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Dendera Temple
The currently standing Temple at Dendera (Denderah) dates to the Ptolemaic period, about 100 BCE. It is well preserved except for the damaging of the faces of the Hathor columns by early Christians. There is a likelihood that the current temple stands at the site of an earlier one - the famous zodiac found on the roof of an upper room and now in the Louvre (Paris) shows a date of about 700 BCE. A much earlier date is attested to in an inscription that states that the temple was built according to the plans of Imhotep, which would place the building of the original temple at about 2650 BCE.
La Mort De Philae
by Pierre Loti, 1924
CHAPTER XII -- IN THE TEMPLE
OF THE GODDESS OF LOVE AND JOY
the Hathor Temple at Dendera (Dendara)
It is the month of March, but as gay and splendid as in our June.
Around us are fields of corn, of lucerne, and the flowering bean. And
the air is full of restless birds, singing deliriously for very joy in
the voluptuous business of their nests and coveys. Our way lies over a
fertile soil, saturated with vital substances--some paradise for
beasts no doubt, for they swarm on every side: flocks of goats with a
thousand bleating kids; she-asses with their frisking young; cows and
cow-buffaloes feeding their calves; all turned loose among the crops,
to browse at their leisure, as if there were here a superabundance of
the riches of the soil.
What country is this that shows no sign of human habitation, that
knows no village, nor any distant spire? The crops are like ours at
home--wheat, lucerne, and the flowering bean that perfumes the air
with its white blossoms. But there is an excess of light in the sky
and, in the distance, an extraordinary clearness.
And then these
fertile plains, that might be those of some "Promised Land," seem to
be bounded far away, on left and right, by two parallel stone walls,
two chains of rose-coloured mountains, whose aspect is obviously
desertlike. Besides, amongst the numerous animals that are familiar,
there are camels, feeding their strange nurslings that look like four-
legged ostriches. And finally some peasants appear beyond in the
cornfields; they are veiled in long black draperies. It is the East
then, an African land, or some oasis of Arabia?
The sun at this moment is hidden from us by a band of clouds, that
stretches, right above our head, from one end of the sky to the other,
like a long skein of white wool. It is alone in the blue void, and
seems to make more peaceful, and even a little mysterious, the
wonderful light of the fields we traverse--these fields intoxicated
with life and vibrant with the music of birds; while, by contrast, the
distant landscape, unshaded by clouds, is resplendent with a more
incisive clearness and the desert beyond seems deluged with rays.
The gateway (portico) to Dendera Temple,
by David Roberts.
The pathway that we have been following, ill defined as it is in the
grassy fields, leads us at length under a large ruinous portico--a
relic of goodness knows what olden days--which still rises here, quite
isolated, altogether strange and unexpected, in the midst of the green
expanse of pasture and tillage. We had seen it from a great distance,
so pure and clear is the air; and in approaching it we perceive that
it is colossal, and in relief on its lintel is designed a globe with
two long wings outspread symmetrically.
It behoves us now to make obeisance with almost religious reverence,
for this winged disc is a symbol which gives at length an indication
of the place immediate and absolute. It is Egypt, the country--Egypt,
our ancient mother. And there before us must once have stood a temple
reverenced of the people, or some great vanished town; its fragments
of columns and sculptured capitals are strewn about in the fields of
lucerne. How inexplicable it seems that this land of ancient
splendours, which never ceased indeed to be nutritive and prodigiously
fertile, should have returned, for some hundreds of years now, to the
humble pastoral life of the peasants.
Through the green crops and the assembled herds our pathway seems to
lead to a kind of hill rising alone in the midst of the plains--a hill
which is neither of the same colour nor the same nature as the
mountains of the surrounding deserts. Behind us the portico recedes
little by little in the distance; its tall imposing silhouette, as
mournful and solitary, throws an infinite sadness on this sea of
meadows, which spread their peace where once was a centre of
magnificence.
The wind now rises in sharp, lashing gusts--the wind of Egypt that
never seems to fall, and is bitter and wintry for all the burning of
the sun. The growing corn bends before it, showing the gloss of its
young quivering leaves, and the herded beasts move close to one
another and turn their backs to the squall.
As we draw nearer to this singular hill it is revealed as a mass of
ruins. And the ruins are all of a kind, of a brownish-red. They are
the remains of the colonial towns of the Romans, which subsisted here
for some two or three hundred years (an almost negligible moment of
time in the long history of Egypt), and then fell to pieces, to become
in time mere shapeless mounds on the fertile margins of the Nile and
sometimes even in the submerging sands.
