Dendara

In talking with other travellers, we have heard about a temple off the beaten tourist track called Dendara that is supposed to be very unique. We booked a driver to take us there as we didn’t feel that we needed a guide but we needed to get there! Dendara is located north of here and it takes about 1 1/2 hours through the countryside to get there.

In its time, Dendara, in addition to being a holy place of pilgrimage to honor the goddess Hathor, was also the place where the sick went to seek healing.

The driver, Allah, picked us up at 8 a.m. The drive was pleasant once we left Luxor, through green fields of sugar cane, bananas and alfalfa. Donkeys pulled little carts filled with everything from tires, to people, to crates of vegetables. At one point we went through a desert with small plots of fertile farmland. How does that work?

Dendara (there are many different spellings of this place) has many different styles through many different periods of Egyptian art. The walls of the temples are absolutely covered in artwork!

After passing through the main gate, we saw one Birth Temple that was built during Roman times, 98 AD. Then we entered the ruins of a Coptic, Christian, church before entering another older Birth Temple build by an Egyptian pharaoh in 380 BC. These temples celebrated divine births of pharaohs and gods.

The main temple, which is mostly intact, was dedicated to Hathor, mother of the gods. The pictures on the walls show a beautiful woman with a sun on her head within cow horns. Within the temple, there are 24 huge columns. The first 6 are topped with Hathor’s head. The Christians defaced them but it is still an impressive sight.

We saw workers cleaning black soot on the ceiling, caused by fires from cooking. They were exposing the beautiful coloured reliefs on the ceiling and then putting a protective coat of something over them.

We went up stairs and came to a room with a plaster cast of the famous Dendara Zodiac. The original is in the Louvres in Paris.

At the back of the complex, there is a small temple dedicated to Isis. It overlooks a wall showing a huge etching of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony and their son.

Once again, it is hard to describe such an awesome place. The etchings that were done on every inch of the walls and columns, inside and out, was very impressive. It’s hard to believe that the paint used on the decorations has still survived since 2320 B.C. and imagine, we had the opportunity to touch them!

The trip home was uneve

Our driver, Allah, was excellent. He gave us his WhatsApp number so we won’t have to go through a tour agency. If need be, we will contact him to drive us to Hurghada on the Red Sea, when we return to Luxor, in two weeks’ time.Read more