Ancient Times

A few years ago I was in Egypt. Some of the forthcoming posts are reposts of my very first website ever, made with the venerable Claris Home Page. Look at the lovely ComicSans. Not enough credit given to primitive photoshoppery: these are tweaked in a major way.

_____________________

Here are some photos I took in Egypt. I actually hadn't planned to take any photos, which was pretty dumb, and once I was convinced to do so, I just bought some disposable cameras...also dumb. I'm not the kind of guy who should waste a lot of money on a camera - I don't think I have any particular talent or patience for that kind of thing - but once I was there I regretted not having worthwhile equipment. The results speak for themselves: virtually all outdoor shots because that's where the light was, not enough shots of people due to misanthropy...and so on. So there's a lot less of a really terrific trip than I would have liked, but that's that. Sorry the pics are so huge, but I'm too lazy to change it all now.

These are columns in, I think, the fairly spectacular temple in Edfu.

Because Egyptian edifices are generally oriented to catch the sun, it's usually difficult for a guy like me to catch a shot of reliefs: they're in shadow or direct sunlight. Here, though, you can see the kind of thing that nearly every square inch of temple surface was either covered with or was supposed to be covered with. The guy on the right is one of the pharaohs holding multiple enemies by the hair with an arm raised to whack them, much as we do today. Crowds of people tended to be represented as one person with echoing lines around them; directly underneath the pharaoh's hand is the central figure kneeling to the right and cowering, much as we do today.

Great gosh a mighty, it's another temple somewhere.

Here's where I got very worried and offended: a bunch of not very subtle looking guys appeared to be painting colours onto the reliefs. Silly me, they were cleaning the damned things with some kind of solution.