Egypt Day 1 - Abydos and Dendara Temples

NOTE: I'm not going to post any photos here - too much hassle. They're on my picasaweb page, link on the left.

Day 1

After finally getting into Luxor at about 8pm on Monday night, decided to hit the ground running and go on a day trip to Abydos and Dendara on the first day. Always a great way to avoid any jet lag – just keep moving! I slept like a log, but was woken by the first call to prayer at 4.45 am, then the second at god knows what time. We left at 8am on the minibus – just three of us and our guide and driver, and drove for three hours through huge agricultural areas of sugar cane, tomatoes, cabbages and other veggies, with the ‘convoy’. This is to protect tourists, and basically was a loose group of tour buses with police escort travelling through the countryside. This is the only way that tourists are allowed to travel out of the cities in Egypt now.

It was nice travelling in the rural areas, through little villages and towns, with donkey drawn carts and just donkeys loaded with freshly cut sugar cane charging along the streets. Whenever we stopped anywhere, even to wait for a train to cross, local children would rush over to the bus and smile and wave to us. They all seemed to want pens, so I wish I had thought ahead and packed a couple of boxes of them. They are all filthy dirty, as I guess you would expect given that they run around in the dust of the desert all day!

Before I get into the temples we saw, you need to know the major gods to know where everything fits. Some of them were:

Anubis, the jackel-headed god of embalmers.

Hathor,the goddess of love, pleasure and beauty,

Horus, the falcon-headed god closely identified with each pharaoh,

Isis, the goddess of magic,

Maat, goddess of truth and balance,

Nut, goddess of the sky,

Osiris, god of the underworld,

Ptah, creator god and patron of craftsmen,

Sekhmet, lioness goddess of destruction,

Oh and then there’s Ra-Harakhty – who was the combination of the sky god Horus and the sun god Ra, whose right eye was the sun and left eye the moon.

Abydos. According to my guide this is the cult centre of Osiris, god of the dead, and was regarded as the holiest of Egyptian towns in Pharaonic times. There were a large group of women all in white there who were on some sort of spiritual tour through the middle east, but not many other tourists.

Tradition has it that Osiris, or at least his head, was laid to rest here after being murdered by his brother Seth and his mutilated body strewn over the countryside. All ancient Egyptians tried to make a pilgrimage to the town or be buried there.

This used to be a huge walled town, but what is left is the 19^th Dynasty Cenotaph Temple of Seti I. This was built during Seti I’s reign between 1294 and 1279 BC, and is one of the most intact temples in Egypt – still having a roof helps. It’s constructed of white limestone and has a lot of figures that have retained their original colour. After the death of his father, Ramses II built his own temple to the north of Seti I’s temple, but only part of this is intact. Outside there is lots of rubbish, although we were told that they did clean it up every day – the argument is that it blows in off the desert although from God knows where. However that’s one of the most striking things that you notice in Egypt – the rubbish everywhere. There is plastic everywhere – despite the fact that they burn much of their domestic rubbish, plastic included, which means there is a particularly noxious smoke around for much of the time, mixed at this time of the year with smoke from the burning off of the sugar cane.

So back to Abydos. Some of the scenes inside show Seti I with the gods Horus and Osiris. Inside the temple there are seven chapels dedicated to a deified Seti I, and the gods Ptuh, Ra-Harakhty, Amun, Osiris, Isis and Horus. Each of the chapels contained the barque of the relevant god and was served daily by the high priests. Behind the temple Seti had built the Osireon (tomb of Osiris) from huge blocks of granite from Aswan, but much of this is under water and again with lots of rubbish around.

One of the things that Mara had told us to look for, which isn’t mentioned in the guidebooks, was a lintel on which are some very interesting carvings – one looks like a helicopter, one a racing car, one a submarine, and another a space ship – to me it looked like the Enterprise! Maybe Eric Von Daniken was right after all …

Inside the first chamber it was very Indiana Jones-ish, with beams of light coming through the roof onto the pillars. It was very beautiful and peaceful, particularly when the Japanese tourists had left! The chapels are quite stunning, with exquisite relief carvings.

After exploring Abydos we set off on the drive back to Dendara Temple. We stopped on the way for the driver to buy fresh molasses from the side of the road, and for a treat for those that wanted to try it, molasses cones, which were boiled molasses put into cones for shape until they solidified, making these sort of brown sugar toffee cups. The American couple with me tried them and said they were delicious, but I didn’t think it would be a great idea for me!

We arrived at Dendara late in the day – which was unfortunate as we were rushed around it quite a bit.

Dendara is where Hathor supposedly gave birth to Horus’s child, the god Ihy, and was Hathor’s cut centre from pre-Dynastic times. The temple was buried in sand until the 19^th century, and so has remained pretty intact. The current temple is Greco-Roman but it’s desogn is that of a typical Pharaonic temple, with a series of large hypostyle halls leading to a dark sanctuary, surrounded by a maze of store rooms, chapels and crypts. There are also two birthing houses and a Coptic basiclica on the grounds.

Inside it was glorious. On the pylons outside are reliefs showing the Roman emperors Tiberius and Claudius making offerings to Hathor and Horus, and inside the columns are all topped with Hathor heads. There is an astronomical ceiling which is still beautifully coloured , with zodiac signs and the sun god Ra sailing his sacred barque across the sky. Inside the temple we went down into a tiny crypt, which was a little claustrophobic but well worth it for the stunning scenes along the walls. Then up into the sunlight again to the New Year chapel, where rituals were performed before taking Hathor’s statue up to the roof. On the ceiling are reliefs showing Nut giving birth to the sun.

From there we went up onto the roof of the chapel, where an open-air chapel was where the statues were exposed to the sunlight once a year to be revitalized by the sun. We went into another crypt on the roof in which the reliefs showed what looked like the Ark of the Covenant. Will have to check this one!

From there we descended a long, beautifully decorated staircase in which the stairs had almost completely worn out from centuries of use, and back into the temple.

Outside on the west wall were other huge reliefs showing offerings to Hathor, and on the south wall is a large one showing Cleopatra making offerings to Hathor with her so by Julius Caesar, Caesarion, standing in front of her burning incense. Next to this is the Temple of Isis, a relatively new addition, built by the Roman emperor Augustus between 30 BC and 14 AD.

So that was the first day! We got back into town at about 6.30, after the curfew but we got checked back off and allowed in.