Sunrise in Egypt - by COCO

NOTE: Due to Very Detail Travel Guide of Egypt, this article contains numerous invaluable pictures. We are only adding a portion of the post in our online edition. Please download/View the full article in PDF format to get full understanding of Egypt.

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AUTHOR: COCO

Sabaah il-xiir ya mar (Good Morning Egypt) J

Mornings in the desert are beautiful. You have to see it yourself to know and appreciate why Ra was the most important god in ancient Egypt. The sunrise is almost magical and ethereal, gives you the feeling that only the gods can be as beautiful. And after the sun rises you can see the desert for as far as the eyes can see.

Isn’t this the secret of the desert - the mystery of life (Sun) and death (the desert)? It’s like Pharaoh Akhenaten’s prayer that he wrote and recited in 1397 B.C.

The Valley of Kings

This place reminds one of hills in phantom comics with human faces carved in. JA lot of money and time was spent in the carving these tombs. This was because the ancient Egyptians believed that the current life is just a passage to the next life which is going to be eternal, so once a man became pharaoh the first thing he would do is to commission the com-mencement of his tomb!!!! (Move over matters of the state, I wanna dig my grave J)…

Frescoes were selected from the artist’s brochure, treasures to be buried were hand picked by the pharaoh himself, and statues of servants and army men to serve the king were crafted. These statues were buried along with the

King’s mummy. It was believed that once the king came back to life these statues will also come to life along with the king…

Quite a few of these statues are there in the Cairo museum doing daily chores for the king. There is this statue of a woman making beer and a servant overseeing her…To imagine she has been making beer for the past 5000 years and he has been overseeing her for the same amount of time.Some of the paintings inside the tombs are extremely beautiful. One of my favorites is the painting of Goddess Nut on the ceiling of Ramses VI. She is shown swallowing the sun in the evening and regenerating it in the morning, thus symbolizing a force of renewal and predicting the rebirth of the dead pharaoh.

This tomb also has interesting scenes from the “book of the gates” according to which every man after his death has to cross seven doors and answer certain questions before he can proceed to his afterlife.

For the queens there was the valley of the queens and for the workers was the valley of the workmen which I could not see because of time constraints. To have a tomb in the valley of workmen was an honor given to the workers who made the tombs in the valley of kings. Probably they were given a chance at second life because of their supreme creation skills.

Since the workers made these tombs for themselves, they are supposed to be extremely beautiful because it was not commission work, it was work for your own soul (literally)!!! J

Most tombs in Valley of Kings were raided in ancient Egypt itself. There were many techniques that were used by the makers of the tomb to confuse the tomb raiders and keep them away; for example, keeping the entrance of the tomb deliberately unfinished, to leave the impression that the tomb was abandoned and there is no treasure inside. However, these tactics didn’t work and the tombs were constantly plundered, most probably by the workers who made them!! Then the high priest decided that although the pharaohs were robbed of all their jewels/treasures and furniture as long as they had a mummy they had a chance for an afterlife. So they collected all the bodies from the tombs and buried them at a place near the Valley of the Kings. And the royalty slept in peace there for thousands of years till two brothers from Luxor discovered this place accidentally.

For a long time they kept this discovery a secret, and used it as a source of their livelihood. Once every year, the two of them used to climb down the well sort of place where the bodies were hidden and steal the remains of the jewels that were on the body of the mummies. They were finally caught and the mummies were taken to Cairo. When the mummies were getting transferred to Cairo the entire village where the two brothers lived collected around the Nile and starting crying. Some romantics said that the mummies were finally getting the funeral they deserved; however, the practical people said they are crying because the source of livelihood of the entire village was going away forever!!!!

