The circles in the text below are cartouches, which mean they are the names of the pharaoh. Many of them were left blank at Edfu because there were many successive pharaohs during the tumultuous Ptolemaic period– they didn’t want to start carving in names until they were sure the pharaoh would last a while. You can see along the bottom those are filled in. It’s the hieroglyphic equivalent of me carving “AMANDA AMANDA AMANDA AMANDA AMANDA AMANDA AMANDA AMANDA” on the walls. You get to be a bit of a narcissist if you are a pharaoh. And you can see why you wouldn’t want to start chipping away on one name only to have the pharaoh change before you got to the last cartouche!
I loved how you could see the little ribs on this guy:
Proof that men were obsessed with drawing penises even 2,000+ years ago:
