egypt

Temple Entrance Abydos was an important site for the Ancient Egyptians right from the beginnings of their culture. The first Pharaohs (including Narmer) were buried there, it was the capital of one of the nomes (adminstrative regions) and there were several temples built on the site over the course of the millennia. At first it was sacred to the god Khentiamentiu and during the First Intermediate Period this god began to merge with the god Osiris whose cult was rising in significance. As time went on the association of the site with Osiris grew stronger and eventually the 1st Dynasty cemetery was regarded as the site of the burial place of Osiris (with the tomb of Djer being the focal point of this belief). The best known structure in modern times is the temple begun by Seti I and finished by his son Ramesses II, known by the Egyptians as… Read More »Egypt Holiday 2014: Seti I Temple at Abydos

Luxor Temple, First Pylon Luxor Temple is one part of a wide ranging and cohesive set of sacred buildings around the ancient city of Thebes. The oldest buildings of the temple that still exist today date to the New Kingdom, but it was almost certainly built on the site of a Middle Kingdom temple (and quite possibly an Old Kingdom temple before that). Once it was joined to the Karnak Temple complex by an Avenue of Sphinxes stretching 2.5km to the north, along which the god Amun processed in his sacred barque on festival days. And in early New Kingdom times before the avenue was built this was a canal, and the god’s barque floated between the temples. I have many pictures from this temple, more than in this post – the rest are, as always, on flickr: click here for the full set. Also click on any photo to… Read More »Egypt Holiday 2014: Luxor Temple

Karanis with the modern city in the background Karanis is the site of a large Graeco-Roman town, to the east of Lake Qarun just outside the modern northern edge of cultivated land at Faiyum. It was a pretty large town, covering around 450 acres and there are still quite a lot of mudbrick structures on the site (although not as much as there were at the beginning of the 20th Century, which I’ll come back to later in this post). My photos from our visit are up on flickr, click here for the full set. Karanis Open Air Museum We started our visit in the Open Air Museum which contains pieces of sculpture and stonework from a different nearby site – Crocodilopolis. As the modern city of Faiyum occupies the same site as Crocodilopolis the pieces that have been excavated are kept out at Karanis where they can be more… Read More »Egypt Holiday 2014: Karanis

Qasr el Sagha Temple Qasr el Sagha is about 8km north of Dimai and is the site of a small Egyptian temple. We visited there after we’d been to Dimai (post) and to the petrified forest (post). My photos from this site are up on flickr, click here for the full set. The only part of the temple still standing is the innermost part – with the shrines and and their antechamber. It’s undecorated, and never did have any decoration, which makes it hard to identify when it was built. By style it is either Old Kingdom or Middle Kingdom, but there is disagreement as to which it is. The structure uses Old Kingdom building techniques with large limestone blocks cut to fit securely together without mortar. However the layout of the temple most closely matches one with inscriptions naming Amenemhat I, a Middle Kingdom Pharaoh. Inside the Temple (left)… Read More »Egypt Holiday 2014: Qasr el Sagha

The Desert If you look at the map we didn’t go very far into the desert when we were on holiday – we were never very far from either a real road or a bit of cultivated land. But we went just far enough to get a taste of looking at the desert. On the second day of desert sites we also stopped at a couple of places just to see the scenery rather than any Ancient Egyptian remains. This isn’t a very wordy blog post (particularly by my standards!), mostly it’s photos to look at 🙂 They are on flickr if you want to see them larger, but I decided to put them all in this post. The first of these stops was at a petrified forest, which was really cool. The Sahara hasn’t always been a desert (obviously!) and around 10,000 years ago the area where we were… Read More »Egypt Holiday 2014: Petrified Forest and the Desert

Dimai Temple Walls Dimai (or Dime es-Sabh) is the site of a Ptolemaic & Roman era town, on the northern shores of Lake Qahrun. Because the lake has shrunk since that time and the northern shore is no longer inhabited or cultivated the site is in a remarkably good state of preservation. It was inhabited for around 600 years from the 3rd Century BC in the reign of Ptolemy II through to its abandonment in the 3rd Century AD. My photos from this site and a few of J’s are up on flickr, click here to see the set. Screenshots from Google Maps showing position & layout of Dimai The most striking thing about the site as you arrive are the remains of the temple enclosure walls around the northern temple. These mudbrick structures are still very tall, much taller than head height, and they stand up out of the… Read More »Egypt Holiday 2014: Dimai