Egypt 2

Isis carving at Philae in Aswan. 

Tombs of quarry workers on the Nile bank.

Kom Ombo temple at sunset

Kom Ombo temple

Hieroglyphs in the tomb of Rameses IV

Some more sketches of Egypt. The paintings in the Valley of the Kings were amazing. They are bright, vibrant, graphic, and much bigger than I expected. In one tomb, KV14 , you could see the outlines that the artists drew onto the plaster thousands of years ago.

I've never been much of a fan of Ancient Egyptian art, it can look twee and formulaic in reproductions and it's analytical approach (some pictures are the artistic version of a circuit diagram) seems strange when you're accustomed to the Western artistic ideas of self-expression or realistic representation of a scene.

 This trip changed my mind. The real thing has much more of an impact than I expected, especially the hieroglyphs which included at least five identifiable species of birds (You might have gathered from some of my previous posts that I don't like generic pictures of birds, I like to know what I'm looking at) This is something that I didn't expect from an alphabet. Some of them are in the sketch above.