Old New Method Gathering in
EgyptJoin us to trace the sun’s journey through life, death, and rebirth…
10 – 17 October 2026
Egypt spans more than three thousand years of history — dynasties rising and falling, capitals shifting, gods multiplying and merging. The only way to approach such vastness is through a deliberate lens. We will choose a thread that runs through Egypt’s many variations across the millennia: the journey of the sun through the hours of the day and night. This journey was central to Egypt’s religion and cosmology. Their temples were built to embody the sun’s movement; their tombs were painted to guide its kings’ through this solar passage and be crowned anew. We will trace this thread from Cairo to Luxor, letting the sun’s daily descent and return organize our own passage through the monuments of this ancient civilization.
Cairo
The Giza Plateau
Our journey begins where the sun’s course was first fixed in stone: the pyramids of Giza and the Great Sphinx, oriented to the sun’s rising and setting five-thousand years ago. Their geometry is a permanent record of the same cosmic cycle. We will enter the Great Pyramid of Cheops, ascend the Grand Gallery, and stand in the King’s Chamber — a space built for a king’s passage into the company of the sun after death.
The Grand Egyptian Museum
On the edge of the Giza Plateau stands the Grand Egyptian Museum opened in 2025 after two decades of construction. It now holds the collection once housed in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, including the complete treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Its scale reflects an ambitious plan to gather Egypt’s fragmented history under one roof: the gods who preside over the sun’s journey as well as the funerary equipment meant to accompany the dead on their journey. Here we will begin to recognize the recurring cast of the sun’s journey — Ra in his solar barque, the serpent Apophis who attempts to thwart Ra’s progress, the union with Osiris — before encountering them again on temple and tomb walls in Luxor.
The Giza Plateau
A Tomb in the Valley of the Kings
Luxor
Temples of Thebes
In Luxor, ancient Thebes, we shift from the sun’s daily course to its cult. The temples of Luxor and Karnak were built for the worship of Amun-Ra, the sun god in his most complete New Kingdom form. Their layout — open courts giving way to increasingly dark, enclosed sanctuaries — reenacts the sun’s own movement from open sky to the hidden chamber of night. We will walk this same progression, from light into shadow, as we move through the temple complex.
Valley of the Kings
The royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings are painted, hour by hour, with the sun’s passage through the twelve divisions of the night: its descent into darkness, its confrontation with the serpent Apophis, its union with the buried Osiris at the deepest point, and its emergence at dawn as the scarab Khepri. We will visit three of the best-preserved tombs and follow this sequence as it was meant to be read; a map of the journey every king, and by extension every soul, was expected to make.
Islamic Egypt
Though we have come to study the ancient Egyptian tradition, we will not be able to ignore the country’s modern Islamic spirit — nor would we want to. Cairo’s mosques, madrasas, and old quarters belong to a civilization some four thousand years younger than the one we came to study, yet they too are governed by the sun. Islamic prayer times are fixed by its position in the sky: dawn, midday, mid-afternoon, sunset, and night. The call to prayer, heard five times a day throughout our stay, will mark the same solar rhythm that once ordered the world of the Pharaohs, carried forward now under a different faith. We will visit some of Cairo’s mosques and old quarters with this continuity in mind.
Our evenings throughout the week will be spent in rehearsal for a theatrical performance of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, which we will stage on our final evening in Luxor.
Temple of Philae, Aswan
Optional Extension: Nile Cruise
For those wishing to extend their stay, we are considering an additional four days aboard a Nile cruise, sailing south from Luxor to Aswan, contingent on sufficient interest. Further details will follow closer to the event.
Old New Method Gathering in
EgyptJoin us to trace the sun’s journey through life, death, and rebirth…
10 – 17 October 2026