Tag: cheap Nile Cruises

Yesterday I was reading the excellent Observer On Sunday and they have an interesting section each week called “On My Radar” where they ask arts personalities their suggestions for “Art”, “Restaurant”, Ehibitions”, “Music” and “Book”.  It’s interesting to read about other peoples interests and recommendations.  I particularly enjoy the music and book recommendations.  This week it was the recommendations of Simon McBurney who is the artistic director of Complicite, the theatre company.

What caught my eye was his “Exhibition” recommendation for the “British Museum: Journey Through The Afterlife” that we’ve been recommending ourselves here on the Nile Cruise Blog.  What appear to fascinate him are the “Fayum Portraits“, otherwise known as the “mummy portraits” which are portraits of the Egyptian dead going into the afterlife, painted while the people were still alive. 

Continue reading “Fayum (or Mummy) Portraits”

When you undertake your Nile Cruise and begin to visit sites such as The Valley of the Kings, Kom Ombo, Karnak Temple, etc, you will be shown examples of hieroglyphs by your Egyptologist/Guide.

When you first see the rows of script you will, if you are anything like me, simply see rows of figures and symbols.  However, on reading the Guardian Ancient Egypt Guide, I now know that:

1. 1) “Hieroglyph” is a Greek word and means “sacred carving”.
2. 2) It was used continuously in Egypt for almost 4000 years – much longer than our alphabet has been used.
   3) When Egypt became a Christian country the traditional temples were closed and the ancient script was abandoned but the same language was used but written with a form of the Greek alphabet known as Coptic.
   4) There are roughly 750 hieroglyphs.

Continue reading “How To Read Hieroglyphs – A basic (very!!) summary”

Nile Cruise and Ancient Egypt Book. 

A number of people have contacted me to say that they opened our email newsletter alert regarding yesterday’s free Ancient Egypt booklet given away in the Guardian too late to do anything about it or else they read my last blog post too late to manage to buy a copy.

If you are one of those people who has just read about it and would like to get hold of a copy then there is a way.

 

Continue reading “Nile Cruise and Ancient Egypt Book”

Nile Cruise with The Guardian!

Hopefully some of you will have read my post yesterday about the Free Ancient Egypt Book given away in today’s Guardian.  If not run out now and see if you can get hold of a copy because it really is an excellent introduction to Ancient Egypt.

Over the coming week or so I’ll detail some of the things that are included in the book but if you can get hold of a copy yourself prior to your taking your Nile Cruise I really think you’ll find it an invaluable resource to give you a well eounded overview that you can then build on when you visit Egypt.

 

Continue reading “Nile Cruise, Ancient Egypt and The Guardian”

 

Having travelled many times to Egypt I still find the whole ancient Egyptian civilisation absolutely fascinating and if you are hoping to take a Nile Cruise in the future then I’m sure that the Guide would prove an excellent travel companion.

Continue reading “Free Ancient Egypt Guide”