An Egyptian Excursion – Day 3: Edfu and Kom Ombo

We left our ship at half past seven to board the tour bus to the nearby temple of Edfu. While the site’s history dates to the third millennium BCE, the famous ruins visited today were built under the Ptolemies: The work began in 237 BCE and was only completed one hundred and eighty years later. As pointed out by the introduction of Cavafy’s Collected Poems, the Ptolemies were in fact the longest-reigning dynasty of Egypt, which I find quite remarkable. This dating makes the temple comparatively young but in no way detracts from its splendour. Buried in the sand for centuries, Edfu retains its hieroglyphs, Horus statues, and some of its colour as well as the ceiling atop its massive pillars.

Our early arrival did little to help us beat the crowds, as everyone else seemed to have the exact same itinerary. The whole navy that queued with us yesterday to cross the lock at Esna had also moored in Edfu for the night, and many of these ships accompanied us on our way to Kom Ombo before continuing to Aswan. We left our ship by crossing the lobbies of four other ships that lined up next to each other by the pier. They all seemed to have the same height and proportions, though each of the lobbies had a distinct touch and furnishings. I felt concern about the number of people, as the jostling crowds bumped into the walls and rubbed their bodies on the hieroglyphs in the narrower passages. I will not be surprised if, in the future, the authorities decide to monitor the number of tourists or perhaps start closing off the tighter spaces.

Our ship left Edfu at half past ten, that is, half an hour later than it was supposed to, because we had to wait for the ships that had piled up around us to vacate the pier. We then continued upstream to the Temple at Kom Ombo. Along the way, I watched the cows graze on the Nile’s green branks as the houses grew sparser and sparser. Occasionally, there would be one with a mud-and-brick roof supported by jutting wooden crossbeams like they do at the great buildings of Timbuktu. The land beyond the banks flattened out as we neared Kom Ombo; all we saw were the rocky banks, the grass and bushes growing on them, and the palm trees jutting above the green groves right into the sky, with desert hills no longer looming in the background.

Kom Ombo came into sight at half past three, its pillars rising majestically above the east bank of the Nile. We left for the temple at four and stayed there for an hour and a half. The Temple of Kom Ombo is remarkable for being dedicated to two gods: Sobek and Horus. Sobek took the form of a crocodile and originally defended people from being killed by the beast. In later years he became the river god, and one account says the Nile was created from his sweat; some images at the temple of Kom Ombo even honour him by identifying him with the sun. This bizarre pairing makes some sense, as crocodiles were probably observed basking in the sun throughout the day and disappearing in the night.

Horus, depicted at Kom Ombo in his mature form as Haroeris, was the god of the sun, the sky, and kingship. He took the form of a falcon. Egyptian myth has it that Horus was the son of Isis, the goddess of magic and fate, and Osiris, the god of resurrection and thus the patron of agriculture and the afterlife. After Set slew Osiris, whose scattered body pieces were dutifully collected by his wife to create the first mummy, Horus sought to avenge his father in battle. The contest between Set and Horus is sometimes said to symbolise the struggle between Upper and Lower Egypt, though there is another reading that equates Set with desert and chaos, and Horus with order and the civilised world around the Nile. Horus eventually won but Set retained control over his own domains.

Kom Ombo’s focus on Sobek makes it a unique attraction among the largest temples of Ancient Egypt. In addition to its crocodile carvings, the site also houses a museum with a very interesting collection: just a few kilometres away from the temple lies a burial place where archaeologists have unearthed several dozen crocodile mummies. These can now be seen behind a glass in a dark room, where a few information boards provide basic information about Sobek and the Ancient Egyptian practice of mummifying animals associated with the gods.

Nothing very noteworthy happened after our visit to Kom Ombo; our being besieged by an army of souvenir sellers of all ages hardly deserves mention anymore. A particularly persistent boy came up to us asking “What are you from?” and I could not restrain myself from explaining the phrase to him until he said it properly. After a fleeting moment of conviction that he had found the weak link in the group, he relented and took leave with an amicable handshake. Our ship left again at around six o’clock and began its course toward our group’s final stop: the city of Aswan. We were served dinner at half past seven, but I sought to fall asleep as early as I could: We had to wake up at two o’clock the very next day to start our long ride to Abu Simbel.