It is a curiosity, in stark contrast with the upscale metropolis of posh hotels and casinos in “new Cairo.” The narrow, unpaved streets of the City of the Dead wind between the tombs and family mausoleums along a 4 mile long Islamic necropolis. At the base Egypt’s Mokattam Mountain, located about 3 miles from Cairo’s lively downtown, the “City of the Dead ” is an ancient collection of pantheons, family …
The winner, besting 1,557 competitors from 82 countries, was the Irish firm Heneghan Peng Architects who was tasked to create the world’s most impressive, ethically responsible and sustainable museum in order to house, display and preserve tens of thousands of ancient Egyptian treasures. Twenty years in the making, it is now complete. The $1 billion project comprises nearly half a million square feet of exhibition halls housing 100,000 objects. The …
This story is epic “Indiana Jones” with hidden treasure, unsolved mysteries, international intrigue, romance, stolen artifacts and a movie set astonishing to even the most jaded viewer. At its heart, a young Egyptian boy with a secret and a couple of ambitious, even greedy explorers willing to listen. The two temples of Abu Simbel located in Southern Egypt, at the second cataract of the Nile, close to the Sudanese border were built …
We visited late on a January afternoon just as the sun was setting. Egypt had presented many of its most magnificent temples but this, the Temple of Luxor, was the most impressive. In both scale and complexity it follows the traditional temple design. Its construction began in 1392 BC and continued across the centuries as testimony of deity of the ruling pharaohs. It is a masterpiece credited to many…from Amenhotep …
This queen, as one of Egypt’s only female pharaohs, singularly re-wrote the rules of Egyptian royal lineage protocol with her cunning, her beauty and her unbridled ambition. She did what no other woman, even the other great legends of history here in the birthplace of civilization, Nefertari, Nefertiti, and much later Cleopatra… dared to do. She ruled. And she ruled well. Her legend carries to the Valley of the Kings., …
At first my jet-lagged brain could not process more than their looming yet beautiful presence, and proximity to the nearby town. I had imagined them constructed in the middle of some vast, remote, practically inaccessible stretch of desert wasteland…as is over 90 percent of the remaining country. But they were here in all their significant historical splendor. All three! The most famous, the Great Pyramid of Giza is the oldest …
