Temple of Kom Ombo
Interesting facts
- Because it served two gods, the temple was called both the House of the Crocodile and the Castle of the Falcon.
- Kom means mound in Arabic, so the town's modern name can be read as Mound of Gold, echoing its ancient name.
- The Ptolemaic temple rose on the remains of much smaller sanctuaries going back to the Middle and New Kingdoms.
- Before Jacques de Morgan's work in 1893, more than half of the ruins lay buried under sand.
- A birth house built by Ptolemy VIII stood in front of the temple until the 19th century, when a Nile flood swept most of it away.
- Carving went on into the Roman period but was never finished, and some rear chapels still show reliefs only roughed out by the sculptors.
- Roman emperors appear in Egyptian guise here: Domitian on the surviving pylon tower and Tiberius making offerings on the courtyard columns.
- A small chapel built under Domitian for Hathor once held crocodile mummies and coffins brought from a nearby necropolis.
- The ceilings of the first hall show vultures and serpents wearing the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, symbols of the goddesses Nekhbet and Wadjet.
- In 2018 work to protect the site from groundwater turned up a sandstone sphinx and the head of a bust of the emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Why it is worth it
The Temple of Kom Ombo is a double temple: two complete sanctuaries built side by side under one roof, above the east bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt. Every element is mirrored along the central axis — two entrances, two sets of halls, two inner shrines — because the temple served two gods at once. The southern half belonged to Sobek, the crocodile god, honoured here as a god of fertility and a creator of the world, together with Hathor and Khonsu; the northern half belonged to Haroeris, Horus the Elder, the falcon god, with his consort Tasenetnofret and their son Panebtawy.
The building is Ptolemaic. Work began early in the reign of Ptolemy VI Philometor in the 2nd century BC, and the inner and outer hypostyle halls were added under Ptolemy XIII in the mid-1st century BC; further decoration followed in the Roman period. Among its reliefs, a scene on the inner rear wall is usually read as a set of surgical and medical instruments, and a calendar in hieroglyphs marks the seasons of the Egyptian year, among them the season of the Nile flood. A nilometer on the site measured the height of the river, which governed harvests and taxes alike. A small museum beside the temple displays several of the roughly three hundred mummified crocodiles found in the surrounding area, a reminder of how literally Sobek's animal was venerated.
Much of the temple was ruined by the Nile, by earthquakes and by later builders who carried off its stone, and Copts who used it as a church defaced many reliefs. The French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan cleared and restored what remained in 1893. The town of Kom Ombo, known in antiquity as Nubt, "City of Gold", and later as Ombos, is today an agricultural centre of sugar cane and cereals, with a large Nubian community resettled here after the creation of Lake Nasser.
Getting there
The temple stands about 3 km from the centre of Kom Ombo, in Aswan Governorate, on the east bank of the Nile. Aswan lies about 50 km to the south. The nearest airport is Aswan International Airport (ASW), about 56 km away in a straight line.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Temple of Kom Ombo is an unusual double temple in the town of Kom Ombo in Aswan Governorate, Upper Egypt. It was constructed during the Ptolemaic dynasty, 180–47 BC. Some additions to it were later made during the Roman period. In ancient times, Kom Ombo was called NBU, meaning "Gold". Later, the Greeks and Romans called it OMBOS. In Arabic, "Kom" means mound, so Kom Ombo means "Mound of Gold".
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