Egypt: Day Nine, Part One

Galila in the streets of Edfu

When I wake up, we’re moored to the quayside in Edfu, about 75 nautical miles up the Nile from Luxor.  No early start today, and easy outings:  Edfu in the morning and then we sail to Kom Ombo in the afternoon.
  As Horus is my favorite Egyptian god - because of a statue I saw decades ago in the Louvre Museum - and this temple is dedicated to Horus, I’m looking forward to it.
A horse and buggy takes us from the boat to the Temple of Edfu.  As most people on this trip are couples, and as the buggies fit only two, I buddy up with Peter, who I think is the only other single in our Ramses Group.  People always being proud of their horses, I ask the driver what his horse’s name is “Galila”, he says, specifying she’s a mare.  She looks relatively more well-tended and better fed than the horses back in Cairo.  I see that the horses waiting for tourists all seem to have a feedbag on, so I guess they’re kinder to their animals here.

Temple of Edfu

Edfu is the most complete temple from the Greco-Roman era, which lasted about a thousand years.  The last Egyptian ruler reigned during the 30th dynasty, in 400 BCE.  Then came the Persians, but they were not liked.  Alexander the Great conquered the Persians and made himself raïs of Egypt in 332 BCE.  He reigned a short time - until his death in 321 BCE - and then his general Ptolemy took over, becoming governor of the province in 305 BCE and then king of both Upper & Lower Egypt.  The Roman era stretched longer, from 30 BCE to 628 AD.
The temple itself took 180 years to build and includes a granite shrine that predates it.  It’s the second largest in Egypt, after Karnak.  Edfu was dedicated to Horus, the sky god, and his wife Hathor.  It celebrated the Festival of the Reunion, when Hathor sailed south on the Nile and reunited with Horus.  It was one of, if not the major festival of the year, and lasted two weeks.  (By the way, Hathor is quite the goddess, being responsible to love, joy, music and maternity; that’s a tall order.)

  When the temple was rediscovered by a French archeologist in 1860, part of it had been used as a garbage dump and another part, the first hypostyle, as a stable.  The rest was silted up from Nile flooding or buried under sand, and homes were built on top of it.  The ceiling of the second hypostyle is covered in black soot, from fires set by the Copts, but its twelve columns are still standing and support an intact roof.  The Copts also defaced almost all the faces on the wall decorations throughout, as they were deemed to be pagan.

Horus

  In spite of all that, the temple as a whole is remarkably well-preserved and gives an excellent idea of how all such temples were built.  The first pylon is quite colossal, even for Egypt - over 120 feet tall - decorated with mammoth carvings of battle scenes as well as Horus and Hathor.  The lintel to the entranceway still has traces of the paint that once covered the entire building, as do some of the columns. At either side of the gate stand statues of Horus that are taller by far than the tourists streaming by.  In the first courtyard is a column with the inscription “all life and dominion” which demonstrates the power of the god... and the pharaohs.  That concept of the unification of the two Egypts is reflected in symbols throughout the temple:  lotus and papyrus, vulture and cobra, white crown and red crown.  In fact, the second hypostyle’s twelve columns alternate the lotus and the papyrus on their capitals.  All this leads to the Sanctuary of Horus at the heart of the temple, complete with the barque that Horus traveled in to reach Edfu for that Festival.  Some of the stone here is so smooth that it’s hard to tell whether it’s polished granite or alabaster.
  One interesting feature here is the lighting.  As the roof is intact on much of the temple, it’s been studied to light obliquely.  And that makes the relief of the carvings stick out.  These are not just flat artwork; the stomachs of the characters, their cheeks and breasts are all gently curving.  It’s especially evident with Horus and Hathor in the sanctuary, ankh in hand.

Second hypostyle