Hurghada Excursions to Dendera

Hurghada Excursions to Dendera are these tours that head to the Temple Complex of Dendera starting from Hurghada, Egypt.

Temple Complex of Dendera

Many ancient temples from the Mediterranean coast to the southern border with Sudan are dotted about the landscape of modern Egypt, most located in the Nile Valley but scattered elsewhere as well. Some of these temples are famous and stand out from others, such as the Temples of Luxor and Karnak, Philae, Kom Ombo, Esna, and Edfu. Among these most important temples may also be counted Dendera, which provides examples of a wide variety of later temple features.

Temples of Hathor

Dendera is located about 60 kilometres north of Luxor on the west bank of the Nile River, opposite the modern provincial town of Qena.

Ancient Egyptian Iunet or Tantere, known to the Greeks as Tentyris, was the capital of the 6th nome of Upper Egypt and a town of some importance. Today, we know it as Dendera, though the town’s population has, since antiquity, moved to Qena across the Nile on the east bank. Now, the ancient temple lies isolated on the desert edge.

Along with the temple is a cemetery with tombs from the Early Dynastic Period. Still, the most crucial phase identified was the end of the Old Kingdom and the 1st Intermediate Period. The provinces were virtually autonomous then.

Although Dendera was not a leading political force in Upper Egypt, its notables built several mastabas of some size, though only one had any decoration apart from stelae and false doors. On the west end of the site are brick-vaulted catacombs of Late Period animal burials, primarily birds and dogs. In contrast, cow burials have been found at various points in the cemetery. Of course, this was a significant site for the Hathor cult, whose forms included a cow.

As usual, the main temple complex is oriented toward the Nile, which flows east-west so that the temple faces north. However, this was symbolically east to the ancient Egyptians since the temple faces the Nile.

Several Roman Period kiosks front the main temple area. After those, the monumental gateway of Domitian and Trajan is set in a massive mud-brick enclosure wall that surrounds the complex and leads to an open space. Although the site lacks an arcade and the two towers which ought to precede the inner temple, an unfinished inner enclosure wall of stone surrounds a courtyard with side entrances which open before the sizeable hypostyle hall added in the 1st century AD by the emperor Tiberius.

However, before the temple proper is the Roman Period birth house of Dendera on the west, perhaps built by Nero, though more probably by Trajan. Although the dedication inscriptions refer to Trajan, Nero is depicted in the main hypostyle hall of the Hathor temple, offering the model of a birth house. This is the latest preserved temple of its type.

The new sanctuary was well-designed and followed Ptolemaic models. To match the level of the Hathor temple, the new building was erected on a high platform. A temporary access staircase led up to the side of the platform. As usual, the roofing slabs were not positioned beneath the level of the cavetto moulding around the building’s top but would have probably been hidden by a parapet wall. The core building contains a sequence of three rooms.

Two corridors that isolate the large sanctuary are notable. The sanctuary’s rear wall is dominated by an enormous false door framed by a double cavetto moulding on slender columns and topped by a uraeus frieze. A cult niche high up in the wall corresponds to the location of the statue niche in the sanctuary of the main temple. These passages are too narrow to be used and must have been added for symbolic and optical effects.

Its scenes depict Trajan, Augustus’ later successor, making offerings to Hathor, and are among the finest to be found in Egypt. It was the ritual location where Hathor gave birth to the young Ihy or Harsomtus, two alternative youthful deities who generally stand for the youth phase of creator gods. There are also figures of the god Bes, a patron of childbirth, carved on the abaci above the column capitals. The reliefs on the exterior walls are superbly preserved and portray the divine birth and childhood of the infant Horus, whose rites legitimize the divine descent of the king.

An ambulatory surrounded the birth house. The composite capitals of the columns carry high pillars with Bes figures. The frontal ambulatory is extended by adding three columns into a kiosk, with the front corners formed by L-shaped pillars. The kiosk had a timbered roof that must have connected to the stone structure of the birth house. This merging of the ambulatory with a kiosk is a novelty. At older birth houses, a court was attached as a separate structure.

