This week, the focus is on the temple complex at Dendera, near Qena, particularly the temple of Hathor, the goddess of love and joy.
Another opportunity for a jump back into antiquity this week, as I’m still going through lots of images! This week we’re visiting an amazing temple complex at Dendera, which is near Qena. The most significant temple in this complex is that of Hathor, the goddess of love, beauty, music, fertility and joy.
Here’s a detail from that temple…
Horus in Judgment
Here we see a bit of detail of the gods sitting in judgment. As conservators have been working hard on cleaning the layers of soot and dirt from this temple, we can see the stunning colors. The soot was mainly due to a lot of temples being used for shelter during Roman occupation, as christians were often persecuted and stayed away from the major cities.
I will do a longer post on this temple in the next couple of weeks, as it has lots of interesting features.
We take a quick look at Luxor Temple, stunningly lit at night to amaze visitors from all around the globe!
Today a bit of a shorter post, as returning to work has been rather busy! During our Egyptian journey, we enjoyed a wonderful time in Luxor. From that locale you will have seen the 3 part series of posts on the Karnak Temple Complex.
We follow the avenue of the sphinxes to this great temple…
Luxor Temple
Here we see the entrance Pylon of the Luxor Temple. You may notice that there is only a single obelisk, which creates an asymmetry. The companion to this obelisk is in Paris on the Place de la Concorde.
This temple is connected with the Karnak Temple Complex by the avenue of the Sphinxes. This 2,700m road was restored and re-opened in 2021, so that one can walk from one temple complex to another.
We explore some of the details of Karnak, such as the Seti II stela, Ramses II’s cartouche, and an Amenhotep III scarab.
As the first posts in this series (Part 1 and Part 2) focused on some rather large aspects of Karnak, I want to bring out some of the other details as well. In all honesty, I wish I had another 5-6 hours at the complex to delve deeper into some of these details.
The first one is a stela that is placed in the entrance walk on the left hand side. This might get little attention among all those ram-headed sphinxes…
Seti II Stela
This stela speaks of the offerings made by Seti II to Amun-Re. Part of what interests me in this are the various king names given on the stela as well as the offerings themselves. I will need to spend a bit of time working on the translation!
The second detail I want to draw attention to is a cartouche you’ll see in many places…
Ramses II Cartouche
Of course, Ramses II’s throne name cartouche is ubiquitous, but if you think this cartouche sounds anything like Ramses, you may be surprised. The cartouche is prefaced by sꜢ-rꜤ [sa-re] which translates to ‘Son of Ra’. In the cartouche we can transliterate to wsr-mꜢꜤt-rꜤ stp.n-rꜤ [usr-maat-ra stp.n-ra]. This translates to ‘The justice of Ra is powerful, chosen of Ra’. This is a great conversation starter during your next cocktail party!
Wandering around the site, there were lots of interesting items. Here’s one that seemed underrepresented…
Scarab of Amenhotep III
This mighty, and lucky Scarab sits atop an oval red granite plinth. It is likely that this was part of Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple on the western bank in Thebes. It was moved to a location near the Sacred Lake at Karnak at a later time (likely by Taharqo – 690-664 BCE). It’s not often that we run across a dung beetle of this size!
The last item that I would like to point out is that all the wonderful archaeologists and egyptologists must love solving puzzles! Here are some pieces found around the site…
Foot and Sandal
What caught my attention on this piece is the exquisite detail of the foot in the sandal. Also, it makes me wonder where the rest of this relief might be. Here’s another puzzle piece…
Puzzle Pieces
This piece appears to have sheared off a larger section. It again makes one wonder where the rest might be. Of course, a lot of the sites that we visited had to be reassembled over the years, as sand, creative re-use of material by many generations and natural forces didn’t preserve all these monuments in their original state.
Hats off to all the people who have worked over time to bring us these monuments and a view into antiquity. It truly helps us connect across the millennia!
More from our trip to Egypt, focusing on the Karnak Temple Complex. This historical site contains temples spanning from the Middle Kingdom to the Ptolemaic Era.
As I’m starting to go through the many photos from our trip to Egypt, I will write a series of blog posts to delve a bit deeper into each area. Today, I’m starting with the Karnak Temple Complex, also known as Karnak.
A couple of things to note both about Karnak, in general. The Karnak complex sees temples from many time periods extending from the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000-1700 BCE) to the Ptolemaic Era (305 – 30 BCE). The area of the complex was named Ipet-isut in ancient Egyptian, meaning ‘The Most Select of Places’. The modern name Karnak comes from the nearby village of el-Karnak, which means ‘fortified village’.
Let’s start with the entrance toward the 1st Pylon…
Entrance towards 1st Pylon
In this approach, we look at the 1st pylon, large trapezoidal walls that form the entrance toward the courtyard. This pylon is 113m wide and 15m thick at its base. The entrance way is lined with a procession of ram-headed sphinx statues, representing Amun-Re, whose temple one enters. Construction of this pylon was started in the 30th dynasty and never completed.
As we enter the courtyard, let’s take a closer look at the rightmost of the 1st pylon trapezoids…
Karnak – 1st Pylon
There are still ancient mud bricks piled up against the inside of the pylon, which would have been used as ramps during the construction phase.
As we enter the courtyard, we get a sense of the scale ahead of us…
Kiosk of Taharqa
Here we’re looking at the Kiosk of the pharaoh Taharqa, one of the Kushite rulers of Egypt. The columns of this kiosk were 21m tall, and the one remaining column on the right gives us a sense of that size.
Also in this courtyard we find a colossal statue of Ramses II…
Colossus of Ramses II
Ramses II is one of the best known pharaohs due to the length of his reign and his volume of construction. In this statue we see Ramses II wearing the nemesis headdress with the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. At his feet is the Princess Bent’anta, holding a flower and wearing a Uraeus crown of rearing cobras. The princess’ name, Bet’anta, is Syrian, meaning Daughter of Anath (Anath is a Canaanite goddess).
In the next episode, we’ll go into the great hypostyle hall.
Edfu provides us with our last and interesting temple in Egypt
As our guide, Ibrahim, predicted, this was our last beautiful temple of this trip! He was right in that the Temple at Edfu didn’t disappoint!
Here’s a quick view with an airport edit…
Edfu Glory
This temple is dedicated to Horus and was built during the Ptolemaic and Hellenistic period. There are a number of interesting features to be found. More on those later!
