Temple of Khnum (Esna)

A temple in a pit in the middle of a market town. Only the hypostyle hall of the Temple of Khnum survives, and it sits some nine metres below the modern street, so you look down into it from the surrounding buildings before descending.

Inside are twenty-four columns with capitals in eighteen different designs — palm, papyrus, lotus, vine and combinations of them — which is unusual; most Egyptian halls repeat a single form. Above them is a ceiling covered in astronomical and calendrical scenes.

The colour

This is why Esna is suddenly worth a stop. A cleaning project running from 2018 removed centuries of soot, bird droppings and grime, and the paintwork underneath came back: deep blues, greens, reds and yellows across the ceiling and the upper columns, in a condition almost nothing else in Egypt can match.

Cruise boats moor at Esna for the lock, and the temple is a short walk from the quay.

The hall was built under Roman rule, mainly in the 1st to 3rd centuries CE, on the site of a much older temple to Khnum — the ram-headed god who, in Egyptian belief, shaped human beings on a potter's wheel. The emperors' names appear in cartouches on the walls: Claudius, Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, all styled as pharaohs in full Egyptian regalia.

It is one of the last places where the old tradition was still being carved. Some of the inscriptions here date to the 3rd century CE, by which point temple building elsewhere had essentially ceased.

Scribes showing off

Esna's texts are famous among Egyptologists for their difficulty. The priests here wrote in deliberately obscure cryptographic hieroglyphs, inventing new sign values and puzzles for their own sake. Two hymns to Khnum are written almost entirely with a single sign each: one composed using only variations of the ram, the other only the crocodile.

They are readable, with effort, and they are essentially a display of virtuosity by a priesthood at the end of its tradition — the last generation of people who could write this script, demonstrating exactly how well.

Buried, and saved by it

The hall survived because the town grew up over it. Silt and rubbish accumulated until the temple was buried to its capitals and houses stood on the roof; the rest of the complex was quarried away. Clearance began in the 19th century and left the hall standing in the excavated hollow you see.

The soot removed in the recent cleaning was largely from the cooking fires of families who lived inside it during that buried period.