The Roman Era Birth House at Dendera

The Roman Birth House (mammisi) was built when the earlier structure, begun by Nectanebo I and decorated in the Ptolemaic Period, was cut through by the foundation of the unfinished first court of the main temple of Hathor. Only a false door at the eastern exterior wall of the main temple of Hathor reminds one of the original sanctuaries. Initially, this birth house measured about 17 by 20 meters and consisted of a triple shrine opening to a transverse hall. It was built mainly of brick but received an interior stone casing. Within this older structure, the walls of the vast hall depict the Ptolemaic kings offering to Hathor. A scene on the north wall shows the creator god Khnum fashioning the child, Ihy, with Hekat, the goddess of childbirth, seen in her image as a frog.

Both birth houses are now accessible. They differ considerably in plan and decoration.

Between the new and old birth houses are the remains of a Christian Basilica that can be dated to the 5th century AD. It is an excellent example representative of early Coptic church architecture.

South of the earlier birth house is a mud-brick “sanatorium”. This sanatorium is the only one associated with an ancient Egyptian temple. Here, visitors could bathe in the sacred waters or spend the night having a healing dream of the goddess. It had benches around its sides where the sick rested while waiting for cures affected by the priests. An inscription on a statue base found in this location suggests that water was poured over magical texts on the statues, causing them to become holy and cure all sorts of diseases and illnesses. Basins used to collect the sacred water can still be seen at the western end.

The Sanatorium

To the west of the sanatorium, a small chapel of Nebhepetre’ Mentuhotep, dating to the 11th Dynasty, was recovered from the site and re-erected in the Cairo Museum. The building, which has secondary inscriptions of Merneptah, was as much for the cult of the king as for the goddess and was probably ancillary to the lost main temple of its time.

The main temple at Dendera is the grandest and most elaborately decorated of its Period. It is also one of Egypt’s most important temple sites, providing examples of later temple features. It is also one of the best-preserved temples of this Period, surviving despite the destruction of the temples of Hathor’s consort Horus and their child Ihy or Harsomtus, which originally stood close by.

Early texts refer to a temple at Dendera that was rebuilt during the Old Kingdom. The massive foundations probably contain many blocks from the earlier structure it replaced. Several New Kingdom monarchs, including Tuthmosis III, Amenhotep III and Ramesses II and III, are known to have embellished the design. However, while fragments of earlier periods have been found on the site, no earlier buildings have been unearthed. Pepi I and Tuthmosis III were mainly recalled in the new temple’s inscriptions.

The temple of Hathor was constructed over a period, we believe, of thirty-four years, between 54 and 20 BC. When Ptolemy XII died in 51 BC, the temple was still in its early stages after four years of building activity, although it did contain some underground crypts. The remainder of the temple was built during the twenty-one-year reign of his successor, Queen Cleopatra VII. At the time of her death in 30 BC, the decoration work had just begun on the outer rear wall.

The temple plan is classical Egyptian, entirely enclosed by a 35 by 59-meter wall standing 12.5 meters high. However, unlike those of earlier temples, the facade of the hypostyle hall that fronts the main temple is constructed as a low screen with inter-columnar walls exposing the hall’s ceiling and the Hathor-style sistrum capitals of its 24 columns.

According to a dedication inscription on the cornice thickness above the entrance, this part of the temple was built under Tiberius between 34 and 35 AD. The structure measures 26.03 by 43 meters and is 17.2 meters high. It has an 8-meter-long architrave that spans the central intercolumniation. Above, a towering cavetto, built from one course, and the massive volume of the corner tori cast heavy shadows and articulate the edges of the facade.

A sistrum is an ancient Egyptian musical instrument closely associated with Hathor. The shafts are profusely decorated with scenes, and their straight bases stand on flat plinths. Each column bears a four-sided capital, which occupies about one-third of the column height, carved with the face of the cow-eared goddess. However, every one of the faces was vandalized in antiquity (probably during the early Christian Period. The paint, still preserved in the 19th century, was dominated by the blue of Hathor’s wig.

