One place I have wanted to see since I was in my early 20s was Egypt. The pyramids, the ancient monuments…they've always been like a siren's call. Unfortunately, I never made it while I had the energy (and the lithe body) that would have allowed me to navigate the tunnels and chambers of the Great Pyramid, and now it's all but certain I'll never see Luxor, or Abu Simbel, or Karnak with my own eyes. With the ongoing instability in the region over the past four decades, I've always been concerned about the safety of traveling to the country, but at this point, with the standing of the United States dropping precipitously with each passing day Orange Twitler is allowed to remain in the White House, I think I'd be too frightened to travel at all as a US citizen.
But there is, I discovered, a vicarious alternative to being limited to the stock photos published in books of the ancient monuments, something I stumbled upon quite by accident.
One day I opened Instagram, and one of the many hot, bearded "Instagram models" I follow was posed in front of the Temple Complex at Luxor. I clicked on the geo location link and my screen filled with hundreds of pictures of the temple—with views of the complex I'd never seen before.
Naturally this led me to the great pyramid. And the temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel. And Karnak. Even a generic #egypt hashtag showed me ancient wonders from a perspective I'd never seen before. I was hooked. The multitude of tourist photos posted to Instagram was showing me Egypt in a totally new way.
Here are a few that caught my eye…
I can't help but wonder what the people who built these monuments were like. Were they like us, with the same wants, needs, and desires? What drove them? What inspired them? Did they suffer the same petty jealousies and insecurities that we do today? Were they as driven to buy, sell, and own stuff as we are? Despite their apparent lack of "technology" were they actually more advanced in certain areas than we are? Did they possess esoteric knowledge we lack, or were they as clueless about the ultimate meaning of "Life, the Universe, and Everything" as we are now?