The Friday Photo: Our Favourite Temple?

After clambering through the pyramids, visiting the wonders of Luxor, and exploring Aswan, Abu Simbel and other Nile sites, I’m still struggling to work out what our favourite temple is.

The temple of Horus in the town of Edfu, where we ended our felucca trip, looks fairly typical from the outside, with its grandiose pylon gate framed by the ruins of a Roman chapel. But the interior is pure Young Indy.

A late temple, begun by one of the first Ptolemaic kings, the temple of Horus at Edfu was completed by Cleopatra’s father not long before the Roman takeover, although modelled on much, much older architecture. And it is quite wonderfully preserved.

We wandered colonnaded halls, the temple laboratory, where the priests mixed their scents and perfumes for their rituals, and the temple library, where they kept their sacred scrolls. We even climbed the stairs that took them up to the roof.

In the inner sanctuary, an old altar remains — complete with a replica of the sacred boat on which the image of the god would be brought out for festivals. And with the darkness only barely illuminated, and hardly any other visitors on site, we got a sense of the mystery, magic and ritual of one of the world’s longest-lived religions.