Tunneling back through time

LUXOR, EGYPT — San Francisco can’t get enough of ancient Egypt. “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” installed at the de Young Museum through March 2010, advances a long line of Egyptian-themed shows mounted by The City’s Fine Arts Museums.

Visitors to almost any one of those exhibits — “Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh” at the then-new de Young in 2005, “Eternal Egypt: Masterpieces from the British Museum” at the Legion of Honor in 2002, the 1979 Tut show at the old de Young — would have come away with a layered sense of wonder.

Breathtakingly beautiful though the individual works of art may be, it’s the complexity, elegance and completeness of another world that exerts such a powerful hold on the imagination. Across the millennia, ancient Egyptians tell us how they thought and felt about justice and animals, death and commerce, eternity and daily life.

I had attended a number of those museum shows through the years and studied several guidebooks before I left for a weeklong trip to Egypt. I thought I knew, more or less, what to expect. But nothing could have fully prepared me for the absorbing experience that awaited, the vividness of a society thousands of years old, the extraordinary and moving presence of the past. Being there richly fulfills the felt life that glimmers at us from the walls and display cases in a museum.

Walking toward a swarm of 134 mighty stone columns at the Karnak temple complex in modern-day Luxor (Thebes in ancient times), I suddenly felt the massive scale of the Great Hippostyle Hall slip away. Yes, the columns, ranging from 50 feet high along the sides to 69 feet in the center, were imposing. But when I saw what the Egyptians intended in their imagery for this towering, sunlit hall — a stand of papyrus growing by a stream — a graceful and knowing love of nature bloomed.

The tops of the shorter papyrus columns, positioned farther away from the hall’s imaginary stream, were still tightly furled. Those in the center, seemingly rooted directly in the nourishing water, had shot up higher, as they would in nature, and unfurled their frondlike crowns. Plant life and architectural design were cunningly, gorgeously fused.

A short walk away, at the Temple of Luxor, history, religion and the natural realm are joined in a more chaotic, invigorating fashion. Built atop an earlier temple, this 18th Dynasty structure later accommodated a fort, several Christian churches and a still-active mosque, whose amplified evening call to prayers echoed across the ruins. A serene Avenue of the Sphinxes that was added a thousand years after the initial temple construction lay buried under Nile River silt for centuries. A missing obelisk, an Egyptian gift to France in the 19th century, now stands in the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

My group happened to visit at nightfall, when the complex is dramatically floodlit. A guide led us through the warm dusk to a small chapel transformed by Alexander the Great, who had himself depicted on the walls as a bare-chested Egyptian. It may have been a politically expedient choice, but even the conquering Macedonian king must have felt the transfixing pull of Egyptian majesty.

The Valley of the Kings, where Tut and scores of other pharaohs were entombed on the Nile’s western bank, is an hour’s ride from Luxor. Along the route, farmers were harvesting sugarcane with the aid of donkeys and camels — and not a truck or tractor in sight.

A visitor could spend days exploring the tombs that are open to the public. As I wandered down the lavishly decorated tunnel of the Ramses VI tomb (which was actually first constructed for Ramses V and stands adjacent to Tut’s resting place), the Egyptian cosmology of human figures and birds, boats, flails and hieroglyphs came to life and surged around me. It was as if I were in a walk-through stereopticon that tunneled back more than 3,000 years. In the lofty burial chamber itself, swarms of tightly spaced figures, a veritable army in stylized profile, enacted the sun god Ra’s heroic journey through the heavens. I was surrounded, swallowed up by a story, a belief system and a compelling metaphor for the journey to a resplendent, unending afterlife.

The ancient Egyptians had two words for time. One, neheh, refers to repeating or cyclical time, as reflected in the migrations of the stars and planets. The other, djet, is about endurance and permanence, or what the Egyptologist Jan Assmann calls “the sacred dimension of everness.”

Even in Cairo, a dense and fractious city of 20 million residents, a sense of time both endlessly repeating and miraculously suspended prevails. Lying in my hotel bed one night and listening to the city’s ceaseless traffic below, I imagined the streams of people over the centuries who had seen the things I had just seen, and the streams and streams to come. It was a pretty wonderful thing to think about as I drifted off to sleep.

For complete coverage and more information:

www.sfexaminer.com/kingtut

http://www.famsf.org/deyoung/