Egypt

Information about Egypt

• Trip Preparation

  
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  Country and People

  
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  Getting Around

  
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  Discover and Enjoy

  
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  For Egypt there are unfortunately no contributions. Tell all the other travellers about your experiences and play the tour guide!

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  Add a contribution

  For Egypt there are unfortunately no contributions. Tell all the other travellers about your experiences and play the tour guide!

  ---

  Add a contribution

  For Egypt there are unfortunately no contributions. Tell all the other travellers about your experiences and play the tour guide!

  ---

  Add a contribution

  For Egypt there are unfortunately no contributions. Tell all the other travellers about your experiences and play the tour guide!

  ---

  Add a contribution

  ---

  

  Egypt
  
  To modern eyes the peoples of ancient Egypt seem like representatives of some higher civilization whose roots lay in another world. While populations elsewhere, still in their infancy, were groping their way out of the stone age, generating cultures that were on more or less the same level in all regions of the world, the ... Read on

  Egypt
  
  To modern eyes the peoples of ancient Egypt seem like representatives of some higher civilization whose roots lay in another world. While populations elsewhere, still in their infancy, were groping their way out of the stone age, generating cultures that were on more or less the same level in all regions of the world, the Egyptians seem to have been born already mature. They soon broke through the barriers of what, six thousand years ago, was thought humanly possible, almost as if it were the consequence of experiences sustained in some other extraordinarily civilized world.
  
  What happened here on the shores of the Nile was unprecedented and unique, an adventure which evolved at dizzying speed, creating works of art and science far beyond the prospects of the time. Even now, the building of the pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) in a period when iron and the wheel were unknown, remains an inexplicable mystery. We are still more baffled when we realize that even before the Great Pyramid rose, the Egyptians had the techniques and organization required to harness the floods of the Nile along thousands of kilometres and turn swampland and the desert itself into a new earthly paradise. The fact that other peoples developed at much slower rates, some remaining in the Neolithic period almost up to modern times, reinforces the feeling that the peoples of “planet Egypt” anticipated the history of the world by two thousand years, with an impulse of such force that it can still be felt five thousand years later.
  
  The arms used in this colossal conquest were water and fire – the Nile and the Sun. These arms were not wielded, but were forged and cultivated by those ancient peoples so that the destruction wrought by water and fire should render propitious the fertility of the earth, and thus the very life of Egypt. Mankind collaborated with Isis and Osiris to recreate life, to make the land look like paradise once more, a terrestrial paradise which is linked to the celestial paradise. Egypt is not the Promised Land, but it is the land that man creates by his labour, day by day, year by year, in endless cycles where the Created and Creator fuse into one. There is no longer a sharp distinction between the gods and man; the gods are in the midst of men; their features are those of man, or of the animals which surround him in the sky or on the earth; their hands are invisible and infinite, as infinite as the rays of the sun. Water and cosmic fire, death and resurrection, human and divine essence are present in every clod of Egyptian earth. The Nile and the Sun trace two boundless rings which permeate the universe of this and of the other world, they are the path along which the new man of “planet Egypt” finds the future, and the very reason for his eternal quest. Those of us who live now, two thousand years after Christ, can still find that ineffable equilibrium between the elements of water and the elements of fire by relaxing on a sailboat in Upper Egypt. We can once more discover the invisible bridge that will take us to the source of our history and experience the same emotion that touched the hearts of our ancestors seven thousand years ago when, at the beginning of the year, they heard the song that accompanied the rising waters of the Nile: “Come water of life which springs from heaven. Come water of life which springs from earth. The sky burns and the earth trembles at the coming of the Great God. The mountains to the west and to the east open, the Great God appears, the Great God takes possession of the body of Egypt”.
  

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