Temple of Khnum
Interesting facts
- From 2018 an Egyptian-German team of about 30 specialists spent five years removing soot and grime from the ceiling, revealing colours hidden for nearly 2,000 years.
- The cleaning uncovered a complete zodiac, from Aries to Pisces, together with the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars.
- The ceiling's star map shows the Big Dipper as the leg of a bull, Orion as the god Osiris and Sothis, the star Sirius, as Isis.
- Restorers found fantastic beasts beneath the dirt, including a ram-headed snake and a four-winged bird with a crocodile's head and a serpent's tail.
- Almost 200 ink inscriptions, previously completely unknown, came to light during the cleaning of the hall.
- Egyptologist Serge Sauneron published the temple's inscriptions in the 1960s and 1970s but never saw the painted ceiling hidden under centuries of soot.
- In the first half of the 19th century the half-buried hall served as a cotton warehouse; it was also used at times as a caravanserai.
- Jean-François Champollion visited Esna in 1828 and reported seeing the name of a King Thutmose in the temple.
- Soot from torches, cooking fires and candles over many centuries was the main reason the ceiling's colours had vanished from view.
Why it is worth it
In the middle of the town of Esna, a forest of columns rises out of a pit some nine metres below the modern streets. This is all that has been uncovered of the Temple of Khnum, the ram-headed creator god who, in Egyptian belief, created gods and humans and each year set the Nile flood in motion. Centuries of silt and the growth of the town above buried the temple so deeply that by early modern times the ground reached the tops of its columns; excavation began during the French expedition under Napoleon and continued in the mid-19th century under Auguste Mariette.
Esna, a Nile town of Upper Egypt between Luxor and Aswan, worshipped Khnum alongside the goddesses Neith and Menhyt and the god Heka. A sanctuary stood here by the 18th Dynasty at the latest, and a new temple was raised under the Ptolemies in the 2nd century BC; its inner rooms have been lost or lie beneath the houses of the town. What survives is the great pronaos, the columned front hall, begun in the Roman period under Emperor Claudius and decorated over two centuries until the reign of Decius in the mid-3rd century AD. Its reliefs show a long sequence of Roman emperors — Tiberius, Nero, Vespasian, Domitian, Trajan, Hadrian, Commodus, Septimius Severus, Caracalla and others — dressed as pharaohs and making offerings to Egyptian gods. Where Philip the Arab once appeared, his names were chiselled out and replaced with those of Decius, his rival and successor; Decius is the latest securely dated emperor named on the walls.
The hall measures about 33 by 16.5 metres, and its intact roof rests on 24 columns more than 13 metres high. Their composite capitals take the forms of different plants, and no two are alike. The ceiling is covered with astronomical imagery — stars, planets, constellations and signs of the zodiac — while walls and columns carry hymns, festival calendars and a long temple ritual. These are among the latest extensive hieroglyphic texts produced in ancient Egypt, and the priests of Esna composed them with rare signs, unusual spellings and visual puns, turning the inscriptions into a learned game of signs.
Getting there
The temple stands in the centre of Esna, around 55 km south of Luxor, about 200 metres west of the Nile. The nearest airport is Luxor International Airport (LXR), about 45 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Temple of Esna, also known as the Temple of Khnum at Esna, is an ancient Egyptian temple in the city of Esna, about 64 kilometres south of Luxor. The temple was mainly dedicated to the creator god Khnum and the goddess Neith. Other deities worshipped there included Heka, Menhyt and Nebetu.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
25.29342, 32.55622per Wikidata