A heap of little reddish bricks that once were fashioned into houses;
a heap of broken jars or amphorae--myriads of them--that served to
carry the water from the old nourishing river; and the remains of
walls, repaired at diverse epochs, where stones inscribed with
hieroglyphs lie upside down against fragments of Grecian obelisks or
Coptic sculptures or Roman capitals. In our countries, where the past
is of yesterday, we have nothing resembling such a chaos of dead
things.
Nowadays the sanctuary is reached through a large cutting in this hill
of ruins; incredible heaps of bricks and broken pottery enclose it on
all sides like a jealous rampart. Until recently indeed they covered
it almost to its roof. From the very first its appearance is
disconcerting: it is so grand, so austere and gloomy. A strange
dwelling, to be sure, for the Goddess of Love and Joy. It seems more
fit to be the home of the Prince of Darkness and of Death. A severe
doorway, built of gigantic stones and surmounted by a winged disc,
opens on to an asylum of religious mystery, on to depths where massive
columns disappear in the darkness of deep night.
Dendera Temple
from "la Description de l'Egypte".
Immediately on entering there is a coolness and a resonance as of a
sepulchre. First, the pronaos, where we still see clearly, between
pillars carved with hieroglyphs. Were it not for the large human faces
which serve for the capitals of the columns, and are the image of the
lovely Hathor, the goddess of the place, this temple of the decadent
epoch would scarcely differ from those built in this country two
thousand years before. It has the same square massiveness.
And in the dark blue ceilings there are the same frescoes, filled with
stars, with the signs of the Zodiac, and series of winged discs; in
bas-relief on the walls, the same multitudinous crowd of people who
gesticulate and make signs to one another with their hands--eternally
the same mysterious signs, repeated to infinity, everywhere--in the
palaces, the hypogea, the syringes, and on the sarcophagi and papyri
of the mummies.
The Memphite and Theban temples, which preceded this by so many
centuries, and far surpassed it in grandeur, have all lost, in
consequence of the falling of the enormous granites of their roofs,
their cherished gloom, and, what is the same thing, their religious
mystery. But in the temple of the lovely Hathor, on the contrary,
except for some figures mutilated by the hammers of Christians or
Moslems, everything has remained intact, and the lofty ceilings still
throw their fearsome shadows.
The gloom deepens in the hypostyle which follows the pronaos. Then
come, one after another, two halls of increasing holiness, where the
daylight enters regretfully through narrow loopholes, barely lighting
the superposed rows of innumerable figures that gesticulate on the
walls. And then, after other majestic corridors, we reach the heart of
this heap of terrible stones, the holy of holies, enveloped in deep
gloom. The hieroglyphic inscriptions name this place the "Hall of
Mystery" and formerly the high priest alone, and he only once in each
year, had the right to enter it for the performance of some now
unknown rites.
The "Hall of Mystery" is empty to-day, despoiled long since of the
emblems of gold and precious stones that once filled it. The meagre
little flames of the candles we have lit scarcely pierce the darkness
which thickens over our heads towards the granite ceilings; at the
most they only allow us to distinguish on the walls of the vast
rectangular cavern the serried ranks of figures who exchange among
themselves their disconcerting mute conversations.
Towards the end of the ancient and at the beginning of the Christian
era, Egypt, as we know, still exercised such a fascination over the
world, by its ancestral prestige, by the memory of its dominating
past, and the sovereign permanence of its ruins, that it imposed its
gods upon its conquerors, its handwriting, its architecture, nay, even
its religious rites and its mummies.
The Ptolemies built temples here,
which reproduce those of Thebes and Abydos. Even the Romans, although
they had already discovered the vault, followed here the primitive
models, and continued those granite ceilings, made of monstrous slabs,
placed flat, like our beams. And so this temple of Hathor, built
though it was in the time of Cleopatra and Augustus, on a site
venerable in the oldest antiquity, recalls at first sight some
conception of the Ramses.
If, however, you examine it more closely, there appears, particularly
in the thousands of figures in bas-relief, a considerable divergence.
The poses are the same indeed, and so too are the traditional
gestures. But the exquisite grace of line is gone, as well as the
hieratic calm of the expressions and the smiles.
In the Egyptian art
of the best periods the slender figures are as pure as the flowers
they hold in their hands; their muscles may be indicated in a precise
and skilful manner, but they remain, for all that, immaterial. The god
Amen himself, the procreator, drawn often with an absolute crudity,
would seem chaste compared with the hosts of this temple.
