The goddess of the island
Philae was a small island in the Nile just above the First Cataract, near Aswan, at the southern border of Egypt. It belonged to Isis, the wife of Osiris and mother of Horus, the goddess who had gathered the scattered pieces of her murdered husband and brought him back to life. For the Egyptians she was the perfect mother and a great magician who could heal, and her cult spread far beyond Egypt, across the Greek and Roman world as far as Britain. Philae was her most important sanctuary. On the island of Biga next door, according to tradition, lay one of the tombs of Osiris.
A temple of the last pharaohs and the Romans
Almost everything you see at Philae is late. The oldest surviving building is a small kiosk of Nectanebo I, of the Thirtieth Dynasty (380-362 BCE), the last native kings of Egypt. The main temple of Isis was built by the Ptolemies, the Greek-speaking dynasty that ruled after Alexander, and decorated by them and then by the Roman emperors, who appear on the walls dressed as pharaohs, making offerings like their predecessors.
The plan follows the classic order of an Egyptian temple, the same one you find at Edfu: a pylon, a court, a hall of columns and a dark sanctuary at the end, where the statue of the goddess stood in her shrine. Here, though, the axis bends to follow the shape of the island, and the buildings stand close to the water, with quays and stairs for the boats that brought priests, pilgrims and offerings. The reliefs show Isis nursing the child Horus, and texts about healing and protection, linked to the Eye of Horus, recur throughout.
The last hieroglyphs
By the fourth century CE Christianity had become the religion of the Roman Empire, and temples across Egypt were closing. Philae held out longer than any other, partly because of where it was. The Nubian peoples south of the border, the Blemmyes and the Nobades, worshipped Isis too and came to the island on pilgrimage. According to the Byzantine historian Priscus, a treaty of 453 CE even allowed them to take the statue of the goddess south on certain occasions.
On 24 August 394 CE a priest named Esmet-Akhom carved an image of the Nubian god Mandulis and a short text next to it in hieroglyphs. It is the last dated hieroglyphic inscription known. A few more decades of inscriptions in demotic, the cursive script of everyday writing, followed, the last of them dated 452. Then nobody could write the old signs any more, and they remained unread until Champollion deciphered them in 1822, helped by an obelisk from Philae whose Greek and hieroglyphic texts gave him the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra.
Around 537 CE the emperor Justinian ordered the temple closed. The statues were taken away, and part of the temple became a church: you can still see crosses carved into the reliefs, and some of the figures of the gods were chiselled away.
An island under water
In 1902 the British built the first dam at Aswan, just downstream. For most of the year the water behind it covered Philae, and visitors explored the temple by rowing boat among the tops of the columns. When the much larger High Dam was planned in the 1960s, the island was in danger of being flooded forever and destroyed by the constant changes in water level.
Philae was rescued by the same campaign that saved Abu Simbel, led by UNESCO. Between 1977 and 1980 engineers surrounded the island with a coffer dam, pumped it dry, cut the buildings into about 40,000 blocks and rebuilt them on Agilkia, an island higher up nearby, whose rock was blasted and reshaped to look like the original. The temples stand in the same order and orientation as before.
Where to see it
Philae is on Agilkia Island, a few kilometres south of Aswan. Motorboats leave from the Shellal landing for the short crossing. The temple of Isis, the kiosk of Trajan and the smaller temples can all be seen in a couple of hours, and in the evening there is a sound-and-light show. Check times and prices with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae” and the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia (1960-1980).
- J. Dijkstra, Philae and the End of Ancient Egyptian Religion (2008).
- E. Vassilika, Ptolemaic Philae (1989).
- Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (Egypt), “Philae Temple”.
- UCL, Digital Egypt for Universities, “Philae”.
