yet another temple in ancient Egypt

Edfu can also be spelled as Idfu or Edfou. It’s situated very close to the city of Luxor. In Edfu lives about 60 thousand people. The Edfu Temple was built between 237 B.C and 57 B.C, and it’s the temple that is best preserved of all temples in Egypt. It doesn’t look very inviting when you first see it from the “big road”, but as soon as you see what’s beyond the entrance, you will not regret the visit for a second. The temple has a  lot of beautiful pillars, hieroglyphs,  statues and other, classic Egyptian remains. A perfect place for tourists that are fund of egyptian remains, and would love to see the remains of the work of  every Pharoah Egypt had had.

Just outside the temple entrance you will find a very nice taverna. Near the area you can also find the Colosses of Memnon. All those site gets you thinking of if ancient Cleopatra every wandered around on those premises? She probably did, during her Egypt Dynasty, checking out the Egypt Kingdom that was in so many ways very impressive. I would love to go back sometime, and then maybe not just running around, taking a lot of photos, but stand still and breathe the old, Eegyptian air and think about what happened within those walls. Cool.

Here are some photos from the Horus temple / Edfu temple. Please visit www.remains.se for more photos.

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The egyptian architect

- here on the blog are some pictures of his market in the Kharga Oasis, Egypt

During our honeymoon to Egypt, we decided to go for one night in the Sahara desert, near the Kharga Oasis.

On our way there, we passed a market place that was designed by one of the greatest architects in the egyptian history, Hassan Fathy. Unfortenately, the marketplace was never to be completed, but I guess it was a very good start.

Here you have some pictures from the Kharga marketplace in New Baris. Look at the very nice “air cooling system“.

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You can read more about Hasan Fathi and also see pictures of his other works here.

Coptic Christian historical graves in Egyptian Oasis

I felt of writing quite a long blog post today, I hope you don’t mind

On our honeymoon, we decided to go to historical Egypt. It was kind of swedish summer there at the time, which suited us perfect (I find it kind of difficult to function proper when it’s too hot). We saw some really interesting places there, like our excursion to the Coptic Christian mud tombs and graves, in the Kharga Oasis!

The Coptic Christian religion is the biggest christian church in Egypt.

It was fantastic to actually see those extremely old frescoes on the walls and roofs. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to take flash photos of those paintings, but the guide, as always, said that it was OK. The only issue was money, nothing else. It sure was very tempting to do so, but I never did. I thought that, okay maybe I can do this once, just to show people around the world what the frescoes looks like, on the remains site. It was probably once in a life time opportunity. But no. Both me and the poor guards could get into real big trouble if I had done that and somebody actually checked my camera.

I actually DID take a photo of an old mummy, with the guide’s permission, but as we left, the guards stopped our vehicle and I erased the photo very quickly, just in case.

Anyhow, as my wife was resting in the jeep and our driver was fixing a tyre, I went into the tombs, like a historical tomb raider, to check them out. My guide at the moment, couldn’t almost speak any english. He had a stick that he would point at the old, flaking frescos. I remember most of them; they all had the christian themes and they were all from the Bible and I found them very, very interesting and it was almost unreal to actual be where this ancient culture use to be placed. The guides never went alone with the tourists; they always had to bring a guard as well (so they said). And it was a little bit annoying to have this huge soldier behind my back all the time, even if he seemed kind of nice. Unlike the other guards and soldiers I came in contact with, this guy was unarmed.

Anyway, I would love to see all the historical coptic christian tombs, but they seemed to have a special route for the tourists. I had to beg him to go to some other tombs, and in the beginning he was willing to do so. But I guess he was kind of sleepy and didn’t want to spend all day with me, so he got more and more, well I don’t wan’t to say aggressive, but he tried harder and harder to get me back to the entrance.

So at the end, I just took a lot of pictures on everything historical I saw on my way out. Some of them was kind of good. Here are the pictures, I will probably not upload all of the images on the remains site as well at the moment, but I will do this when the next release / upgrade has been done.

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To see more images of ancient Egypt with all the pyramids, fresc writings, sphinxes and other historical stuff, visit www.remains.se . Remember that you can also buy high-res photos from me, you can leave a note under the post if you are interested in this.

The ancient temple of Karnak in Luxor, Egypt

I´ve uploaded 426 new pictures from the Karnak Temple in Luxor, Egypt. Those fantastic Egyptian remains are full of  ancient tombs, small sphinxes, wonderful statues, osiris and much more. When I was visiting the Karnak temple, I RAN for about 2 hours in this enourmus place, while my wife sat at a typical egyptian café right outside the temple, reading a book. I think she even managed to read the entire book before I was back.

But still I missed about 1/5 of the entire temple area. Unfortenately, I realised this as I came home to Sweden again, checking Google Maps… But what can you do? How patient you think you are, sooner or later you just don´t care if some guy with blue jalabia says “PSSST!”, pointing behind a big monument and tries to get you in there, so that he can point at a stone, not like a very interesting stone, but a really ordinary one. And they you´ll have to pay him. Sure.

At one of those magical moments, I pointed behind the guy´s back. He turned around and had a look and when he turned back to me, I just smiled and silently put out my empty hand. It didn´t work.

So next time I go to Egypt and visit the great temples, I´ll run faster, then I hopefully get to take even more photos of the statues of Ramses, Amon, Horus and the other cool, ancient guys.

How ever, you can watch the Karnak photos at remains.se here.