In 2020, when the world went into lockdown, I decided it would be fun to create a virtual journey up the Nile, visiting ancient sites in sequence through some of the better photos in my collection. I was due to accompany an actual Nile cruise from Cairo to Aswan – the ‘long cruise’ – in May that year but it was cancelled of course. For this #virtualnilecruise my plan was to post a few photos from each site to my social media accounts with a little description, key facts etc, at a rate of one site per day for thirty days. It thoroughly enjoyed it, and my followers seemed to as well, and having arrived in Aswan, I decided to extend the idea to take in six extra days visiting the Nubian temples and the region of Lake Nasser, then crossing into Sudan, ending almost at Khartoum. This brought up a half century of posts. A few months later, I returned to the idea with a month’s virtual visit to sites in the Delta and deserts.

It was fun, but more work than I had anticipated: selecting and editing images, writing captions then posting everything to Instagram, Twitter and Facebook – paying careful attention to the varying ways text and images work in each case – was pretty time-consuming. But by the end I realised that without meaning to I had created a set of the best images I had from each of eighty sites, and a decent text for each place as well. This has turned out to be very useful – if I need an good image of any of these places I can now straight to the best ones, and if I need to check something about any of them I now have a handy guide of my own to refer to.

So I’ve decided to try to make something more permanent and accessible and perhaps even useful out of this, hence these pages on my website.

The photos and captions I originally posted to social media are still there but they’re not that easy to find; these pages are intended to provide a more permanent and accessible home for them. As I’m no longer tied to posting about one site each day, I can add in a few of the more obscure places that didn’t make my original list, or sites I have only been to for the first time recently. I can also replace older photos with better ones as I revisit Egypt with a better camera (eleven times and counting since that cruise was postponed). I’ve also taken the opportunity to add a little more information, links to further reading, and all the sites are included in a map I’ve created in Google Earth to show all the locations.

I’m hoping that people might enjoy seeing the photos again, and that some might even find what is now a quick-reference atlas of ancient Egyptian sites and monuments useful.

Enjoy, and do let me know what you think in the comments or via the ‘Contact’ page.