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Cheers
Give a Cheer
Give a Cheer
After lunch we enjoyed the view of the Nile River from the hotel courtyard just long enough to get a few pictures. Then we were back on the bus on our way to the Valley of the Kings!
Our tour guide was fantastic – he was an Egyptologist and was able to read and interpret hieroglyphics for us. At Karnak Temple he was very knowledgeable and turned day into a fun history lesson for us. On the bus he gave us a lot of the history so we knew what to expect to see and what these sights had to do with the history, culture, and early religion of Egypt.
He explained that one side of the Nile is for the dead – Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, and other burial places are there. On the other side of the Nile are the cities and the temples for the living. Both the burial places on one side and the cities and temples on the other were as close as possible to the banks of the river. He also told us that everyone in ancient Egypt was mummified – no exceptions. Even the new babies who died at birth were mummified. There were three processes for mummifying a body; one process for Pharaohs and royalty, another process for noblemen and the wealthy in society and a third process for commoners.
The mummification was so important because they believed that the soul left the body at death and went to the North Star. That is why the pyramids, which are tombs, all face the North Star. That is so when the person dies the spirit can easily find its way to the North Star. They also believed that at some time all of the spirits will leave the North Star and return to earth and once again enter the bodies of the owners through their nostrils, which is why the bodies were mummified.
If their bodies were allowed to decay and rot or disintegrate then the spirits would not be able to re-enter and their spirits will be lost in a hell-kind of limbo forever and their earthly bodies will not have the new life. That is why they took such care in the mummification process – so the bodies would be in good shape when the spirits returned to inhabit them.
They were entombed with elaborate masks on their faces to aid the spirits in finding the proper body/owner when it returned. The most famous burial mask is that of King Tut. The reason for the mask was to make sure his spirit recognized his body so it could be enter his body and resurrect his body with new life when all the spirits return from the North Star.
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