Viking’s newest river boat, which travels from Cairo down to Aswan via Luxor, provides the ideal opportunity to get your ancient history fix, writes Chris Caldicott
There can be few better excuses for a Nile river cruise than the centenary of the most important archaeological discovery of the 20th century: Howard Carter’s 1922 excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun. This in mind, I opted for the maiden voyage of Viking’s Osiris, the cruise line’s newest river boat, whose inaugural jaunt along the river – from Cairo down to Aswan via Luxor, and back again – was timed to coincide with the archaeological anniversary.
Named after one of the most important gods of ancient Egypt, Osiris was built and designed from a similar toolbox to the rest of Viking’s fleet of river, ocean and expedition ships. On board, I found a Nordic compote of minimalist spaces and stylish comfort, with a midship atrium of floor-to-ceiling glass that fills three decks with natural light, linked by vertical slabs of shiny pink and grey streaked onyx (inspired by the columns of Abu Simbel).
There’s a sun deck of shaded sofas, open-air loungers and rocking chairs, too – where I spent many an hour drinking in 360-degree views of river life as it drifted past under perpetual sunshine. When it came time for a break from the heat, I’d venture down to the Pool Deck and cool off in the infinity plunge pool or the indoor-outdoor Aquavit terrace.
But I was there with a loftier purpose. Just before leaving for Egypt, my mother had revealed that my late great uncle, Edwin Ward, was head of Egyptology at the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh (of which he later became director in 1931), and worked in Egypt with Carter’s mentor, Flinders Petri, “the father of modern Egyptology”.
In 1896 his team discovered the Merneptah Stele in Thebes, a 3m-tall black granite slab inscribed more than 3200 years ago – a significant find, as it included a hieroglyphic reference to Israel, providing the first-ever extra-biblical evidence that the land of Israel existed around 1200 BC.
It is now housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and, conveniently, my cruise itinerary kicked off with a private after-hours tour of the museum, to see the spectacular antiquities Carter subsequently excavated from the tomb of Tutankhamun. Compared to these, the Merneptah Stele is now a minor exhibit – though with the help of our Viking Egyptologist guide, Salah Twafik, I was able to find it in a lonely corner of the museum, on a pallet ready to be moved to the new Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) in Giza – just in time to get a photo of me standing next to it to show my mother.
My mission achieved, it was on to the Ptolemaic-era temple dedicated to Hathor – goddess of music, drunken revelry and fun – at Dendera, a pleasure dome of antiquity that hosted festivals of hedonistic excess in Roman times. With the place entirely to ourselves, we wandered this wonderfully preserved site – where the story of Osiris is told in graphic detail on the walls of a rooftop chamber – then returned to the cool comfort of Osiris for cocktail hour, as the heat of the day faded into a blood-orange sunset over the river.
In Luxor – known to the ancient Egyptians as Thebes – we were berthed right next to the Temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak, the largest religious building ever constructed. A committed Egyptologist could spend days exploring this vast complex that took 1300 years to construct, but Salah expertly guided us to the highlights – including the 134 beautifully painted columns of the Great Hypostyle Hall, each one topped with calyx capitals large enough for 100 men to stand on.
From there, we headed along the river to the smaller Luxor Temple – connected to the Temple of Amon-Ra for the first time in living memory by the Avenue of Sphinxes, following the recent restoration and excavation of the 1060 figures that line the route, some now headless, others reduced to mere plinths by the passing of time.
In 1905, following “an incident with drunken French tourists at Saqqara”, Carter resigned from The Egyptian Antiquities Service and went freelance. He then met George Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, who became the benefactor of Carter’s quest to find more lucrative bounty in Thebes.
On our way to visit Tutankhamun’s tomb, we stopped off at the recently renovated house they used as a field base between their residencies in the opulent Winter Palace hotel on the Luxor Corniche. Considering the wealth of treasures we saw excavated from it in Cairo, the tomb of the boy pharaoh is surprisingly small – the mind boggles at the quantity of treasure that must have been looted from the vast tombs of the greater kings and queens.
Our day at an end, Osiris sailed on through the night to the red sandstone temple of the ram-headed god of the Nile, Khnum, in Esna, once a caravanserai stop for camel trains between Nubia and Cairo, and still a busy riverside town. The next morning, we docked in Aswan – where the Nile is wide and languorous, broken up by giant granite boulders and palm-studded islands – and spent the next two days exploring the river on traditional single-sailed feluccas, shopping for spices in the souk, visiting a Nubian village and the Temple of Isis on Philae island.
From here, it was back up-river to Luxor, punctuated by stops at the Temples of Kom Ombo, shared by Horus and the crocodile god Sobek, and the Horus Temple at Edfu. But the best was yet to come: the lure of a sunrise hot-air balloon flight over the Valleys of the Kings and Queens in the Theban Mountains of the Nile’s west bank was too tempting to resist.
At 3am the next day, an alarm call summoned me to board a small boat that crossed the river in total darkness. At the launch site, a mighty roar filled the pre-dawn air as dozens of fans inflated giant canvas envelopes all around me, then propane flames were ignited and all of a sudden the desert was filled with inflating balloons, illuminated from within.
My gondolier ascended over the linear perfection of Deir el Bahri, the mortuary temple of the pharaonic queen Hatsheput – looking, from above, as though it had grown organically out of the rocky amphitheatre of cliffs around it. As we drifted in perfect silence interrupted only by bursts of flame, a golden morning light bathed the vast, magnificent desert landscape below, dotted with millennia-old tombs, temples and monoliths.
Below us, and as far as the eye could see, Africa’s longest river snaked its way through the Sahara on its 6400km journey from the tropical rainforests of Tanzania and the highlands of Abyssinia to the Mediterranean, delivering a thin line of fertility and life to the Nile Valley.
As the sun rose, we came gently down to land among a tapestry of fields – ripe with sugar cane and wheat, busy with turbaned fellaheen farmers in flowing cotton gallabiyya robes – and I was returned to the ship for breakfast, mind suffused with the endless magic of this storied land, and awed as ever by its mighty river.
CHECKLIST: EGYPT
DETAILS
Viking Cruises offers a 12-day Pharaohs and Pyramids itinerary from Cairo, visiting Luxor, Qena, Esna and Aswan, from AU$7295 ($7724)pp. vikingrivercruises.com.au