Our second stop of our first full day on the Nile was the Temple of Horus at Edfu. It was built during the Ptolemaic period, which means it is a young relative to many of the sites we saw in Cairo and the Valley of the Kings. Even so, it’s still 2100 years old.
Before we got to the temple, we had to disembark from the boat. I was not particularly thrilled when I saw the horse-drawn carriages that were going to take us the short distance to the temple…I don’t have anything against horse drawn carriages, but I could see one of the guys yanking on one poor horse’s face before we even got onto the dock. Most of them had some pretty intense (and most likely unnecessary) bits. Fortunately we got up the stairs before anybody and got the first pick of carriages.
We joined the traffic fray momentarily before getting on the tourist road up to the temple. We were informed our horse was named “Rambo” and we cheered him on with a “Yalla Rambo!”
We arrived at the temple and once we got past all of the tourist touts hustling to make a few last minute sales, we knew we were going to enjoy this temple. It had two huge pylons and was surrounded by tall mud brick walls:
The pylons were intricately carved and positively radiant in the late afternoon sun, off set from the bright blue sky. We spent a lot of time just marveling at the front of the thing, and snapping lots of photos. We felt sad that Mom & Tom decided to stay back at the boat for this one. No matter though, there would be plenty more temple-time later in the trip!
Again with the preferred imagery of the pharaoh beating everyone into submission while holding them by the hair:
The back side of the pylons were not as elaborately carved and without the sun it was harder to photograph. You can get a sense of how things were laid though– behind the pylons was an open courtyard ringed with columns:
Walking through the courtyard it’s possible to go deeper inside the temple, passing into a covered hall. There were interior rooms with more hieroglyphs but as there was no natural light, it was impossible to photograph. In the far back of the temple, there was a granite shrine which once held a small gold statue of Horus. There’s no more gold statue, but there is a replica of the wooden barque that the ancient Egyptians would have put the statue on to parade him around. I say replica because the real one is in the Louvre…
A side door:
Around the back of the temple there were extraordinary hieroglyphs everywhere you looked. They were so fine, so deep, and unlike many of the others we saw…Apart from how beautiful the place looked bathed in the light of golden hour, I think that was my favorite part of this temple. I will share them in a subsequent post!
