Isis

No, not THAT one.  According to Ahmed, the Egyptian government persuaded President Obama to refer to the hate group as ISIL to distinguish it from the Egyptian goddess of love.

We had to dodge a phalanx of tchotchke salesmen and catch a boat to visit Philae, the temple that honors her.  It sits on an island created by Lake Nasser, not far from Aswan where our Nile cruise ended.

The love goddess deserves no less than a spectacular setting!

The Greeks and the Coptic Christians left their marks.

I asked a group of Vietnamese travelers from Boston for their native country's equivalent of Memphis Tours.  They recommended Viet Tours and Saigon-Tourist.  Maybe that will be our next overseas trip.

Ahmed waited until the end of his lecture before making his big reveal.

Philae, often flooded for long periods after the construction of the Aswan Low Dam in 1902 was relocated to its current perch before the completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1970. The creation of Lake Nasser would have submerged it (and many other temples) completely. Pilings mark the spot where the Egyptians began building Philae nearly 2400 years ago.

The ride back to Aswan took us past the low dam.

It would have been interesting to ask this man for his thoughts about Egypt's recent history.

He probably has lived long enough to have seen Abdel Nasser depose King Farouk in 1952, ending the monarchy that had ruled Egypt for centuries, and expel the British after the Suez Canal crisis; the humiliating land loss during the 1967 Arab Israeli War; Egypt's alignment with the Soviet Union to complete the Aswan High Dam, a project which literally electrified the country in the 70s;  the assassination of Anwar Sadat three years after the 1979 peace treaty with Israel; the long, corrupt reign of Hosni Mubarak and the brief Arab Spring that finally removed him; the democratic election of Mohamed Morsi, a president representing the Muslim Brotherhood; and the subsequent coup d'etat by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi a little more than a year later in 2013, after another political uprising.

In comparison, the United States, for all its problems,  doesn't look quite so fucked up.