Valley of the Kings, Part 1 - Ramses IX

 The Valley of the Kings on the west bank of the Nile is the principal destination of most visits to the Luxor area.  With 63 tombs, including the one of pharaoh Tutankhamen, there is much to see.  Not all of the tombs are open at any given time - usually about nine.  And your normal admission ticket will only get you in to three of them.  Tut's tomb is always an extra cost option and has a long line.

A couple of cautions are in order.  First, the time of year to make this visit is around January, give or take a month, when the temperature is tolerable.  Summertime is an awful time to visit Egypt and just about intolerable in this area.  Second, don't expect to take great photos inside the tombs.  They are crowded with people, all of whom want to take a photo or be in a photo and the lighting is awful resulting in enormous differences in light/dark across the painted images.  This is truly a place for you to take advantage of HDR photography and you may end up with better photos from the HDR setting on your cellphone than from a camera.  You can get good images of small areas where the lighting is more uniform.

The visitor's center for the valley has a wonderful 3-D map of the valley.  It is worth a stop to get an orientation to the layout of the tombs.

Beyond the visitor center is a walk or electric trolley ride up to the tomb area.

In contrast to the kings associated with the pyramids near Cairo who ruled Egypt for a few hundred years beginning around 2500 BC, these kings ruled for a few hundred years beginning around 1600 BC.  We are going to explore tombs belonging to three kings from around 1200 to 1100 BC. 

Our first tomb on this visit was Ramses IX.  He ruled from1129–1111 BC.  The tombs have sequence numbers, KV1, KV2, etc.  There is excellent signage just outside each one showing you the layout of the tomb and highlights to be noted inside.  Here Roshdy explains a bit about the king and the tomb before we enter.

  

Here are a few images from the interior of the tomb.

  

If your only familiarity with novelist Norman Mailer has been from news accounts or reading The Naked and the Dead, you might want to try Ancient Evenings: A Novel which is set in Egypt during the reign of Ramses IX.

More photos at this Flickr Album, of course.