For here, on
the contrary, the figures might be those of living people, palpitating
and voluptuous, who had posed themselves for sport in these
consecrated attitudes. The throat of the beautiful goddess, her hips,
her unveiled nakedness, are portrayed with a searching and lingering
realism; the flesh seems almost to quiver. She and her spouse, the
beautiful Horus, son of Iris, contemplate each other, naked, one
before the other, and their laughing eyes are intoxicated with love.
Around the holy of holies is a number of halls, in deep shadow and
massive as so many fortresses. They were used formerly for mysterious
and complicated rites, and in them, as everywhere else, there is no
corner of the wall but is overloaded with figures and hieroglyphs.
Bats are asleep in the blue ceilings, where the winged discs, painted
in fresco, look like flights of birds; and the hornets of the
neighbouring fields have built their nests there in hundreds, so that
they hang like stalactites.
Several staircases lead to the vast terraces formed by the great roofs
of the temple--staircases narrow, stifling and dimly lighted by
loopholes that reveal the heart-breaking thickness of the walls. And
here again are the inevitable rows of figures, carved on all the
walls, in the same familiar attitudes; they mount with us as we
ascend, making all the time the self-same signs one to another.
As we emerge on to the roofs, bathed now in Egyptian sunlight and
swept by a cold and bitter wind, we are greeted by a noise as of an
aviary. It is the kingdom of the sparrows, who have built their nests
in thousands in this temple of the complaisant goddess. They twitter
now all together and with all their might out of very joy of living.
A small Isis Chapel built on the roof of Dendera Temple
By David Roberts, 1839.
It is an esplanade, this roof--a solitude paved with gigantic
flagstones. From it we see, beyond the heaps of ruins, those happy
plains, which are spread out with such a perfect serenity on the very
ground where once stood the town of Denderah, beloved of Hathor and
one of the most famous of Upper Egypt.
Exquisitely green are these
plains with the new growth of wheat and lucerne and bean; and the
herds that are grouped here and there on the fresh verdure of the
level pastures, swaying now and undulating in the wind, look like so
many dark patches. And the two chains of mountains of rose-coloured
stone, that run parallel--on the east that of the desert of Arabia, on
the west that of the Libyan desert--enclose, in the distance, this
valley of the Nile, this land of plenty, which, alike in antiquity as
in our days, has excited the greed of predatory races.
The temple has
also some underground dependencies or crypts into which you descend by
staircases as of dungeons; sometimes even you have to crawl through
holes to reach them. Long superposed galleries which might serve as
hiding-places for treasure; long corridors recalling those which, in
bad dreams, threaten to close in and bury you. And the innumerable
figures, of course, are here too, gesticulating on the walls; and
endless representations of the lovely goddess, whose swelling bosom,
which has preserved almost intact the flesh color applied in the
times of the Ptolemies, we have perforce to graze as we pass.
The Gateway of Dendera
artist unknown.
In one of the vestibules that we have to traverse on our way out of
the sanctuary, amongst the numerous bas-reliefs representing various
sovereigns paying homage to the beautiful Hathor, is one of a young
man, crowned with a royal tiara shaped like the head of a uraeus. He
is shown seated in the traditional Pharaonic pose and is none other
than the Emperor Nero!
The hieroglyphs of the cartouche are there to affirm his identity,
albeit the sculptor, not knowing his actual physiognomy, has given him
the traditional features, regular as those of the god Horus. During
the centuries of the Roman domination the Western emperors used to
send from home instructions that their likeness should be placed on
the walls of the temples, and that offerings should be made in their
name to the Egyptian divinities--and this notwithstanding that in
their eyes Egypt must have seemed so far away, a colony almost at the
end of the earth. (And it was such a goddess as this, of secondary
rank in the times of the Pharaohs, that was singled out as the
favourite of the Romans of the decadence.)
The Emperor Nero! As a matter of fact at the very time these bas-
reliefs--almost the last--and these expiring hieroglyphics were being
inscribed, the confused primitive theogonies had almost reached their
end and the days of the Goddess of Joy were numbered. There had been
conceived in Judaea symbols more lofty and more pure, which were to
rule a great part of the world for two thousand years--afterwards,
alas, to decline in their turn; and men were about to throw themselves
passionately into renunciation, asceticism and fraternal pity.
How strange it is to say! Even while the sculptor was carving this
archaic bas-relief, and was using, for the engraving of its name,
characters that dated back to the night of the ages, there were
already Christians assembled in the catacombs at Rome and dying in
ecstasy in the arena!
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