Temple of Hathor, Dendera
About
The great temple of Hathor at Tentyra rises inside a mudbrick enclosure on the west bank, its hypostyle hall carried on twenty-four sandstone columns whose capitals all wear the goddess's face. Building began around 54 BCE and never really stopped: the hall was finished under Tiberius, and in 117 CE masons are still cutting reliefs that show Roman emperors dressed and titled as pharaohs, making offerings to Egyptian gods. A birth house for Hathor's son is going up at the front of the site. Crypts below hold the cult statues, and a sanatorium beside the sacred lake takes pilgrims hoping for a cure.
What happened here
The building itself is a house for the god, and most people never go inside. Everything public happens on the steps and at the altar in front: an animal led up, examined, killed cleanly, its organs read, the meat divided and eaten. The priest covers his head and a flute player keeps up a noise so no ill-omened word is heard. Worshippers leave what they can afford — a terracotta figure, a coin, a model of the body part they want healed — and the accumulated clutter is periodically cleared and buried on site. On festival days the doors are opened and the cult statue is dressed, garlanded, and sometimes carried out through the streets. The temple also holds money, which is why towns keep their treasury in one.
In ancient writing
- Strabo, Geography 17.1.45
Strabo describes Tentyra (Dendera) and its people's ritual hostility toward crocodiles, unlike neighboring Egyptians, and notes that at Tentyra the goddess Aphrodite (Hathor) is worshipped, with a temple of Isis behind her shrine.
Sources
Nearby
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