The Endless Weekend

 We flew from Cairo in northern Egypt to Luxor in the south.  It was the first time I had ever seen the metal detector machine lines divided by sex. Not as weird as you might think, because everyone got patted down. Get ready for a confusing paragraph.  In ancient times Luxor was called Thebes, which was the capital of Upper Egypt (upper and lower refers to the direction of the Nile, not our modern map orientation).  You may remember that Oedipus was the king of Thebes, but that was a completely different one, in Greece. Got it? These statues are the Colossi of Memnos, all that remains of the mortuary temple of Pharoah Amenhotep III. An odd thing about the ancient Egyptians.  If they wanted two or mulptiple statues (such as guardians around an entrance) they preferred to make them as close to identical as possible. Not two different gods or different poses; just the same dude.  Temples in Luxor.          The goddess Sekhmet. ...