The goddess with the cow’s ears
Hathor was the goddess of love, music, dance and drunkenness, and also of birth and of the dead, a protective mother often shown as a cow or as a woman with cow’s ears. In her fierce form she was the Eye of Ra, sent by the sun god to punish humanity. Dendera, on the Nile north of Luxor, was her main home, and every year her statue sailed upriver to visit her husband Horus at Edfu.
A temple of the last pharaohs and the first emperors
The temple you see was begun in 54 BCE under Ptolemy XII, on a site where Hathor had been worshipped for more than two thousand years. Building and decoration went on under his daughter Cleopatra VII and then under the Roman emperors. On the outer back wall Cleopatra appears with her son Caesarion, the child she had with Julius Caesar, making offerings to the gods like any pharaoh. The pronaos, the great hall at the front, carries an inscription naming the emperor Tiberius.
The pronaos has 24 columns whose capitals are four faces of Hathor, turned to the four directions, topped by a small shrine. The shape copies a sistrum, a metal rattle shaken in her rituals, whose handle often bore the goddess’s face. Many of the faces were later hacked off, probably by Christians who reused the temple. The ceiling, painted with the sky goddess Nut, the zodiac and the hours of the night, was black with soot until recent restoration brought back its blues and golds.
Why carry a goddess to the roof?
The Egyptian New Year began in summer, with the rising of the Nile. On that morning the gods had to be recharged by the first light of the year. At Dendera the statue of Hathor, her ba or living spirit, was kept in a crypt, a narrow secret room built inside the thickness of the walls. Before the festival priests brought it out, gathered it with other sacred images, and climbed the west staircase to a small open kiosk in the south-west corner of the roof. There the goddess waited for dawn, so that the sun’s rays could fall on her and fill her with new life. Then the procession went back down by the east staircase.
Both staircases are carved with the event as it happened on them. Priests in single file carry shrines on poles, the king leads with offerings, musicians shake sistra, and the menat, a heavy bead necklace sacred to Hathor, swings from their hands. The figures climb on the west stairs and descend on the east ones, so a priest going up or down walked beside his own image doing the same thing. The reliefs were painted, and traces of colour remain.
Chapels on the roof and a zodiac in Paris
The roof held more than the New Year kiosk. Six small chapels were dedicated to Osiris, the god who died and came back to life, whose mysteries were celebrated there in the month of Khoiak. The ceiling of one of them carried the Dendera zodiac, a round map of the sky with constellations, the twelve signs of the zodiac borrowed from the Greeks, and the gods of the decans. In 1821 the Frenchman Claude Lelorrain, sent by the collector Sébastien Saulnier, cut it out of the roof, partly with explosives, and shipped it to Paris. It has been in the Louvre since 1922. On the roof today you see a plaster cast.
Is there a light bulb in the crypt?
In one of the crypts a relief shows a large oval shape with a wavy snake inside, rising from a flower and held up by a pillar. Online it is called the “Dendera light”, and some claim it proves the Egyptians had electric lamps. Is it true? No. The inscriptions beside it explain the scene: the shape is a lotus flower opening, the snake is a form of the sun god born from it at the creation of the world, and the support is a djed pillar, a common symbol of stability. The same motifs appear elsewhere in Egyptian art, and no wires, glass or electrical remains have ever been found.
Where to see it
Dendera is on the west bank of the Nile in Qena Governorate, about 60 km north of Luxor, and is usually visited as a day trip from there or as a stop on a Nile cruise. The staircases are open to visitors, and you can climb to the roof by the same route as the procession. Around the main temple are two mammisi (birth houses), a sacred lake and a sanatorium for pilgrims. The original zodiac is in the Louvre in Paris. Check opening times with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
Sources
- S. Cauville, Dendara: le temple d’Hathor and the volumes of Le temple de Dendara (1998-).
- UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, “Temple Festivals of the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods” (2009).
- Musée du Louvre, “The Dendera zodiac” (D 38).
- R. H. Wilkinson, The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt (2000).
- Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (Egypt), “Dendera Temple Complex”.
