see the shape of the 'double crown'.

The 'champagne bottle' represents upper (southern) Egypt and the 'champagne bucket' represents lower (northern) Egypt. The unity of the two regions is a common theme of statues and hieroglyphs, also often represented by the knotting of papyrus (lower Egypt) and lotus (upper Egypt) flowers.

I think in this statue of Hatshepsut you can detect a feminine softness.

And now we have to leave Hatshepsut looking out over the desert, waiting patiently for our next visit...