Monuments in Egypt

I could fill pages and pages with pictures of the things we have seen here in the Middle East. I kept reminding myself the things I was seeing were thousands of years old- anywhere from 2 to 4,000 years old. Although most showed wear, they were amazing in so many ways. Here is James giving you the perspective of how huge the stones were in the pyramids. There were thousands and thousands of these massive stones we could hardly move with really powerful modern equipment. The thought of piling them with only manpower and simple tools (and tons and tons of sand piled up) is just mind-boggling. 

Then there are the gigantic statues. This is Ramses IV, laying down because his legs are broken off. We were in an outdoor museum. Most of the smaller artifacts we saw were in the Cairo Museum which our guide in Cairo managed to squeeze in for us between our flight from Aswan and our flight out to Amman. It was a welcome alternative to spending most of the day in the Cairo airport!

I am standing among these columns to give you the perspective of size again. There were columns in and in front of all the temples everywhere we went. They were built by piling huge discs then carving and painting marvelous art on them.

There were even places where the colors had not faded so you could see how incredible they were.

To illustrate the number of things, I'm including the street of sphinxes. It's a path about a mile long from one temple to another lined on both sides with sphinx statues, hundreds of them!