Egypt -- Edfu and Kom Ombo

Edfu is the place where the goddess Isis gave birth to her son Horus. At that time, she was on the run from her brother-in-law, so had to keep the birth a secret (which is why she's breastfeeding in the papyrus stand in this depiction). Eventually, Horus (falcon-headed god) grew up and defeated his uncle and ruled Egypt. Pharoahs likened themselves to Horus quite a bit because he also happened to be the god of the midday sun -- sun at its strongest.

To build and fully decorate a temple takes many, many years, but while Edfu was under construction was a very tumultuous time where it seemed no pharoah was in power long enough to see a project through to completion. The artisans constructing the temple were clever enough to keep their options open as they carved the stone decorations. If you want to get paid, you certainly don't want to cover the walls with the cartouche of the guy who was in charge two pharoahs ago. So they carved all the titles "Ruler of upper and lower Egypt" and "Son of Ra" (see the duck-sun disk sign?) but they left the cartouches with the names blank until the project was complete. Here you can see a couple of cartouches that are still empty.

Kom Ombo is the only temple in Egypt dedicated to two god -- you can kind of make out the two main doors here and the whole temple is symmetrical with equal importance given to each of the gods.

In a couple of the areas sheltered by the sun you could still make out the paint colors that would have originally adorned the whole temple. It's amazing to think that these little paint remnants on a doorway lintel are in the neighborhood of 3,000 years old.


One of the cool carvings on the temple was a medicine cabinet showing the various tools an Egyptian physician would use. You might be able to make out some giant scissors on the bottom row, a scale and maybe some forceps in the third row, etc. A lot of these remind me of tools I've seen at the dentist.


One of the gods to which the temple is dedicated is the god of the Nile, and therefore someone who was called on for fertility help. Apparently, people used to line up outside the temple to get blessings for fertility (of people or crops). They even had a few carvings of footprints still there reminding people where they should queue.

After these two temples, we headed upriver again overnight to reach the city of Aswan. There is something really exciting about going to sleep and waking up in a surprise location. On my occasional late-night wakings, I sometimes checked out the window to see what kind of place we were in or if we were still chugging along the river. It was always fun seeing the neon green lights and minerets of the mosques, shadowy outlines of date palms and desert hills. As we neared Aswan, the power lines seemed to spring up like a new riverside plant.