I seemed to develop a lot of favorites while visiting the temple at Edfu. For example, this is my favorite photo of Rob attempting to become a local. :) Hahaha. The tricky part about visiting temples in Egypt is that you are funneled through the souvenir shops where Egyptian men do everything in their ability to sell their goods. At Edfu they went so far as to put scarves and head wrappings on us as we walked to the temple knowing that they would catch us as we left a few hours later. That's when the "no, thank you" phrase in Arabic came in very handy. Anyway, I think the temple just behind Rob is one of my favorite temples in all of Egypt. The temple is very well preserved and it is dedicated to the god Horus (again, probably my favorite Egyptian gods).
Horus is usually depicted as a falcon-headed man wearing the crown of both upper and lower Egypt as a symbol of kingship over the entirety of Egypt. You can see Horus on the photo above, he is pictured second from the left and second from the right. Also, I posed with Horus at the entrance of the temple in the photo at the left.
The columns within this temple were beautiful! Each column capital seemed to be unique and was a depiction of a plant. I can't for the life of me understand why the Greeks didn't continue to use these types of capitals for their temples in Greece. Ionic and Doric are so boring in comparison. Egyptian column capitals are where it's at!
Hieroglyphs covered almost every square inch of this temple. Check out these hieroglyphs. To me, they look like they could have been carved yesterday. So cool!
Horus!
This final photo is a bit more difficult to figure out. It is a photograph of a ceiling with the female goddess Nut wrapping around the outer edge. Here she is depicted as a star covered human arching over the Earth. Her hands start at the bottom left corner, her head is at the top left corner, while her legs wrap around the top and come down to the lower right corner of the photo.
No comments:
Post a Comment