Gifts of the Nile

Tonight my friend Sherry( and her husband Ray) and I went to the museum for an Egyptology lecture titled "Private Tombs of the New Kingdom".

I've been meaning to go to the museum since the beginning of June because there's a special travelling exhibition of Egyptian artifacts from the Royal Ontario Museum called "The Gifts of the Nile". But with one thing and another I waited until Sherry told me there was an Egyptologist named Dr. Thomas Hikade who was coming to speak on tomb development and wall decoration.

So we went and listened to tales of the necropolis at Thebes, tomb robbers,and the seven hundred gods of the Egyptian underworld.We admired slides ofbeautiful ancient art from the period of 1550-1070 B.C. and learned of some of the restoration work going on. Dr. Hikade was quite knowledeable and entertaining. He was keen on promoting the newly-formed Canadian Society for the Study of Egypt also, which discusses modern Egyptian issues as well as ancient ones. Yes, it was an informative lecture but the slide projector unfortunately suffered from The Curse of the Mummy and had to be manually manipulated.

We roamed around the display upstairs where there were some nice beaded necklaces, amulets, and pottery from ancient Egypt. There were some larger exhibits of coffins and such but these were reproductions and so not as intriguing. I'm spoiled from the British Museum's Egyptian rooms I suspect.

Too bad it was so hot there and no air-conditioning! Thank goodness the kind museum folk handed out free bottled ice water. I guess they didn't want anyone passing out.

Hey, did you know that hieroglyphics have no vowels, only consonants? As nobody speaks ancient Egytian nowadays, Egyptologists basically make some very educated guesses about how to pronounce some names and words. Dr. Hikade pointed out it is difficult to work with a word spelled, for instance, R-M-T. Do they stick an "E" in there, or perhaps an "I"? Fortunately, they've had some help from the Coptic Church in Egypt which has been around a VERY long time and translated the Bible in old Egyptian and so has preserved the sound of what is probably very simialr to what was spoken in the days of the pharaohs.

I also learned that if you are a tourist visiting the Valley of Kings, be sure to know beforehand what tombs you want to see. It costs around twenty dollars to visit three or four, they vary wildly in quality, and there are usually 15 to 20 tombs open to the public at any one time. Also, the ticket desk is about ten kilometres away through burning desert, so do be thorough in your research before getting on the bus.

I learned many things tonight although to be honest I was sometimes distracted by the hair of the girl sitting in front of me which was the most delicate pretty shade of pale green.