Position 46 - The Beautiful Temple Of Hathor At Denderah—view South Over The Remains Of A Vanished City

Standing before the Denderah temple and looking directly southward, we have Abydos now on our right; Cairo is behind us, Thebes, now but forty miles distant, is before us, while on our left is the Arabian desert. We are stationed, as the map indicated, with our backs to the river, in the hollow of the great bend (see Map 3), after passing which we shall find the river valley lying in a generally north and south line, as it did until just before we reached Assiut.

Here before us is one of the three best-preserved temples in Egypt; the other two are the Edfu temple and the temple of Philae. This is, for Egypt, a late temple, as we shall see, but it is none the less beautiful. Its pure and simple lines rise with a beauty and dignity that are felt at the first glance. Let us inquire as to the age of the building.

On the top edge of the cornice which crowns yonder façade, is a Greek inscription, which reads: “On behalf of the Emperor Tiberius Caesar, the young Augustus, son of the divine Augustus, under the Prefect Aulus Avillius Flaccus, the governor Aulus Fulvius Crispus, and the local governor Sarapion, son of Trychambos, the citizens of the capital and the nome dedicated the pronaos to the great goddess Aphrodite and her fellow gods, in the year (number lost) … of Tiberius Caesar.”

The part of the temple which we see, therefore, was built under the Roman emperor, Tiberius, in the 1st century A. D., when Egypt was a Roman province. It is therefore 1,300 years later than the temple of Abydos, which we have just visited. The halls lying in the rear were the work of the later Ptolemies just before Rome acquired Egypt, so that this temple marks for us the transition, from Greek to Roman domination in the Nile valley.

But, of course, there was here a temple to the great goddess, Hathor, patroness of love and joy, whom the Greeks called Aphrodite, long before Greek or Roman ever saw the spot. The earliest inscriptions we have refer to her; her temple existed here in the Old Kingdom; it was rebuilt by the kings of the Middle Kingdom, and enriched by the conquerors of the Empire. The building before us, although unfinished, represents an attempt to create for her a larger sanctuary than she had enjoyed before.

In front of this colonnaded hall which forms its present façade, there was to have been an open court, surrounded by a colonnade or portico such as we shall later see at Thebes. Whether the means failed or what may have been the reason for its remaining incomplete, we cannot now say. We cannot appreciate its beauty fully until we know that this is not the surface of the ground, which we see before the temple.

These heaps and mounds are the rubbish which was once part of a town. The sun-dried brick walls of the houses, which later invaded the temple enclosure clustering around the very walls of the sanctuary, have gradually accumulated as dust and mud, as generation after generation of such houses rose on the ruins of others, which had tumbled down, burned or been destroyed in the sack of war. Gradually such accumulations rose in all ancient towns, until the town no longer stood upon a plain, but upon a mound, known as a “tell” in Arabic, and commonly so designated in many geographical names.

You saw such a tell at the city of Crocodilopolis in the Fayûm, and we shall find more or less of such rubbish around every Egyptian temple. It is this rubbish to which we have already referred as being much employed by the natives as fertilizer, because of the potash and ammoniacal ingredients which it contains. As the natives call it “sebach,” the diggers for it are termed “sebachin.” They have ruined many a site for excavation by their promiscuous digging.

But to return to our temple—the pavement and the base of the walls are far below the surface of these heaps, and hence the temple should appear much higher—nearly twice as high as it now seems. The hall in front, called by the Greek dedication a “pronaos,” contains eighteen of those peculiar columns, as you may plainly see by looking through the door. Each column, formerly known as a “Hathor-column,” is really a gigantic reproduction of a musical instrument, known as a sistrum, which was a kind of rattle used by the women in religious services in the temples.

The shaft of the column is the handle surmounted by a decorative head of the goddess, Hathor, above which is a square representation of a chapel, with a door in front. They are, therefore, now called “sistrum-columns,” and are to be found only in the temples of goddesses. You notice that the roof is much lower behind, dropping in two successive stages, through a hypostyle to a chapel, and then to the holy of holies in the rear.

You can see the two lion-heads on the outside wall of the second hall, which serve as spouts for leading off the water of the rare rains, which might otherwise streak the once painted reliefs. For you must imagine this temple as painted in the gayest colors. The reliefs show us the foreign kings of Egypt engaged in the ritual of the temple service. It seems strange indeed to see here in Egyptian style and costume the Roman emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, who thus assume the functions of the ancient Pharaohs.

In the side and rear walls, built in the thickness of the wall, are long, narrow crypts, intended for safe and secret storage of the temple furniture of value. These crypts are twelve in number, and the painting of the wall reliefs in them is almost as fresh as when the work was first done. The massive masonry upon which we stand belongs to an accessory chapel usually called a birth-house, because one of its rooms contains reliefs depicting the birth of the son of the goddess and her consort, Harsomtous. This son was worshiped in this chapel, and such a birth-house or chapel was commonly attached to temples of this period. Behind its projecting wall here you may see the masonry wall which surrounds the enclosure of the large temple.

Now, if you can imagine this temple clad in the brightest hues, surrounded by a lovely garden, in place of these sombre rubbish heaps, and looking out from masses of verdure and waving palms, reflected in the bosom of the sacred lake, you may gain some faint impression of the beauty of Egyptian architecture. But you do not find here the element of size which will meet us so often at Thebes, the temples of which greatly surpass this one in that respect.

At last we are about to reach the goal of all travelers, ancient and modern, the plain of Thebes. Turn to our general Map 3 again, and you see that Thebes was situated about fifty miles south of Denderah, and on both banks of the Nile. At this point you note that the river flows northeast. Now we should turn to Map 8, which gives this district on a much larger scale.

Here you find the Nile interrupted by several islands on its way northeast toward Denderah. On its east bank, in the lower right-hand portion of the map, are the remains of the Karnak and Luxor temples, but the larger portion of this storied plain lies, you see, on the west bank.

There ruins of many temples are scattered widely over the plain and along the cliffs which border upon it. We are to occupy first a point of vantage on those western cliffs from which we can get a good general view. Find the number 47 in a circle in the upper left-hand portion of Map 8 and the red lines which branch southeast. There at the point indicated by the apex of those lines, upon the crest of the cliffs, we are to take our stand now and look down over the plain and the river.