Temple of Hibis

Sand gathers in the corners of the doorways here. It is fine and pale, and it shifts a little whenever the desert wind moves through the open gates. Underfoot, the paving stones feel warm, even early in the day. Around you, the palms of the oasis rise in dark green rows, and beyond them lie the long brown cliffs of the Western Desert. This is the Temple of Hibis. It is one of the best preserved temples from a period of Egyptian history that most visitors never hear about.

First, a word on where you are. The temple stands in the Kharga Oasis, in Egypt's Western Desert, inside the New Valley Governorate. Baris is a village in the southern part of this same oasis. The temple itself is at the northern end, just outside the modern town of Kharga. So if you came up from Baris, you travelled the length of a long desert depression. People have farmed it for thousands of years, using water from deep underground.

The name Hibis comes from the ancient Egyptian name for the town that once surrounded this temple. Scholars often translate that name as "the plough". The name suits the place. It was a farming settlement, set on the green edge of an enormous dry land. Today, almost nothing of the ancient town is visible. Fields and palm groves cover most of it. The temple is what survived, and it gives you a sense of how important this oasis once was.

Here is the first surprise. Most of what you see was built while Egypt was ruled by Persia. In the sixth century before Christ, the Achaemenid Empire conquered Egypt. That was the great Persian dynasty founded by Cyrus the Great. The Persian king Darius the First appears on these walls as a pharaoh. His name is carved in royal cartouches, the oval rings that frame a king's name in hieroglyphs. Very few large temples from the Persian period survive in Egypt. That makes Hibis rare.

Work on the temple may have started a little earlier, under the last native Egyptian kings before the conquest. Scholars still discuss exactly who began it. But the main decoration carries Darius's name. He presented himself here in the traditional way. He makes offerings to the gods, and he wears the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. A foreign emperor chose to rule through Egyptian forms, and this temple is the evidence.

The temple was dedicated mainly to Amun, the great god of Thebes, far to the east on the Nile. Here he was worshipped as Amun of Hibis. His wife Mut and their son Khonsu were honoured with him. These three gods formed the Theban triad. The builders brought the religion of the Nile Valley out into the desert. The oasis was distant, but it was not cut off from the beliefs of the river.

As you walk inward, notice how the temple is laid out. It runs in a straight line through gateways and halls toward the sanctuary at the back. Each space was once darker and more restricted than the one before it. Ordinary people stayed outside. Priests moved deeper in. Only a few could enter the innermost room, where the god's image was kept. The building is a path from daylight into shadow.

Now for the second surprise, and it is easy to miss. Look for a relief of a god with wings who drives a spear into a serpent. The god is Seth, and the serpent is usually identified as Apophis, the enemy of the sun. In much of Egypt by this time, Seth had a bad reputation. In the oases he kept an honoured place. Some writers have noticed that this winged figure with a spear looks a little like later Christian images of Saint George killing the dragon. That link is a comparison, not a proven line of descent. Still, the image is striking.

The walls around the sanctuary are covered with rows of small figures. They show a huge number of Egyptian gods and goddesses, carved in neat bands one above another. The effect is almost like a catalogue of divine beings. Specialists value these walls highly, because they collect so many local forms of gods in one place. Take your time here. Your eye will keep finding new faces, animal heads, and crowns.

The temple did not stop growing with the Persians. Later Egyptian kings of the fourth century before Christ added parts of it. After them came the Ptolemies, the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great. Roman rule followed. On one of the outer gateways you can find long Greek inscriptions from the Roman period. They include official decrees about taxes and local government. They show that this temple was also a place where the state spoke to the people of the oasis.

In the early twentieth century, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York excavated and recorded the temple. Its team published detailed studies that scholars still use. In more recent decades the temple has faced a quieter threat. Groundwater and salt rise through the soil and attack the sandstone from below. Conservation work has tried to protect the walls and stabilise the building. Look closely at the lower parts of the stone, and you may see the marks of that long battle.

The stone itself is a local sandstone, warm and golden in colour. In soft light it seems to glow. In some places the carving is crisp, and the lines of hieroglyphs are sharp. In others, wind and salt have softened the surface until the figures are only shadows. Both kinds of surface are part of the story. One shows what the builders made. The other shows what time has done since.

Before you leave, stand for a moment in one of the gateways and look back toward the sanctuary. Notice the line of doorways, one behind another. Listen to the wind, and perhaps a bird in the palms nearby. A Persian king, Greek rulers, and Roman officials all left their marks on these stones. Each one used the language of Egyptian gods. As you walk out into the oasis light, the green fields around you still grow on the same water that kept Hibis alive.