Mark & Jen's 'Around the World' Travel & Photography Blog

I stand in the center of an enormous temple, my neck strained to see the remains of the massive columns towering above me. The smell of sand drifts across the air, settling slowly, softly, atop the piles of stones that once entertained the world’s most powerful rulers. I turn in circles just trying to absorb the intricacies of the stories carved in the stone, so long ago.

The hieroglyphic story of Queen Hatshepsut’s divine conception covers the walls of her temple. This powerful female ruled in a man’s world, donning the dress and posture of the mighty male Pharaohs before her. Interestingly enough, it was this same woman who, as a young girl, found and raised Moses from the reeds of the Nile. And it was her jealous successor who not only defaced her story on the temple walls, but who also drove Moses into the desert for fear that he would usurp his “mother’s” place on the throne.

Jen at Temple of Isis at Philae / Writing on the wall….

Warring Ramses III had his military victories carved into his own temple. His story shows his numerous conquests of foreign lands, piles of hands and heads and gentiles indicating the numbers of his defeated. In one pictograph, he reaches down with his sword over the cowering people before him, daring anyone who observes such a scene to defy his power. But for every statue we have seen of him, interestingly enough, his head is nearly smashed.

At the Temple of Karnak, the massive ruins display evidence toward the gallant attempts each pharaoh made to “one-up” the previous ruler. “No, no,” we imagine one king saying to a slave with a pompous dismissal of the hand. “That statue of myself is not big enough. Bring me a larger one, bigger than all the rest.” One British tour guide called the temple “prodigiously opulent”–quite fitting.

Temple of Karnak (first/last) / Temple of Hatshepsut (second/third)

Standing amid all of these temples and tombs reminds me of the sonnet “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (husband of Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein). Although Shelly was subtly condemning his contemporary Napoleon and all his vainglories, his commentary continues to speak to the broken remains of man’s glorious attempts to achieve timelessness. The sand blows across the Egyptian land; the stories of so long ago, while still beautifully etched in stone, are now just a whisper riding on the winds of past greatness.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.