Egypt: Ancient and Modern

Over many years, my family has approached taking trips to distant lands as a form of time travel, not simply crossing frontiers. We’ve visited Ancient Rome, Mayan ruins, and peeled layers of Berlin — leaving the safety of home to dwell in other worlds, physical and temporal. On trips to Angkor, to the Buddha’s Deer Park in Sarnath, at Machu Picchu, my imagination has seemed to travel far greater distances than my body. Going to Egypt, though, was like visiting a different planet.

Egypt is ancient and modern; on a journey up the timeless Nile, just beyond bullrushes that could have hidden the baby Moses, a modern train is seen to rush between cities. In Giza, with pyramids built nearly 5000 years ago visible through enormous windows, we spent time in the world’s newest, and possibly greatest, museum. Many countries are studies in contrast, but the time scale in Egypt is like no place on Earth. If it really is on Earth.

From the giant sculptures of gods and pharaohs at Abu Simbel so close to ancient Nubia, to the Sphinx and Great Pyramid just outside of modern (and ancient) Cairo, the distance we traveled was dwarfed, once again, by Egypt’s time scale. We were fortunate to visit Aswan and Luxor, Edfu and Esna, and to get a sense of each distinct period of Ancient Egypt, including the time, a moment ago in a scheme of things as grand as the pyramids themselves, in which Greece and Rome interacted with the Egypt of Cleopatra. That is, Cleopatra VII. There were six before her. Six.

My camera was at times a mere tool to record art created five millennia ago. But it also found opportunities to document people in the streets of Aswan and Cairo, and not just the static remains of a civilization that carved its art on walls, hundreds of feet underground, in tombs built for kings and queens to bridge the permeable membrane between life and death.

All images made with the Hasselblad X2Dii (color) and Leica M11 Monochrom (B&W).

For the second time in a year, we visited a fascinating land with our friends at Classical Excursions. This time, Lani Summerville and Cosmo Brockway were joined by superb guides, including and especially Egyptologist Dr. Arto Belekdanian, who could translate hieroglyphs on the fly. This journey was a privilege to be on. Our minds are thoroughly blown.

Click on pictures to expand.