Time Travel

Sometimes you just get lucky. I took this picture on the Nile River at Luxor, through the tinted glass of a boat’s window. I didn’t have much hope for the image turning out well, but the effect was pretty cool. The tinting made the picture look like a 19th century sepia photograph. And if you ignore some of the modern buildings in the background, such a scene of the feluccas on the Nile could well have been the same over a century ago.

Thoth Confers Life

In the Temple of Karnak at Luxor, in Egypt, there’s a small chapel in which one can find some remarkable ancient frescoes that date from the reign of the Queen Hatshepsut, around 1465 BCE. These 3500-year-old works include this detail here, where the ibis-headed god Thoth pours life–symbolized as the ankh–from an amphora. The colours are still, amazingly, vibrant. But there’s more to the story. Do you see above Thoth’s head, and down below on the left of the image? There are parts that are scratched out. After Hatshepsut’s death, her image and her hieroglyphs were erased throughout Egypt, because it was thought unnatural that a woman should have been pharaoh.