Agilkia Island and the Temples of Philae

The motorboat engine drops to a low hum, and the water of the Nile turns glassy and dark. Granite boulders rise from the river on every side, smooth and rounded, almost black where the water has polished them. Then the boat turns, and pale sandstone columns appear above the palms. This is Agilkia Island. The temples standing here once stood on a different island altogether.

That is the first surprise of this place. The temples you are about to walk through were built on Philae, a small island a short distance away. For most of their long life, they stood there. What you see today is a careful rebuilding. Every wall, column and gateway was taken apart and carried here, block by block, in the 1970s. Agilkia itself was reshaped so the temples would sit on the land almost as they once did.

Why move a whole sacred island? The answer is water. In the early twentieth century, the British built the first Aswan Dam downstream. For much of each year, the river rose and flooded Philae. Travellers rowed boats between the half-drowned columns, and some found it beautiful. But the floods were slowly damaging the stone. Then came the much larger High Dam in the 1960s. It threatened to put Philae underwater for good.

So an international rescue began, led by Egypt and UNESCO, the cultural agency of the United Nations. Engineers built a temporary wall around Philae and pumped the water out. Workers cleaned, numbered and cut the monuments into tens of thousands of blocks. Each block was shipped across and set back in place on this higher ground. The work finished around 1980. Look closely at some walls and you can still see fine lines where the stones were cut and joined again.

As you step off the boat, the first thing to meet you is a slender hall of columns near the southern tip. This is one of the oldest standing parts of the complex, linked to the pharaoh Nectanebo the First in the fourth century before Christ. Most of what follows is younger. The great building work here came later, under the Ptolemies — the Greek-speaking dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great — and then under the Romans.

Walk north along the long open court, framed by colonnades on both sides. The columns are not all the same. Their tops, called capitals, flower into different plant forms — papyrus, lotus, palm. Some still hold faint traces of ancient paint. At the end of the court rises the first great pylon, a towering gateway shaped like two sloping walls. Huge carved figures cover its face.

The main temple belongs to Isis, the mother goddess of ancient Egypt. In myth, she gathered the scattered body of her husband Osiris and restored him to life. Her son was Horus, the falcon god of kingship. Legend placed the burial place of Osiris on Bigeh, the rocky island just across the water. Philae became the place where Isis watched over him. Pilgrims came here from across Egypt and from Nubia, the land to the south.

Here is a detail many visitors walk straight past. Philae was one of the last places where the old Egyptian religion survived. Long after most temples had fallen silent, priests still worked here. The last known inscription written in hieroglyphs, dated to the late fourth century after Christ, was carved on these walls. Scribes kept writing in demotic, a later everyday script, for decades after that. In a quiet way, this island marks the end of a writing system that lasted thousands of years.

The end came in the sixth century. The Byzantine emperor Justinian ordered the temple closed. Christians later used parts of it as a church. Inside, you can see the results. Small crosses are cut into the old carvings. Many faces of gods and kings have been deliberately chipped away. Some walls carry both layers at once — an ancient goddess, and a Christian cross carved beside her.

The stone carries more recent visitors too. Inside the gateway of the first pylon, look for a French inscription. It records the arrival of Napoleon's soldiers during the expedition to Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century. Elsewhere, nineteenth-century travellers scratched their names and dates into the walls. Today we would call it vandalism. Yet these marks now form their own small history of who came here, and when.

To the side of the main temple stands the birth house, called a mammisi. It celebrates the birth of Horus, and its walls show Isis nursing her young son in the marshes. Nearby, the small Temple of Hathor has some of the most cheerful carvings on the island. Look for the god Bes, a short, bearded figure who protected families and childbirth. Here he plays music and dances.

Then walk to the eastern edge of the island, beside the water. Here stands the building most people photograph: the Kiosk of Trajan, a Roman emperor. Its tall columns hold up nothing at all now. It probably once had a wooden roof. Locals have long called it Pharaoh's Bed. In the late afternoon, the low sun turns its sandstone a warm honey colour against the blue river.

It is worth slowing down for a moment here. Behind you are temples built by Greek kings and Roman emperors for an Egyptian goddess. They were then used by Christians, marked by French soldiers, flooded by a British dam, and finally rescued by an international team. Few places carry so many hands on a single set of stones. And all of it was moved here, so it could keep standing.

Before you return to the boat, find a quiet spot near the water's edge. Listen to the small waves against the granite and the calls of birds in the reeds. Look across to Bigeh, the island of the old myth. Somewhere below that water is the original Philae, now empty. As the boat pulls away, turn around once more. Watch the columns grow smaller against the sky.