The First Hypostyle Hall

The outer hypostyle hall was decorated by emperors ranging from Augustus to Nero. Nevertheless, the ceiling of this hall retains much of its original colour. It is illustrated as a complex and carefully aligned symbolic chart of the heavens, including signs of the zodiac (introduced by the Romans) and images of the sky goddess Nut who swallowed the sun disc each evening to give birth to it once again at dawn. Note that at the centre of the south outside wall was a relief of a gilded sistrum to show its importance and evoke Hathor, the “gold of the gods”.

Since tradition rules that the processional approach should gradually descend from the inside to the outside, the builders had to lower the floor of the central nave of the hypostyle hall to obtain the required progression of floor levels.

A doorway aligned to the central axis of the temple leads from the large hypostyle hall into an inner hall with six Hathor columns known as the hall of appearances. Here, the statue of the goddess “appeared” from her sanctuary for religious ceremonies and processions. This hall’s front wall was the original temple’s facade. Lighting within the gallery is provided through small, square apertures. The chamber has columns in two rows of three. They also have Hathor heads. The drums’ bases and lower parts are granite, while the upper parts are sandstone.

Scenes on the walls of this hall depict the king participating in the foundation ceremonies for the temple’s construction. On either side, doors open into three chambers used as preparation areas for various aspects of the daily ritual. For example, one room was probably used as a laboratory to prepare ointments. An opening through the eastern outer wall allowed offering goods to be brought into this area, and a parallel passage from one of the western chambers led to a well.

The rear part of the temple was built first, probably in the early 1st century BC. The earliest king named is Ptolemy XII Auletes, but mostly the cartouches are blank, probably because of dynastic struggles in the mid-1st century. This inner core included an offering hall, in which sacrifices were dedicated, and a “hall of the ennead”, also known as the “hall of the cycle of the gods, where statues of other deities assembled with Hathor before a procession began.

These are followed by a 5.7 by 11.22-meter barque shrine, which once enclosed the four barques of Hathor, Horus of Edfu, Harsomtus and Isis, which were not surrounded by wooden shrines.

After this small chamber, there is the sanctuary of the goddess herself. It is embellished by a splendid, temple-like facade topped by a cavetto with a uraeus frieze. Inside the sanctuary was an expensively decorated wooden Naos that held Hathor’s gilded, two-meter-high seated cult image. The naos stood in a niche of the rear wall, and it is unknown how the niche, three meters above the pavement, could be reached. To either side of this inner sanctuary, the king is depicted offering a copper mirror, one of Hathor’s sacred emblems, to the goddess.

The central sanctuary on its sides and rear are eleven chapels dedicated to the other deities associated with Hathor’s chief attributes, the sacred sistrum and the menat necklace.

Within the temple, the most distinctive parts are the fourteen crypts, of which eleven were decorated. They far surpass those of other temples. The inclusion of secretly accessed tombs in temples can be traced back to the 18th Dynasty. By the Late Period, crypts were included in the architectural design of most temples.

These are suites of rooms on three and sometimes even four stories, set in the thickness of the outside wall and beneath the chambers’ floors in the temple’s rear part. The elongated, narrow rooms and passages are arranged one above the other, with the lowermost laid deep within the temple foundations. Access was gained through trapdoors in the pavement and behind hidden sliding wall blocks. Unlike other crypts, those at Dendera are decorated in relief. The decorations in these chambers conform to the temple’s axis. The most critical reliefs, among which sistra are prominent, were on the axis. These rooms were decorated before the roof blocks were set.

Their primary use of these crypts was for keeping cult equipment, archives and magical emblems for the temple’s protection, though the most critical object held in the tombs was a statue of the Ba of Hathor.

The huge roofing slabs must have once been covered with thinner paving stones. Also within the wall thickness are the staircases, which lead up to and return from the roof, which, because of the unequal ceiling heights of the rooms below, was built into terraces. Their surface was slightly inclined and had channels to guide rainwater from the roof.

On the roof in the southwest corner is a kiosk, where the ritual of the goddess’s union with the sun disk was performed. It has four Hathor columns on each side. Sockets in its architraves suggest a barrel-shaped timber roof with a double hull and segmented pediment, though, for its purpose, it must have had roof windows to let in the sun’s rays. On the chapel’s floor, one may also note the light well for the Horus chapel below, on the main floor.

