Thebes, Egypt

So it has three days in Cairo, visiting the various museums, the pyramids at Giza.

Then from Cairo, you go to Luxor, the city formerly known as Thebes.

It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

From there, you have the Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens.

So every one of these temples represents a god, the plagues of Exodus, directly confronted.

So from Edfu, the ship crosses, the Esna locks towards Luxor, ancient Thebes.

So can you tell us a little bit about that part of the itinerary there?

Yeah, now you're getting to the really crazy, huge temple complexes.

Karnak alone could be its very own episode.

So maybe we'll do that in an upcoming one.

So the next day, travelers take across the river to Necropolis of Thebes.

So what do travelers see there on the west bank of the Nile?

Houses, furniture, paintings, texts, objects found in tombs, and some extraordinarily useful records from particular communities.

One of the best is Deir el-Medina, a village near ancient Thebes, where highly skilled workers and their families lived during the New Kingdom.

These were the craftsmen involved in making and decorating royal tombs in what we now call the Valley of the Kings.

and they left behind an unusually rich collection of everyday written records.

It's possible Nefertiti was meant to be interred at Amarna, but archaeologists have no evidence of her burial in the Amarna royal tomb.

In later years, her son-in-law, King Tut, moved the court back to Thebes, and the Aten worship era was declared heresy.

Subsequent pharaohs attempted to erase the entire Aten episode from history.

Statues were smashed, and names and images of Akhenaten and Nefertiti were chiseled out, and the heretic queen was virtually wiped from the official record.

One persistent idea is that Nefertiti was buried at Amarna and later moved.

If she died during Akhenaten's reign, she might have originally been interred in the Amarna royal tomb, along with her daughter Mekataten, who died young and was definitely buried there.

When Tut abandoned Amarna, loyalists could have taken Nefertiti's remains out and reburied her quietly in Thebes to protect her from desecration.

In this scenario, her tomb in Amarna may have been destroyed or left empty.

Ramesses III wanted it remembered.

On the west bank of the river at Thebes, his temple rose behind massive gateways, and his stonecutters covered the outer walls with the story of the war.

They carved the land battle and the carts, the chariots and the captives.

They carved the fight at the river mouths as a single great scene, ship against ship, men falling into the water, archers on the shore, the earliest sea battle known to have been carved in stone.

And they cut the figures deep, much deeper than earlier kings had done, so that no later king could smooth the pharaoh's name away and put his own in its place.

When the work was finished, the walls of the temple at Thebes told the whole story from beginning to end.

The enemy had come from the sea, the lands had fallen before them, and Egypt had stood.

Priests walked past the carvings every day on their way to the sanctuary.

Nahum is a brief yet difficult book to consider, as its principal focus is God's judgment upon Nineveh.

It is a text rooted in biblical history, as the author attested to the fall of the Egyptian city of Thebes, or Noamon.

Nahum 3.8-10, something which occurred in 663 BCE.

With Nahum prophesying the fall of Nineveh or Assyria, the period portrayed in the text thus falls somewhere between 663 to 612 BCE.