Atherton Family Notes

Our second major stop between Aswan and Luxor was the temple at Edfu (or depending on who is doing the transliterating from Arabic, Edfou.)

Edfu is probably the best preserved of the remaining ancient Egyptian temples.  Stylistically, it looks a lot like Philae.  It is surrounded by a large mud brick wall that is at least partly modern, but our guide assured us that the wall had been used since antiquity to reduce the occurrence of flooding in the temple.

The temple dates to the 3rd century B.C.E. and was built over the course of the following two centuries.  I’m not sure when the temple fell into disuse, but by 1860, only a fraction of the temple was visible above the sand when the decision was taken to unearth it.

David Robert’s 1860 lithograph of Edfu temple

Here is how that same section of the temple looks today.

I’m not sure why the Egyptians have decided to hang Horus, the god of the temple.  Maybe it has something to do with the birth ritual that is supposed to be held in front of the temple every year that celebrates the rebirth of Horus.  I guess for him to be reborn, somebody has to off him first.  

A close up of the columns.

As we have discovered elsewhere, paint on the ceilings survives better than paint anywhere else on the temple.  It would have been really magnificent to see this temple during the time it was used.  On the front facade of the temple, there are holes in the wall that were likely used to hold standards.  The ancient Egyptians saw this temple much differently than the shell we see today.

A cartouche spelling the name of Cleopatra.  Carissa and Anna spent a fair amount of time looking at hieroglyphs on the walls of the temple and this is one of the ones they learned pretty quickly to identify by sight.  There are many examples of Cleopatra’s name on the walls, written inside the royal cartouche, and the name of her father, Ptolemy, appears many times as well within the temple.  The royalty of Egypt went to great lengths to remind everyone who was in charge.

For an explanation of how to decode the cartouche take a look here.  Note that this cartouche reads from right to left… The Egyptians write text both directions.  You can tell which direction to read by looking at which way the hieroglyphs face — characters facing right mean read from the right, and characters facing left mean read from the left.

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I realized after my previous post that I had forgotten to include a picture of the main entrance to the Edfu Temple.  It is an imposing facade and definitely worth seeing.

Looking at this image of the temple again reminded me of one other fact I learned about the temple.  There is an inscription on the temple saying that it was designed by Imhotep, whom I mentioned in passing on the post about the step pyramid.  Since the step pyramid was built around 2600 B.C.E. and Edfu was not stated until about 200 B.C.E., it’s not likely that it was the same guy, and it’s also not likely that he left papyrus blueprints lying around for his successors to use.  Instead, by this time, Imhotep was worshipped as a god in his own right, and it is likely that the inscription really means that the plan for the temple was inspired by Imhotep, the god of architecture.

As it turns out, though, one of the other enduring traits of Imhotep is that he is credited with writing the first true medical text, in that sense that it doesn’t resort to magic for diagnosis or healing but contains practical information describing diseases, injuries and treatments.  The earliest known version of the text dates from about 14 centuries after Imhotep’s death, so it isn’t really clear that Imhotep really wrote the text or if it was attributed to him because he was considered to be so smart that he had to have written it.

Of course, since he was so smart and did so many impressive things, his reputation grew over time (even long after his death) until finally the Egyptians raised him to the status of god — and then they promptly started praying to him for acts of magic to heal them.  Kinda ironic, no?

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For the last several months, Carissa has been participating in a reading competition sponsored by the Wayne township schools.  Carissa and 4 of her friends worked through a list of 20 books.   Not every girl read every book, but as a team they covered them all.

Reading all of the books was preparation for participating in a challenge where they compete against other teams to answer questions about the books.  The moderator alternates asking questions to each team, then the team tries to answer with the name of the book (one point) and the author (one point).  If a team answers the question incorrectly, the other team gets an opportunity to “steal” by naming the correct book for one point.  The first team to 20 wins, as long as they are ahead by at least 2 points… otherwise it goes back and forth like a tennis match.

Carissa’s team won a 4-team tournament to represent her school, Westlake Elementary, a few weeks ago.  Today was the township tournament.  9 schools participated in a single elimination tournament.

Carissa’s first match today against Chapelwood was pretty scary.  Her team missed a question early in the game (and the other team stole a point as a result) and so our girls were behind for several rounds.  Cece looked like she was going to cry if her sister didn’t win.  Sadie said afterwards that her heart was pounding really fast.  But in the second half of the game, the other team missed 3 questions and the girls managed to catch up and win.

In the second round against Chapel Glen, the two teams traded a few missed questions here and there, but the match reached 20 points all tied up.  After a few more rounds, the other team missed a question and the Westlake team pulled ahead for the win.

So Carissa’s team made it to the finals against Rhoades Elementary.  This was a very tight match.  Both teams knew the books well, and it showed.  Round after round both team answered question after question correctly, but somewhere in the high twenties, the Rhoades team got a question they didn’t know… and the Westlake team was already ahead.

Each girl on the team got a $25 Barnes and Noble gift card and bragging rights for the school until next year.  This is the fourth year for the tournament and the team is already talking about preparing for next year!

Here is the winning team, wearing the t-shirts we had made with the team name on them: G.R.E.A.T — Girls Reading, Educating, Achieving Together.  From left to right: Lizzy, Maddi, Abby, Carissa, Ms. Klinker and Jessica.

For the record, here is the tournament bracket.

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I made this video for a school project.

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I haven’t finished all of the posts I was going to do about our trip to Egypt, but it was for a good reason.  We have been working on the video version of our trip instead so that Carissa could take it to school before summer vacation.

Producing a halfway decent video takes a lot of effort, even if you know what you are doing.  It’s not always clear that we do.

We had to take a lot of short cuts to get this done by today.  We edited out huge unfinished sections (it’s still 32 minutes long!).  We split up the team between writing, layout and recording and tried to stitch it together in the editing room.  We switched the format of the video from HD to SD so that our tools could run at a reasonable speed.  We left in a handful of  <ahem> mistakes in the audio, including some pretty weird issues such as too much bass being present on Carissa’s narration track.

We won’t make the mistake of listening to the movie using a subwoofer again, if you know what I mean.  It’s strange to think you can get blown out of the room by Carissa’s voice, but you can.

The next step will be to make  a “director’s cut” to restore the unfinished segments, fix the audio, go back to HD video and so on.  It needed to be done today, though, so we got it done today.  I have vaguely been considering adding bumpers (where they tell you what they are going to show you after the break) to each of the segments so that the video looks more like something you’d see on the Discovery channel.  I think it would be sort of funny, but it would actually make the video more annoying.  I might change my mind if I can find some Arabic McDonald’s and Coke commercials to splice in.

And you know what?  It’s not bad.  So I’ve decided to go ahead and post what we’ve got.  When we get the final version finished (which could very well be months from now), I may replace this version.

Much like the video we did several years ago for our trip to Italy, one of my favorite parts is the music used throughout.  I’m a little self-conscious about posting the video publicly to the web though because we don’t speak Arabic, and most of the time it’s been very difficult to find even translations of the titles, much less the lyrics.  So it’s entirely possible that the some of the music choices will seem bizarre to any passing Arabic speakers who somehow happen to view the video.

Without further ado, here is the video of our trip to Egypt and Jordan:

For some reason I don’t fully understand, the video won’t play back on Chrome (IE, Safari, and Firefox work fine). As a workaround, here is a link to download the video: Egypt 2010

The download version will also play back in higher resolution, so you might want to download it even if you can watch it above.

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