We were able to sleep a little today. Breakfast from 7 to 8. At breakfast we learned that our guide’s brother had died and he left the boat in the middle of the night to take care of his affairs. So, we will not have a guide on the boat but instead, guides at each of our stops. The first stop is Edfu, location of Edfu temple. We took horse drawn carriages from the pier to the temple.
The temple is dedicated to the falcon god Horus. The temple was built in the Ptolemaic Kingdom between 237 and 57 BC.
The temple of Edfu fell into disuse as a religious monument following Theodosius I’s persecution of pagans and edict banning non-Christian worship within the Roman Empire in 391 BC. As took place elsewhere, many of the temple’s carved reliefs were razed by followers of the Christian faith which came to dominate Egypt. The blackened ceiling of the hypostyle hall, visible today, is believed to be the result of arson intended to destroy religious imagery that was then considered pagan.
As is true in all temples, commoners were only allowed in the courtyard. Priests populated the inside of the temple and only the high priest was privy to the altar room, the Holy of the Holies, which is where the god “lived.”
The temple is shaped like a pyramid on its side, getting narrower and lower as you approach the holy of holies. The art on the inside was for the gods, the commoners never saw it. The cartouches (hieroglyphics encircled in an oval) are only for the pharaoh and hieroglyphs between two straight lines represent the names of the gods. If the depiction of the pharaoh has a straight beard it is a living pharaoh. If it has a curved beard it is a god or a mummy. The pharaohs were living gods.
Here are some pictures of the temple.
We got back on the boat and motored for the rest of the afternoon. There was enough wind to briefly put up the sails so Rick won the bet. Here are some pictures of the river.
That evening we stopped at Silsela Hormoheb Temple. It was dark, closed and we didn’t have a guide. I tried to find info on the internet but couldn’t so I will just show you some pictures. Getting off the boat was a little dicey so I included a picture of that.
After checking out the temple we had dinner. It was another early evening.