Friends Reunited

Diana Craig Patch, Janice Kamrin, Jan Picton, Ivor Pridden

We are very happy to announce our arrival back “home” on the West Bank. Our respective planes landed at the Luxor airport late on Monday night, and we spent most of Tuesday visiting the East Bank Taftish and our friend Ray Johnson at Chicago House, and organizing supplies back at our hotel. In the late afternoon, we decided to take a walk to reintroduce this season’s photographer, Ivor (also known as Jan’s husband) to the local landscape, which has changed a lot in the fifteen years since he was last here. We walked up past the Colossi of Memnon at Kom el-Hettan, then down the Qurna road to the Ramesseum. To start out our blog for the 2019 season, we thought we’d share some of the photos we took along the way.

Our Mudira Diana poses in front of the Colossi of Memnon, just down the road from our home away from home at the New Memnon

We are always amazed to see how much our good friend Hourig Sourouzian has accomplished at Kom el-Hettan, the memorial temple of Amenhotep III.*

Jan, Ivor, and Diana playing tourist in front of the back of the Ramesseum

Our pathetic attempt at a selfie

You only get skies like this in Egypt!

The Theban necropolis at dusk

Looking over the remains of Tawosret’s temple to colossi at the northern entrance of Kom el-Hettan

The remains of the Merneptah temple, with the magazine in the distance

Almost home, as we pass the colossal stelae at Kom el-Hettan

*We want to express our sorrow at the loss of Hourig’s beloved husband and our great colleague, Rainer Stadelmann.