The ba of Hathor would have been taken from its hiding place to the temple’s roof for the significant New year’s festival celebrated. It would have spent the night before beholding the rising sun in a symbolic union with the solar disc.

Chapel of the New Year

These representations depict multiple aspects of the New Year’s festival. The staircase to the west of the offering hall, which the priests used to ascend to the roof, has ascending figures of the king and various priests with the shrine of the goddess carved on its right-hand wall. The stairway to the east has corresponding scenes of descending figures and was used for the procession’s return.

A pair of parallel shrines are also on the roof’s eastern and western sides dedicated to Osiris. They are concealed in a kind of mezzanine floor. Both of these sanctuaries have open courts, surrounded by a cavetto. Three doors lead into two succeeding chambers from the rear wall of the court.

In the inner of the two rooms, Isis and Nephthys are shown mourning the death of Osiris, who lies on his funerary bier waiting to be resurrected by magical rituals. As the myth unfolds, Isis is also depicted as magically impregnated with the seed of her son Horus.

A corresponding suite on the eastern side of the roof depicts the lunar festival of Khoiakh in which an ‘Osiris bed’ was filled with earth and grain seed as part of a vital fertility rite. The first room’s walls show scenes of Osiris’s burial goods, including his canopic jars, and on the ceiling, Nut is shown with other astronomical figures. On the other half of the top is a plaster copy of the famous ‘Dendera Zodiac’, representing the cosmic aspect of the Osiris mysteries. The original is now in the Louvre in Paris. The inner room depicts scenes from the Osiris myth, similar to that of the western suite and reliefs of cosmic importance.

Dendera was considered one of Osiris’ many tombs, and the shrines, which have no link with Hathor, were used to celebrate his death and resurrection. His death may have been re-enacted at the sacred lake to the west of the temple.

The roof of the hypostyle hall was reached by another flight of steps with various gods carved along its wall. Pious pilgrims who awaited signs and miracles from the goddess used this temple’s highest area in antiquity. There remain gaming boards cut into the stone blocks that helped these faithful pass the time during their vigils.

On the rear outside wall of the temple directly behind the sanctuary, beneath the two lion-headed waterspouts (there are also three more on each of its side walls) which drained rainwater from the roof, are scenes showing the massive figure of Cleopatra VII and her son by Julius Caesar, Caesarion, who became the great queen’s co-regent as Ptolemy XV. At the centre of the wall is the large False Door with a gigantic emblem of Hathor, diminished over the centuries by pilgrims who scraped at it to obtain a little of the sacred stone where they could come closest to Hathor herself. This is the location of the “hearing ear” shrine, which allowed the goddess to “hear” the prayers of common folk not otherwise allowed into the main temple.

The Isis Birth House

Immediately south of the Hathor temple is the temple of Isis, known as the Iseum, which used foundation blocks from a destroyed Ptolemaic building and was decorated under Augustus. The east gateway, also Roman in date, leads to this temple, which is almost unique in having a dual orientation with the outer rooms or central part of the structure and hypostyle hall facing east and the inner ones north toward the temple of Hathor. The significant high relief in the sanctuary, which showed Isis giving birth, has been mutilated. Within the sanctuary’s rear wall, the arms of Isis and Nephthys supported a statue of Osiris (now destroyed).

Further to the south, at the temple’s southwest corner, lies the compound’s sacred lake, which provided water for the priests’ ablutions. Next to the lake is a well with rock-cut steps leading down to give access to water for daily use in the temple. With stairs descending from each corner, this stone-lined ceremonial basin is the best preserved in any Egyptian temple. It is empty of water today, and tall trees grow within its walls.

The sacred lake

East of the temple was a part of the town, which the temple texts mention as having a temple of Horus of Edfu in its midst. This may be the same as some remains of the Roman Period about 500 meters from the main enclosure. The triads of deities worshipped at Edfu and Dendera were similar: Horus, Hathor (or Isis), and Ihy or Harsomtus. Hathor of Dendera and Horus of Edfu met at a sacred “marriage” ceremony when she progressed to the south.