The Temples from Luxor to Aswan, Egypt

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Temples, temples, temples. A dizzying number of Temples exist from Luxor to Aswan and what struck me the most while roaming through these opulent stones was how humbled I became.

Five thousand years ago Luxor, known as Thebes by the Greeks, had a population as high as one million. Today, the Luxor Temple lies smack in the middle of the city and on any given evening, the locals sit with their families on the grass outside the temple to enjoy picnics. The temple ends with an ‘avenue of sphinxes’ that stretches 2.5 kilometers and leads to the largest temple in th world — Karnak.

Karnak covers an area that could accommodate 10 Notre Dame Cathedrals. The Temple of Amun has sixteen columns across and twelve columns verticle, each 23 meters high with a girth of 15 meters. Every column is richly decorated with hieroglyphics that three-thousand years ago were colored with deep reds, blues, and ochre. It’s a magical forest of stone where, while walking about, people disappear and then suddenly come into view between the columns.

Beyond the Temple of Amun, the ruins at Karnak become richly confused. The complex took about 1,300 years to build, so ruined structures exist from many different periods all the way up to Christian times.

On the West Bank of Luxor, the Valley of the Kings has 62 tombs tucked inside mountainsides. The pharoahs didn’t want their lavish tombs robbed, so they did away with pyramids and instead created opulent frescoes underground. About twelve tombs nowadays are open at any given time. We chose see the tomb of Tuthmosis III, located at the tippy end of the valley. Steep metal stairs climbed up into the mountain and then we went down a ladder into stale hot air. We walked across a plank over a large hole, meant for robbers to fall inside and never escape. We next entered a room with images of 741 gods on the walls. The Ancient Egyptians worshipped countless number of gods who were both hybrid animals as well as humans. Deities cropped up every generation and their complete number remain a mystery.

Hatshepsut’s Mortuary Temple near the Valley hid against a mountainside. The third woman to rule as queen and the first to rule as king, Hatshepsut, according to her mummy, was an obese woman with poor dental hygiene. She was also a formidable power who shaved her head and wore a fake beard in order to be taken seriously. She created hieroglyphics that claimed she was a direct descendant of a god.

We next traveled south along the Nile until we came to the place where the gods Horus and Seth met in combat for the world at the Temple of Horus in Edfu. The second largest in Egypt, this temple is best preserved. Construction began during Greek times and is not much older than the imperial ruins in Rome. Still, the Ptolemies kept the archaic style in respect for their Egyptian subjects. Today, you can still roam through a bevy of dark halls and chambers.

Further south, the Temple of Sobek (the crocodile god) and Haroeris (the falcon-headed god) in Kom Ombo is also Ptolemaic. Ptolemy VI Philometor began the temple, then Deos Dionysos added more and the Roman Emperor Augustus added even more, including the pylon. This was also once a hospital and reliefs display suction cups, scalpels, retractors, scales, lances, bone saws, chisels for surgery within the skull, and dental tools that point to a large medical sophistication of Egypt 2,000 years ago.

Finally, the city of Aswan — 886 kilometers from Cairo — is where Egypt ends and Nubia and the Sudan lie beyond. Two thousand years ago, this marked the southernmost outpost of the Roman empire. Here, we drove to the outskirts of the city and took a motorboat to Philae, the island with the Temple of Isis. Scholars say that it was the cult of Isis that initiated the idea that humans could be reborn after death. As the story goes, Isis had a husband named Osiris who was chopped up into pieces by his brother Seth. Mourning, Isis took each of her husband’s body parts, put them back together, and he was reborn.

The Isis temple was built during Ptolemaic times and the temple itself is covered with reliefs of both the Ptolemies and Roman emperors performing the customary ceremonies in the guise of pharaohs. The Coptic Christians, on the other hand, came along and chiseled off the hieroglyphics from the walls, using the blocks of stones for their churches.

The Egyptian museum back in Cairo — our last stop — displayed the mummies of Hatschepsut, Tuthmosis III, and Ramses II, among others. Alongside more than 300,000 pieces in the Museum, the mummies made the temples and Ancient Egyptian life real. Here were the actual bodies of the pharaohs. What’s more, the mummification process itself demonstrated the technological sophistication of the Ancient Egyptians.

In the end, my visit through the Ancient Egyptian temples might have been only looking at blocks of stone, but they certainly smacked down my modern day hubris. I had to ask myself: how will we ‘moderns’ be remembered? Perhaps we won’t be remembered at all, others tearing down our skyscrapers and deeming our work to be only ‘blocks of shrapnel.” But my most burning question after leaving the ruins of an ancient civilization behind was this: Do we moderns really do things better?