We awoke to sunrise over a glass-smooth Nile. Our river boat, which we boarded at Luxor, reached Edfu at about 2:30 a.m. and had tied up so that we could tour the ancient Temple of Horus. The traditional way to travel to the temple from the river landing was by horse and buggy, and Road Scholar did not disappoint us. Our buggy through drove a traffic circle in the center of town as several large trucks blasted their air horns in successful attempts to assert their right of way. The mix of modern trucks and cars, horse-drawn buggies, donkey carts, and pedestrians made for a uniquely Egyptian scene in the traffic circle.
Ptolemy III, one of the Greek pharaohs, started the temple in 237 B.C. Building the temple took 80 years, so it was finished by one of his successors. Inside the enormous pylon is a courtyard in true Egyptian style. Across the courtyard from the entrance is a well-preserved statute of the god Horus as a falcon, next to a doorway that leads to a hypostyle hall. The columns in this hall have varied capitals – palm-leaf, lotus, papyrus, and what Heba called “composite” capitals. Unlike the older temples, this one still has its roof, which made it more enjoyable in hot, sunny weather. The Egyptian Council of Antiquities had put screens between the columns at the front of the hall in an attempt to exclude pigeons. However, the oversize door was standing open, so there were almost as many pigeons inside as out.
The innermost room of the temple was a shrine, made of polished granite, which would have housed a statue of Horus in a cabinet made of gilded wood. The cabinet was still there, but Horus had flown the coop. A 100-year-old replica of the ancient bark used to carry Horus out for ceremonies stands in front of the wooden cabinet, now displayed gilt-free.
The reliefs in the temple recount the story of Horus and Seth. I won’t trouble you with the details here, since you can look them up online. Seth was repeatedly portrayed as a hippopotamus being harpooned by Horus from a boat as an approving Amun-Ra looks on. In their details, some of these reliefs looked more Greek than Egyptian, even though they were telling classic Egyptian religious stories.
After lunch, we retired to our room, where we watched the banks of the Nile roll past. In places the desert came right down to the river on the east bank, while in others, irrigation had pushed the desert away, but not too far away. Occasionally, we could see cattle grazing on the river bank or on grassy sandbars in the middle of the Nile as fishermen in rowboats fished with nets.
We docked at Kom Ombo for a couple of hours to visit the Temple of Haroeris and Sobek. Haroeris is a version of Horus, the falcon-headed god, and Sobek is a crocodile-headed god. Like its counterpart at Edfu, this temple was built in the Ptolemaic period when Egypt was ruled by Greek descendents of Alexander’s general, Ptolemy.
Kom Ombo is similar to the Temple of Horus at Edfu, but is not as well preserved. There were some interesting reliefs, for example of the Egyptian calendar, and of medical instruments used by ancient Egyptians. Heba showed us the hieroglyphic symbol for the verb “giving birth” – it depicted a woman delivering a baby. I took pictures of the sun setting behind the temple.
Like the one at Edfu, this temple contains a “Nilometer.” In this case the Nilometer consists of a large well that in ancient times was connected to the river by a tunnel. The height of the Nile during the spring flood determined the amount of crops that farmers would be able to grow, which in turn determined the amount of taxes they had to pay. Small crocodiles would swim into the well, and would be taken care of by the priests of the temple, because this was the temple of Sobek, the crocodile-headed god. According to Fodor’s, the crocs were treated as semi-divine, which included giving them golden earrings and gilding their toenails.
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