Dendera Temple of Hathor

Dendera is the temple people leave saying they wish they had heard of it sooner. It is largely complete, it is comparatively quiet, and its ceilings are the reason to come: cleaned of centuries of soot in a long restoration, they have emerged with their original paint — deep blues, ochres and reds on figures of the sky goddess Nut swallowing and rebirthing the sun.

The hypostyle hall has twenty-four columns topped with the face of Hathor. Every one was defaced in antiquity, and the vandalism is itself part of the record.

Look for

• The painted astronomical ceiling, the best-preserved in Egypt
• The Dendera Zodiac — a replica in place; the original was cut out of the ceiling in 1821 and is in the Louvre
• The crypts beneath the sanctuary, narrow and finely carved, reached by a small stair
• The roof chapels and the staircases, whose walls show the New Year procession carrying Hathor up to meet the sun
• On the rear exterior wall, a large relief of Cleopatra VII with her son Caesarion — one of very few images of her carved in Egypt during her lifetime

The building is Ptolemaic and Roman, put up between roughly the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE, though Hathor had been worshipped on this spot for millennia before that. Hathor was goddess of love, music, drunkenness and joy, and Dendera was a place of festival — its most important rite sent her statue by river to Edfu each year for a fortnight-long "beautiful reunion" with Horus.

The stolen ceiling

In 1821 a French antiquarian, Sébastien Saulnier, sent an agent to remove the circular zodiac from a roof chapel. It was cut out of the ceiling with saws, gunpowder and chisels, shipped to France and sold to Louis XVIII. It has been in the Louvre since, and Egypt has repeatedly asked for it back. The blackened scar it left is still visible above the replica.

Faces chiselled away

The systematic damage to the Hathor heads came later, from Christian communities who occupied the temple after the old cults were suppressed. They left their own marks too — a Coptic church stands in the complex, built from reused temple stone.

Dendera therefore records three religions in sequence on the same walls: Egyptian ritual, Roman patronage, and Christian iconoclasm, one cut over the other.