Only the hypostyle hall of the Temple of Khnum at Esna has been excavated; the rest is still buried underneath people’s homes, shops, and mosques and forgotten by time. It is the most immediately evident feature of Esna– you have to walk down a wooden staircase into what is essentially a giant pit in order to get to the level of the temple. And as far as Egypt goes, this temple is downright new– about two millennia old, give or take a few centuries, from the Ptolemaic period.
As with other sites in Egypt, modern religion exists alongside the ancient one:
Inside the temple, the most spectacular features were the pristine pillars, with color still visible. I can’t decide if the colors would have been spectacular or gaudy 2,000 years ago. Maybe both. The temple is currently being cleaned, as you can see there is quite a bit of soot on it. I can’t remember if this was the case in Esna, but many of the other temples in Egypt were used as shelter by Copts or others. They left their traces through graffiti, soot from their fires, or their deliberate vandalism of the icons of the sacrilegious (to them) deities.
The temple’s roof was in perfect condition– and it carries motifs you would recognize today. The scorpion is in fact of Scorpio; with the modern day zodiac (with roots in Egypt and Babylon) carried forward into modern day “Western” culture by the Greeks. Looking up at the roof and all of the intricate detail actually gave me vertigo. There was so much detail to look at I would have needed to lay on my back to fully appreciate it…
The roof was so intact, in fact, that I had a lot of trouble taking any photos at all, let alone some that would pick up some of these colors:
I loved this carving because you can see the two gods pouring little vases with the ankh (the key of eternal life) showering down on the Pharaoh.
