Multiple Operating Systems

May 18, 2006

For me the eternally fascinating thing about Egypt is the way multiple traditions have been written onto the landscape. These traditions knew about the earlier versions and in some ways built upon that past. It is as if there is a succession of major operating systems.

Luxor Temple embodies the ways that these successive traditions wrote themselves onto the landscape. To begin with, of course, the temple represents New Kingdom Egypt (1550-1069 BC) at its zenith. Not that it is the complete creation of any single king.. but a general continuity is evident.

The next picture gives a sense of further operating systems. The slender columns in the foreground represent the remains of the Roman fort that once stood here. The mosque in the background.. which was built into the ancient Egyptian ruins.. represents the Islamic period. In the 19th century paintings of Egypt by David Roberts this mosque (the Mosque of Abu al-Haggag) is visible.. and it seems to go all the way back to the 14th century. It now appears from inside the ruins as if the mosque is hanging in the air, but that is only because excavations have brought the floor in the Temple of Luxor down below street level.

Inside the Luxor Temple early Christian worship is also evident, marking another distinct operating system. At the very back one comes across an apse flanked by two slender columns.

It may seem odd to hold a Christian service surrounded by carvings of ancient Egyptian gods.. and evidently the ancient Christians would agree, as they covered those gods with plaster and painted their own scenes. Some restoration work is beginning to be done on this plaster, and at one place they have managed to make a pair of faces stand out clearly.

Luxor Temple is hardly unique in its attraction of a series of religious/cultural traditions.. but in many other sites this is hidden by archeological work that tends to erase levels of the past that are held to be less valuable. The result is ancient Egyptian monuments cleansed of the multiple operating systems that 1) often allowed these ruins to continue to exist relatively unharmed, and 2) provide a window into the way the ruins were experienced through the centuries before the current tourist regime took over some time in the 19th century.. or perhaps even earlier.