Taxes had to be paid for anything that gets transported over the Nile. However there was no “mummy tax” defined in the taxing officers list. So the closest he could get was the tax applicable for “dead fishes”. So the tax applicable for dead fishes was collected for transporting the royal mummies over the Nile. Talk about life coming to a full circle …J

Every tomb in Egypt has been discovered twice, once by the tomb raiders and again by the explorers of the ancient Egyptian world. The raiders took all the money and the explorers left all the memories. So after the entire valley was plundered by the tomb raiders, only King Tut-Ankh-Amen lay forgotten in his grave, forgotten by his own people, the high priest and the raiders too…They built another tomb at the top of his tomb and that’s how his grave survived the raiders of the tomb. Today his mummy is the only one that still lies in its own tomb in the valley of the kings, and his tomb is the most famous of them all…The boy is finally famous! J

CGC in the Sands of Time by Kaustubh Adhikari

Download the pdf version of the article: data-analysis_kaustubh_edited-final_bg

“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” (Often attributed to Mark Twain). So, this time I’ll refrain from telling too much lies (i.e. writing too much). Instead, let us have less of numbers, plots and tables compared to the mammoth report of last year, and indulge more in talking.

“A man may have six meals one day and none the next, making an average of three meals per day, but that is not a good way to live” (Louis D. Brandeis). Yes, the last year has brought some ups-and-downs to CGC. Amidst the varied reactions of the individual members, we can have a look how the combined behavior of members has been.

There are two components of any forum – one, the incoming lot of people who become members from visitors, and secondly, the current lot of members who indulge in all sorts of discussions through posting. Both are essential for the forum to grow. They depend generally on different factors, although both external and internal factors control them.

Let us dissect the components separately. First, the number of registered members across date, plotted by the blue line:

One can see, there are some periodic annual variations; but except that, there has been no effect till New Year to registration. That’s a good sign! The red dots are the major change-points in the data. The periods of waxing, as suggested by them, are mid-Feb to mid-May ’06 and Mar-May ’07. Rest of the years follows a fixed trend. But what do these periods correspond to? They correspond to the post-exam time and summer vacations in India, when people enjoy some free time and can spend more time on the net.

Next, we look at the daily posts. The problem here is that, there have been large scale post deletions in the history of CGC few times, to reduce the huge server load because of the ever-increasing database size; the most recent one being in Nov ’07. Let us compare the total daily posts, before and after deletion on Nov ‘07:

The red lines (data till March last year) denote before deletion, and blue lines after deletion. So a large amount, about ⅔ of the posts, has been deleted. But the basic post pattern remains same. Moreover, there is no marked change around Nov ’07 (deletion time), which means for getting recent trends the deletion does not cause problems.

So we can safely analyze the daily posts:

It also contains some change-points:

(i) The first one is at mid-Feb ’06, when the post rates had increased tremendously. We have seen that registration also increased in that period. And during that time, a large chunk of very active members (with high personal post counts) came in who posted actively, increasing the daily rate.

(ii) The rates fall somewhat in Aug to Dec ’06. And the reason for it is the-then turmoil in CGC, resulting in server hacks and bans.

(iii) They increase again from Dec ’06, when recently a lot of active people had joined, as well as a lot of discussions started about English sections, sharing issues and post restrictions to sections etc.

(iv) The post restrictions blocked all those people who just made posts like “thank you” and took the gifts. I showed in last report that it resulted in an increase in numbers of people who reached post counts 100 & 250 to gain eligible statuses. Still, many people were restricted, and it brought down daily post counts. Moreover, internal tiffs contributed to it.

(v) In Sep ’07, there were large collisions and collusions, as some people slowly separated from CGC. So the post rate fell. But since then, the rate has been nearly constant, even slightly increasing, which is another good sign.

I was talking just now about joining of active members. This will be shown in the CGC members’ timeline.

Here is the number of active members per day. It has the same pattern of posting, naturally. It directly gives the number of people who post daily, though it misses out those who come and read topics but do not reply. Anyway, note that among thousands of members, only a few are active.

The CGC members’ timeline is given bellow. It shows, corresponding to each day, the post rate of members joining on that day. People with high post rates or number of posts are marked.

Last time I did talk about poverty in terms of posts, participation of the female members, share of post among top members, popular sub-forums etc. This time, I feel they would not give the proper picture, because many high-post members have become inactive. I hope this report will give an insight into the recent affairs of CGC statistically. Also, it shows that there is no sign of decay, but stability.