Egypt: Kom Ombo – Temples of Sobek and Haroeris

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🏛️ Kom Ombo – We Rocked Up Late and It Was Actually Brilliant

We arrived at Kom Ombo later than planned, somewhere after six in the evening. Our boat – and I use the term our loosely, since it felt at times like a floating car park on the Nile – appeared to be the slowest vessel on the river. Throughout the day we’d watched a steady procession of other cruise ships glide past us with what seemed like quiet smugness. It was, frankly, a bit embarrassing.

But here’s the thing: being late turned out to be a genuine stroke of luck, which almost never happens when you’re sixty and your back’s already playing up. By the time we’d docked, shuffled down the gangplank, and got ourselves organised, most of the other tour groups had already done their rounds, ticked their boxes, and retreated to their boats for dinner. The result was that we had the temple largely to ourselves, which at a site as popular as this is roughly equivalent to finding a parking space in central London on a Saturday afternoon – essentially miraculous.

🌙 Wandering About in the Dark

It was fully dark by the time we reached the temple complex, and the whole place was bathed in artificial floodlighting. Now, I’ll be honest – we’re not really the sort of people who go in for all that atmospheric, torchlit, mystical experience nonsense. We tend to leave that to younger travellers who wear linen and say things like “I really felt a connection with the ancients.” But even we had to admit that the effect was rather impressive.

The lighting threw the carved reliefs into sharp relief – if you’ll pardon the expression – picking out the hieroglyphs and figures carved into the sandstone with a clarity that the harsh Egyptian midday sun would have completely flattened. There was a stillness to the place, a quiet that is genuinely rare at Egyptian monuments, where the default setting is normally approximately four hundred tourists and a man trying to sell you a papyrus bookmark. We walked around slowly, took our time, and actually looked at things properly. Remarkable what you can do when nobody’s standing in front of you with a selfie stick.

🐊 A Temple Built for Two – Which Is Already Unusual

Kom Ombo is architecturally unlike anything else we’d seen on the trip, and by this point we’d seen quite a lot of temples. Most Egyptian temples were dedicated to a single god, built along a single axis, with everything pointing towards one holy of holies at the back. Kom Ombo throws all of that out and dedicates itself to two gods simultaneously, which might sound like an administrative headache but actually works remarkably well.

The two deities in question are Sobek – the crocodile god, associated with fertility, military prowess, and the fertile silt left by the Nile’s annual flooding – and Haroeris, also known as Horus the Elder, the falcon-headed god of the sky and kingship. The two couldn’t be more different in temperament or symbolism, yet here they sit, side by side for eternity, which is either a lesson in divine tolerance or evidence that the ancient Egyptians were considerably more pragmatic about religion than we tend to give them credit for.

The temple is split straight down the middle with near-perfect symmetry – two entrances, two hypostyle halls, two sanctuaries, two of almost everything. Each half mirrors the other, dedicated to its respective god. Construction began under Ptolemy VI in the second century BC, around 180 BC, and continued under various Ptolemaic rulers and later Roman emperors over several hundred years, which is the sort of building project that would make even the most ambitious modern contractor go a bit pale.

🧱 The Entrance Pylon – Partial, But Still Impressive

We entered through what remains of the main pylon – the great ceremonial gateway that once formed the dramatic entrance to the complex. Pylons at Egyptian temples were typically built as two massive tapering towers flanking a central doorway, and Kom Ombo’s was no exception. Unfortunately, the left tower is now largely gone, presumably collapsed at some point in the intervening two thousand years, giving the whole entrance a slightly lopsided look. You can still make out the proportions of what it once was, which was clearly enormous and imposing. Now it’s enormous, imposing, and missing a bit. Bit like the rest of us at this stage of life.

Beyond the pylon lies what is known as the Outer Courtyard, sometimes called the Augustus Courtyard – a name that tells you immediately when it was built. This section dates to the reign of Emperor Augustus, who ruled from 27 BC to 14 AD, and reflects the Roman empire’s distinctly pragmatic approach to conquered territories: rather than tearing everything down and starting again, they simply adopted the local religious traditions and inserted themselves into them. Augustus is depicted on the courtyard walls making offerings to the Egyptian gods, dressed in the full regalia of a pharaoh, which must have required a certain flexibility of ego.

The columns surrounding the courtyard are beautifully preserved and carved with papyrus and lotus capitals at the top – the papyrus representing Lower Egypt, the lotus representing Upper Egypt, together symbolising the unified nation. It’s a detail that Egyptian architects had been using for centuries by this point, and the Romans were sensible enough to keep it. The courtyard itself would have been a public space, where ordinary worshippers could come and participate in religious festivals and make offerings before the more restricted inner sections of the temple, which were reserved for priests alone.

We stood there for a while, looking up at the columns in the lamplight, and I thought – not for the first time on this trip – that the ancient Egyptians were rather good at this sort of thing. Better than us, certainly. We can’t even agree on what to put on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.