Dendera Temple of Hathor: Ptolemaic Temple, Zodiac and Crypts

The Temple of Hathor at Dendera, in Upper Egypt, is a large temple to the goddess of love, music and motherhood, begun in 54 BC under Ptolemy XII and completed under the early Roman emperors. With its roof, staircases and painted ceilings still intact, it is one of the most complete temples in Egypt. It is famous for a relief of Cleopatra VII and her son Caesarion, for underground crypts and for the circular Dendera zodiac, now in the Louvre.

Background: Hathor of Dendera

Dendera, called Iunet by the Egyptians and Tentyris by the Greeks, lies on the west bank of the Nile opposite modern Qena, about 60 kilometres north of Luxor. It was the capital of the sixth nome, or province, of Upper Egypt and an ancient centre for the worship of Hathor, a goddess often shown as a woman with cow’s ears or with horns and a sun disc.

Temple inscriptions claim that the sanctuary went back to the earliest kings, and earlier buildings certainly stood there. The present temple replaced them in the last decades of the Ptolemaic dynasty, the Macedonian royal house that ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great.

Construction from 54 BC

Building began under Ptolemy XII Auletes, with the foundation dated to 54 BC. Work continued under his daughter Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic ruler. After Egypt became a Roman province in 30 BC, the emperors took the role of pharaoh in the temple decoration. The great front hall, or pronaos, was built under Tiberius, and decoration continued under later emperors, including Caligula, Claudius and Nero.

The complex grew to include two birth houses (mammisi), one of them built by Nectanebo I in the 4th century BC and the other in the Roman period, a sacred lake, a sanatorium where pilgrims sought healing, and a small temple of Isis. In the 5th century AD a Christian church was built inside the enclosure.

The temple building

The facade of the pronaos is formed by columns whose capitals carry the face of Hathor on four sides, like the sistrum, a sacred rattle used in her worship. The hall has 24 such columns. Many of the faces were deliberately damaged in later centuries.

The ceiling of the pronaos is covered with astronomical scenes, including the sky goddess Nut swallowing the sun in the evening and giving birth to it at dawn, as well as a rectangular zodiac. A cleaning project completed in the 2010s removed soot and grime and revealed strong blues, yellows and reds that had been hidden for centuries.

Inside, a hypostyle hall and a series of offering halls lead to the sanctuary of Hathor. Stairways decorated with processions of priests climb to the roof, where the cult statue was carried each New Year to be united with the rays of the sun. On the roof stands a small open kiosk and chapels dedicated to the death and resurrection of Osiris.

The Cleopatra relief

On the rear (south) outer wall of the temple, a monumental relief shows Cleopatra VII and her son Caesarion (Ptolemy XV), whose father was Julius Caesar, presenting offerings to Hathor, her son Ihy and other gods. The figures are carved in traditional Egyptian style rather than as realistic portraits, so they show how Cleopatra presented herself as an Egyptian queen, not what she looked like.

The relief is one of the very few large-scale images of Cleopatra from her own lifetime, and it stresses Caesarion’s role as heir. Its placement on the back wall, facing the town, also allowed ordinary people who could not enter the temple to see the royal family honouring the goddess.

The Dendera zodiac

In one of the Osiris chapels on the roof, the ceiling carried a circular relief of the sky showing the twelve signs of the zodiac, constellations, planets and the decans, star groups used to measure time at night. Mixing Babylonian-Greek zodiac signs with Egyptian star figures, it is the only complete circular map of the ancient sky known from Egypt.

Members of Napoleon’s expedition published drawings of it, and in 1821 the French antiquities dealer Sébastien Louis Saulnier sent the engineer Jean-Baptiste Lelorrain to remove it, using gunpowder, saws and chisels. King Louis XVIII bought it for 150,000 francs. It was displayed in the Royal Library in Paris and moved to the Louvre in 1922. A plaster copy now fills the ceiling at Dendera.

The zodiac caused a sensation. Some scholars claimed it was many thousands of years old, which would have contradicted the biblical chronology accepted by many at the time. In 1822 Jean-François Champollion, who had just deciphered hieroglyphs with help from the Rosetta Stone, read the Greek title autokrator (“emperor”) in a cartouche among the temple’s astronomical carvings and argued that the temple was Greco-Roman. Modern study of the planetary positions dates the zodiac to around 50 BC.

The crypts and the “Dendera light”

Built into the thickness of the walls and below the floor are a dozen or so narrow crypts, used to store cult objects and statues. Their walls are carved with fine reliefs showing these objects, which allows scholars to reconstruct the temple’s treasures. The entrances to some of the crypts were concealed behind movable stone blocks in the floor or walls.

The crypts are among the best-preserved parts of the temple because they were dark, dry and sealed for centuries. Their reliefs are carved in the same careful late style as the main halls, with the king offering to Hathor and the gods of Dendera.

One crypt contains reliefs showing a large lotus flower from which a snake emerges inside an elongated oval shape, supported by a djed pillar. Since the 1960s some fringe writers have claimed these show ancient electric light bulbs. Egyptologists reject this. The inscriptions beside the scenes describe the serpent as a form of the creator god emerging from the lotus at the beginning of the world, a familiar theme of Egyptian religion.

Festivals and later history

Each summer the statue of Hathor sailed upstream to the Temple of Horus at Edfu for the Festival of the Beautiful Meeting, a sacred reunion of husband and wife lasting about two weeks. Dendera was also a place of pilgrimage for people seeking healing from the goddess.

After pagan worship was banned in the late 4th century AD, the temple was abandoned. Sand and later houses partly buried it, which helped preserve it. Auguste Mariette cleared much of the site in the 19th century, and it is now a regular stop for visitors travelling between Luxor and Abydos.

Timeline

• 4th century BC: Nectanebo I builds a birth house at Dendera.
• 54 BC: Building of the new temple of Hathor begins under Ptolemy XII.
• 51–30 BC: Work continues under Cleopatra VII; the Caesarion relief is carved.
• c. 50 BC: The circular zodiac is carved in a rooftop chapel.
• AD 14–37: The pronaos is built under the emperor Tiberius.
• 5th century AD: A Christian church is built in the enclosure.
• 1821: The zodiac is removed and taken to France.
• 1922: The zodiac is moved to the Louvre.

Why it matters

Dendera shows how Egyptian religion and temple building continued without break from the Ptolemies into Roman rule. Its zodiac played a part in the 19th-century debate over the age of the world, and its Cleopatra relief offers one of the few contemporary images of Egypt’s last queen.