I've always wanted to visit Egipt. Just not this Egipt. I heard about our times Cairo that is a ruin that really shows it claws on the outskirts.
I think Ancient Egipt was an incredible place with lots of secrets and an incredible people. I think that Egipt was more than the totalitarian state our history tries to present. I don't think that people that managed to have such flourishing cities and culture can live thousands of years under rulers that enslaved them. Egipt has to be seen as another lost civilisation that we, as a whole, lost sometime during the transition from that way of thinking, to ours.
Ancient Egipt can be somewhat visited. I don't know if people that are not gamers know about this, but there a platform (I wouldn't say video game) that can take you, virtually, into Ancient Egipt. There is everything there in terms of scenery, people, buildings, flora and fauna. Even more than that, the developers have recreated, if you are paying enough attention, a feeling, a scent of what I think that Egipt was: this huge empire that managed to develop technologies that even today we are struggling to comprehend. They were organised and simple people, living simple lives, closer to nature and closer to emotions than to wealth.
Ancient Egipt was maybe the biggest merchant empire of its time and they exchanged culture to a lot of civilisations around the world. The inheritance Egipt has, is probably discovered only in a small proportion today. If our times Egipt will understand this, they will let the international community help and uncover other spectacular things that we didn't even have an idea about.
In Assassin's Creed: Origins I discovered another Assassin's Creed game that blew my mind. The detail the team managed to push inside is just astonishing. You will hear people speaking in ancient Greek, not only in Egyptian. That is because the story is developed around the period of Greek influence. The pyramids are all there (even more than the average human knows) and yes, they are covered with white lime - this is something I found out relatively late and I am still wondering why would they put in this huge effort just to bury one person inside, be it a Pharaoh.
The map is huge (though it is not 1:1 scale) and all the regions of Ancient Egipt are there. People around are going around their daily life; they tend the crops, they bring water from the river, they fight off crocodiles, they move on camels and they have conversations all around you. I mean the game is really putting you in the middle of a busy, 48 BC Alexandria when pharaoh Ptolemeus was the boss. This was one of the dictatorial pharaohs Ancient Egipt had.
The game has a great camera module that you can use to take spectacular pictures (as you can see). You decide the perspective, the bokeh, you can orbit around the subject or concentrate on the spectacular scenery. With a natural day/night cycle, this makes photographing great. All the hidden oasis, burried temples and cities, the fights and the epic rides on the back of your horse or camel makes for great photos that can be taken further than I did - editing with Lightroom.
