12/18/2009
On our third day we visited a very interesting temple that was not on our original itinerary and I was very glad that we got to see it. Like most of the temples in Egypt the Habu temple was located on the west bank of the river. This temple was built in the middle 1100 B.C. Thus temple was built for Ramses III. Now a key fact about his grandfather who was Ramses II, he believed that he was a god, and sometimes more than a god and so he went around to a lot of temples and scratched out the names of all the other pharaohs. How grandson had learned from that, and it was obvious in his temple. The way that all the hieroglyphics were carved into the wall made it clear that no one was going to scratch out anything that was written about him. These hieroglyphics were carved very, very deep into the wall so that they could not be easily removed. These were so deep that one student could actually fit their whole hand inside of one of the carvings. At this temple was one of the very first bathrooms. Now it at quick glance would just look like a hole in the ground, but it made sense who and where it was built. It was off a main chamber so that everyone that needed to use it would be nowhere near anyone else. Now these bathrooms now a days are called turkish bathrooms and are still in use all over the globe, like obviously in Turkey and in other places like France.
Posted at 8:53 AM by Anthony Jahr