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Egypt history inspiration life Photography story

Day 31~ March 31st~ Egypt

egypt the unforgettable~ inside the tombs of the Pharaohs

Every journey must end for a new one to begin…

This image concludes the Egypt series for the month of March and I thought in encapsulates the whole experience for me. Humans, friends, together in a quest, searching for the truth, looking at the ancient, to better cope with the now and with the future. The human story, our story, your story, my story, her story, his story , history…

The next month will be an entirely different chapter of my story, another life changing experience, in images..

till tomorrow, good night from New York, and thank you for bearing with me while I am traveling with very little time to comment on your work. Thank you also for your wonderful, thoughtful and encouraging comments on this series. I have enjoyed every post, and every comment and I have valued every reflection you gave back to me about the work.

Categories
architecture Egypt history Photography

Day 28~ March 28th~ Egypt

the temple of Hatshepsut

The impressive mortuary temple built for Queen Hatshepsut, the 18th dynasty female Pharaoh stands as the evidence of Egypt’s influence on today’s classical architecture styles. This pharaoh was known for her great power and dominion over both upper and lower Egypt and was said to reign for over 22 years.

The original name of the mortuary temple is Djeser-Djeseru (holy of holies) and it is entirely dedicated to the birth and life of the queen to whom it was dedicated.

Legends of Queen Hatshepsut’s great ambition as a ruler and the later destruction and desecration of her statues leave much to ponder about her  intentions as a ruler of Egypt. The sense I got standing at the temple near Deir el Bahari is that of cloudy oppression.

 

Categories
Egypt history life Photography

Day 13~ March 13th~ Egypt

larger than life

Have you ever wondered why entities that aim to exercise power over us are always large, imposing, overwhelming? Government buildings, houses of religion, temples, Egypt…

The first thing that I registered when looking at Egyptian art is how large everything is, how oppressively daunting it is. The first reaction is to feel small in the face of it, and less significant. But isn’t the human significance and power more concentrated in the smaller worlds? Isn’t the whole universal power coded in every cell of the human body and just waiting to be activated to its highest potential by personal development?

Just a ponder along the way…

Categories
Egypt history Photography story

Day 8~ March 8th~ Egypt

the burial mask of Tutankhamun~ Cairo museum

 

The journey to Egypt was more a journey of feelings, sensing and of connection than that of collecting brain information. There were places and things in Egypt that let me ‘feel’ so much more than others. One of these beacons was the tomb of Tutankhamun.

The son of Akhenaten, king at age 9, reformer of religion from god Aten to god Amun, youngest Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of ancient Egypt, the young boy king was to die at age 18. There has been so much written and said about this enigmatic king and so much of it fails to meet logic.

One thing that was for me undeniable standing in the tomb where Tutankhamun’s mummy was found, despite it being a much simpler tomb than that of other kings, a soft and gentle cloud wrapped itself around the place and a great quiet, a stillness that I feel even now as I write this. The mummy was housed in 7 levels of gold and wood and it was discovered in 1922 in the Valley of the Kings by Howard Carter.

the alabaster canopic jars of Tutankhamun
the burial mask of the boy king

 

Categories
architecture Egypt history life Photography

Day 2~ March 2nd~ Egypt

The great pyramids at Giza

I went to Egypt with hundreds of questions and came back with thousands.

Egypt lives in children’s imaginations as the world of fantasy, of pharaohs, of mummies, of pyramids, of kings, of power, of ankhs, and I am yet to meet a child who hears about Egypt without falling prey to its enchantment.

Ancient Egypt is big, it is massive, it is impressive, and it can make you feel so small if you let it. Everything natural and human has a way of returning to the earth, our bodies do, our waters circle up to the skies and return, our seeds grow only to wither again and nourish the soil. Not Egypt. Egypt was always looking beyond the planet’s cozy atmosphere and towards the heavens. The pyramids are gigantic, pointy, sharp, were covered with shiny limestone that reflected and could be seen from space, the stars were charted in Egypt on every sarcophagus, on every tomb, and bodies were mummified to withstand time and to defy the laws of nature here on Earth. Was it  because Egypt had other plans?

There are about 138 pyramids discovered in Egypt, the largest is Giza’s Khufu pyramid photographed above at sunrise, and is the only wonder of the ancient worlds that remains standing.

 

Categories
lebanon life Photography

Day 12~ February 12th~ Lebanon

running though time

You know how when you are a child in school, only very few things resonate and remain with you despite all the efforts from your teachers to fill your head with information? For me, it was a chemistry teacher that I really loved because he demonstrated all his theories in a practical manner, a math teacher who was clearly in love with math, so he was able to infect me with that love, and then there was the magic of history. Not all of history, some of it was dead boring, but some stories just lived in me. One of these stories was the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. It was all just too fantastic and too heroic and too hauntingly transporting to another place and another time. But can you imagine that the place spoken of was just an hour’s drive away from my school? The incredible Epic of Gilgamesh takes place partly in the cedar forest of Lebanon, the same forest that was mentioned 75 times in the bible, the very same forest whose tree resin was used for the mummification of Ancient Egypt, whose wood was used for the temples of the pharaohs and their tombs, the very same trees used to construct the palaces of kings David and Salomon, as well as the famous temple of Salomon, and the list goes on…

And in this ancient forest now called ‘the cedars of god’, my daughter runs today bathing in the vibrations of ancient history…

cedrus libani~ the lebanese cedars