Egypt: Edfu – Temple of Horus

🏛️ Waking Up in Edfu — and the Temple That Made It All Worthwhile

We woke that morning to find our boat had moored overnight at Edfu, a modest little town sitting on the west bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt, roughly halfway between Luxor and Aswan. And — how shall I put this diplomatically — it wasn’t exactly knocking our socks off. Edfu is not a place that makes you want to linger. The waterfront is dusty, the town itself is perfectly ordinary, and there’s nothing about it that screams “must-see destination.” If it weren’t for what lay just a short ride away, most of us would probably have stayed on the boat with a cup of tea and a biscuit.

But we didn’t come here for the town, of course. We came for the temple.

Stepping off the gangplank, we were met with a sight that is, by now, fairly standard on any Nile cruise: a long, cheerful row of horse-drawn carriages lined up along the riverbank, their drivers hollering good-naturedly for our attention. These caleches, as they’re known, have been ferrying tourists from the dock to the temple for as long as anyone can remember, and despite looking as though they were last serviced during the reign of Ramesses II, they do the job perfectly well. We climbed aboard with the slightly nervous optimism of people who’ve never entirely trusted a horse, and clip-clopped our way through town.

It was actually rather pleasant. The streets were waking up around us — children in neat uniforms heading off to school, shopkeepers rattling up their metal shutters, market traders arranging pyramids of tomatoes and onions with the focused artistry of people who do this every single morning. The whole thing felt entirely unperformed and real, which made a refreshing change from the more heavily stage-managed bits of tourist Egypt.

🦅 The Temple of Horus — A Brief Overview

We arrived at the temple entrance, clambered down from the carriage with the collective dignity of a group of middle-aged tourists — so, not much dignity at all — and joined the stream of early visitors heading towards the great pylons.

And then we looked up, and we all went rather quiet.

The Temple of Horus at Edfu is, quite simply, one of the most staggering things we’d ever seen. Not in a showy, Instagram-filter sort of way, but in the quietly astonishing way that something achieves when it has been standing there, largely intact, for over two thousand years while everything else around it has crumbled to nothing.

Construction began in 237 BCE, during the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes — one of the Greek-Macedonian pharaohs who ruled Egypt following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. The Ptolemies were, in many ways, brilliant political operators: they adopted Egyptian religion, built temples in the traditional Egyptian style, and presented themselves as legitimate pharaohs rather than foreign conquerors. The Temple of Horus was very much part of that programme. Work continued under a succession of Ptolemaic rulers over nearly two centuries, finally being completed around 57 BCE, under Ptolemy XII — the father, as it happens, of the rather more famous Cleopatra VII.

The temple is dedicated to Horus, the falcon-headed god, one of the most important and ancient deities in the Egyptian pantheon. Horus was associated with the sky, with kingship, and with divine protection — his eye, the Wadjet, became one of the most recognised symbols in all of ancient Egypt. According to mythology, Horus and his uncle Seth fought a series of fierce battles over the throne of Egypt following the murder of Osiris, Horus’s father. The temple at Edfu commemorates this struggle and was the site of an annual ritual drama re-enacting the conflict — essentially ancient Egypt’s version of a theatrical festival, though presumably with better costumes than am-dram.

What makes Edfu so remarkable, compared to many other Egyptian temples, is how extraordinarily well-preserved it is. Most ancient temples have been looted, dismantled, buried, converted, or generally knocked about over the millennia. Edfu was, for much of its history, buried under several metres of accumulated silt and rubble — which, while undignified, turned out to be rather good for its long-term survival. It was excavated by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette beginning in 1860, and what emerged from the sand was essentially a nearly complete temple, its walls still covered in hieroglyphic texts and carved reliefs of extraordinary detail.

Standing before those massive entrance pylons — each one towering some 36 metres high and covered in carved scenes of the pharaoh smiting his enemies in the time-honoured fashion — it was genuinely difficult to believe that this thing had been built before Julius Caesar was born. It felt less like a ruin and more like a building that had simply been closed for a while and was now letting visitors in again.

We hadn’t even got through the front door yet, and we were already gobsmacked.