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Ancient Egypt Magazine

Issue Three - September / October 2000

The Temple of Horus at Edfu

Five major cult temples – Edfu, Dendera and Philae, the best preserved cult temples in Egypt, plus Kom Ombo and Esna – were built in Upper Egypt during the Ptolemaic Period (304-30 BC), at a time when the country was ruled by a dynasty of kings who were of Macedonian Greek rather than Egyptian origin. In the second part of our series on Ancient Egyptian temples, Dr Barbara Watterson describes Edfu, the best preserved of these

 Most of the Ptolemaic rulers tended to view Egypt largely as a ready source of the wealth that was needed to enable them to wage war against their fellow rulers who reigned over various parts of Alexander the Great’s old empire.

It was no coincidence that the Ptolemies commissioned the building of temples in the south of Egypt, far away from Alexandria and their power bases in the north. Upper Egypt was rich in agricultural produce and was also the gateway to Nubia, and to the deserts, with their gold and other valuable resources. But Upper Egypt had a tendency to rebel against its foreign rulers. Hence the Ptolemies were forced to come to a modus vivendi with the powerful Egyptian priesthood, agreeing to commission new temples built in the old Egyptian style and dedicated to Egyptian deities in return for priestly cooperation in handling the native populace.

Edfu, which lies some 100 km south of Luxor, was the capital of the second province of Upper Egypt. From the earliest days of Egyptian history it was a prosperous town; and an important centre for the worship of the falcon god, Horus, who at first was worshipped as a sun god but who later became identified with Horus son of Isis and Osiris.

According to tradition, the first stone temple to be built at Edfu was designed around 2660 BC by the illustrious Imhotep, architect of the Step Pyramid at Sakkara, to a plan that “fell from heaven”. It was dedicated to Horus of Behdet in commemoration of the fact that by this time the local falcon-god Horus had been identified with the Horus of a Delta town called Behdet. Over the years, successive temples were built on the site; and, in 237 BC, Ptolemy II ordered the construction of a new one. The nucleus of this temple was completed by 212 BC, but six years later, civil disorder in the region interrupted proceedings and it was not until 142 BC that the dedication ceremony, performed in person by the reigning king, Ptolemy VIII, was carried out.

Ptolemy VIII granted a further favour to the temple by ordering the addition of a great hypostyle hall, known in temples of this period as a Pronaos (see below), to the southern end; and twenty-five years later his son ordered the construction of a courtyard and a pylon-gateway. On the Egyptian equivalent of 5th December, 57 BC, a massive double-leaved cedarwood door was hung in the gateway and the great Temple of Horus was finally completed.

The Temple is constructed of sand­stone, now mellowed to a creamy brown, but originally painted in bright, clear, colours. Like the cult temples of earlier times, it is rectangular in shape, but whereas they are oriented east/west for ease of access to the Nile, ancient Egypt’s main highway, Edfu Temple, is oriented north/south, with its main entrance to the south. The pylon gateway leads to a courtyard, open to the sky and surrounded on its south, east and west sides by colonnades.

On the northern side of the courtyard is the largest of the temple’s halls, the Pronaos, which is both higher and wider than that part of the temple, which lies beyond it. The roof of the Pronaos is supported by eighteen columns, with the spaces between the six columns on the southern side filled to roughly half their height by curtain walls which screen the interior but allow light to penetrate.

Built into the thickness of the curtain walls are two small chambers, one, the “House of the Morning”, the place in which the chief officiant, in theory the king, purified himself; the other, the “House of Books” or temple library. To the north of the Pronaos is the twelve-columned “Great Hall” on the western side of which is the room known as the “Laboratory”, its walls decorated with the formulae for the preparation of the unguents and incense used in temple ceremonies.

The Great Hall leads into the smaller “House of Offerings” which, in turn, leads to the large, oblong space that houses the innermost sanctuary, within which is a large shrine made of polished black granite where the cult-statue of Horus of Behdet was kept. The sanctuary is flanked on its north, west, and east sides by thirteen smaller rooms, the “guest bedrooms” and storage chambers, the most important of which, the “Harpoon Room” lies immediately behind the sanctuary on the central axis of the temple and once contained statues of Horus and his consort Hathor, and two sacred lances.

The whole area to the north of the Pronaos is known as the Naos.  A passageway, called the “Pure Ambulatory”, runs along the west, east, and north walls of the Naos’ exterior: in its eastern section is the floor-level entrance to the well from which much of the water used in temple ceremonies was drawn.

The auxiliary buildings that once surrounded the Temple today lie buried under the modern town, but they would have included houses for the priests and for guests visiting from other parts of Egypt, kitchens, abattoirs, storehouses and administrative buildings; the sacred lake; and the grove in which the falcons sacred to Horus were reared. In front of the Temple is a mammisi, or Birth House, a small temple consisting of a court, antechamber and sanctuary, in which the births of the god and the king were jointly celebrated.

Many of the reliefs and inscriptions carved on the walls of the Temple of Horus are conventional, depicting the king, often accompanied by his queen, presenting offerings to various deities. They are not placed haphazardly, however: the decoration of each room records the rituals that were once performed there. Thus Edfu, like the other Ptolemaic temples, is a sourcebook in stone of ancient Egyptian temple ritual, much of which was designed to perpetuate the well-being of Egypt and to maintain the equilibrium between gods and men.

The inscriptions are more extensive,  more detailed and elaborate than at any other period because the priests of the time realised that it was no longer possible to rely on custom and memory to pass on the knowledge by word of mouth, nor even to rely on papyrus records since these had been found in the declining years of Pharaonic Egypt to be by no means indestructible.

By making what they hoped would be a permanent record on the stone walls of temples, they prepared for the day when their foreign rulers would be gone, and, rather as the Jacobites in eighteenth-century Scotland longed for the day when the “King over the water” would return, looked forward to the day when a true Egyptian-born king would come to the throne and find that knowledge of the sacred rituals had been preserved intact.

Many of the inscriptions in Ptolemaic temples were written in a deliberately elaborate and confusing hieroglyphic script so that their meaning was safeguarded against those who could read standard hieroglyphs. The language in these inscriptions is one that was dead even at the time that they were being written: it is not the spoken language of the period, but a priestly revival of a much older stage of the Egyptian language. Ptolemaic writing is a richly decorative script that has taken the hieroglyphic signs used in standard ancient Egyptian, added to them and given some of them new meanings.

Each Ptolemaic temple has its own variations in writing; the earliest and best Ptolemaic writing is found in Edfu Temple, the most decorative at Dendera, the most difficult at Esna. At Esna, for example, there are eighty different ways of writing the sound 'n'; and even at Edfu there are over 8000 signs in use – standard Egyptian has about 700.

From the third century AD, the Temple of Horus at Edfu was allowed to fall into disuse as the state religion of Egypt became first Christian and then Islamic. Gradually, tons of sand and rubble drifted into the building, although not before religious zealots, both Christian and Muslim, and possibly even before them pagans afraid of the evil eye, had damaged many reliefs. When, in the nineteenth century, Auguste Mariette became the first Director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, he instructed that Edfu Temple be freed of its sand and rubble, and of the 62 houses that had been built on the roof of both the Naos and Pronaos. Work began in 1860, and a few years later the House of Horus stood revealed as the best-preserved temple in antiquity, its Ptolemaic inscriptions ready to reveal the life of the Temple to whose who could read them – at that time, no one!

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