Philae Temple Complex

Listen first. The motorboat engine cuts out, and the hull knocks against a stone landing. Water slaps softly at the granite boulders around you. The air smells of river and warm stone. Ahead, two great towers of pale sandstone rise from the island, their faces carved with figures taller than any person. This is Philae, the island temple of the goddess Isis. And the ground under your feet holds a secret. It is not the island where these temples were built.

For most of their long life, these temples stood on a different island called Philae, a short distance from here. In the 1970s, rising water threatened to drown them for good. An international rescue effort, led by UNESCO, took the whole complex apart. Engineers cut it into tens of thousands of numbered blocks. Then they rebuilt it here, on higher ground, on the island of Agilkia. They even shaped the new island's rocks and slopes to echo the old one. Look around. Almost nothing you see is in its original place.

The story of the water starts earlier. In the early twentieth century, the British built the first Aswan Dam just downstream. Each year, when the reservoir filled, the river crept up over Philae. For months at a time, only the tops of the columns and the upper walls showed above the surface. Victorian travellers rowed boats between the drowned pillars. They looked down through green water at carved gods. Many of them wrote that it was the most beautiful ruin on the Nile.

Then came the Aswan High Dam, built in the 1960s, further upstream. It solved one problem and created another. Philae now sat between two dams. The water no longer rose and fell with the seasons. Instead, it stayed, and it moved against the stone all year. Scholars feared the temples would slowly wash away. So the rescue began. Workers built a wall of steel and sand around the old island and pumped it dry. Then the dismantling started.

Now look at who this place belongs to. Isis was one of the great goddesses of ancient Egypt. She was the wife of Osiris and the mother of Horus, the falcon god. Egyptians saw her as a powerful mother, a healer, and a protector. People believed that Osiris was buried nearby, on a neighbouring island. That made this area deeply sacred. Pilgrims travelled long distances to honour Isis here, and her worship spread far beyond Egypt, as far as Rome itself.

Here is something many visitors do not expect. Most of what you see is not truly ancient in the pharaonic sense. The oldest standing part is a small porch built by a pharaoh named Nectanebo the First, in the fourth century before Christ. Nearly everything else came later. Greek-speaking kings, the Ptolemies, built most of the main temple. Roman emperors then added halls, gates, and decoration. They all chose to look Egyptian, and to show themselves as pharaohs.

Walk up to the great first gateway, the pylon. Its two towers carry huge carved scenes. A king raises his arm to strike a group of enemies, while Isis and Horus watch. This scene is very old in Egypt. Kings used it for thousands of years as a sign of power. Here, the man playing pharaoh was a Ptolemaic ruler, a Greek. Look closely at the faces and you will see damage. Many figures were deliberately scraped away in later centuries.

That damage tells the next chapter. Philae held on to the old religion longer than almost anywhere else in Egypt. One carving on this island is the last known hieroglyphic inscription ever written. It dates to the year 394, long after Christianity had spread across the country. Then, in the sixth century, the Byzantine emperor Justinian ordered the temple closed. Christians turned part of it into a church. You can still find crosses cut into the walls, sitting beside the older gods.

One more layer sits on the gateway itself. Inside the first pylon, look for a neat inscription in French. Soldiers and scholars of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt carved it at the end of the eighteenth century. It records their arrival. Later travellers added their own names, scratched across the stone. Some visitors find this graffiti upsetting. Others see it as part of the record. Either way, the walls carry voices from many centuries, written in many languages.

Inside the courtyard, beside the main temple, stands a smaller building. This is the birth house. Here, ceremonies celebrated the birth of Horus, the child of Isis. The columns end in carved faces of Hathor, a goddess with cow's ears. Walk into the main temple and the light changes. The rooms grow narrower and darker as you move inward. At the centre was the sanctuary, where the image of Isis once rested. Only priests could enter it.

Now turn toward the water's edge, on the east side. There you will find a graceful open pavilion with tall columns. It is called the Kiosk of Trajan, after the Roman emperor. Some locals call it the Pharaoh's Bed, because of its shape. It was probably a ceremonial landing place for sacred boats. It was never fully finished. Even so, it is the image most people carry home from Philae. Its columns frame the river and the sky.

The island also helped crack the code of hieroglyphs. In the early nineteenth century, an English collector named William John Bankes took a small obelisk from Philae to his estate in England. It carried writing in both Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Greek text named Cleopatra. That helped scholars, including the Frenchman Champollion, match names to hieroglyphic signs. So a stone from this island played a small part in one of history's great discoveries.

Before you leave, find a quiet corner near the river. Watch the light move across the sandstone. In the morning it looks pale gold. Later in the day it turns warmer, almost honey coloured. Listen to the boats and the birds over the water. Think of the long chain of people who stood here: priests, pilgrims, monks, soldiers, engineers. Each one left something behind. And as your boat pulls away, look back once. The temple still looks as if it grew from this rock.