The Temples now located on Philae Island in Lake Nasser (close to Aswan) are additional ancient monuments rescued by UNESCO due to the inundation of their original sites as Lake Nasser filled.
We suppose that everything that happens gets suspended for a moment in what we call “the present” and then becomes “history,” such as this account found at the entrance of the Temple of Isis of coming up from Alexandria, encountering the Mamluks at the Pyramids, then going on to the cataracts by a soldier accompanying Bonaparte on his expedition into Egypt. Compared to the tablet on which he chose to write his version of events, it seems like yesterday that Bonaparte turned the world upside down.
The repurposing of the Temple of Isis by Christians creates its own history on top of the ancients that captures our imagination and causes us to wonder at the continuous reinvention of culture and the world of the spirit by our fellow humans as they honored the holiness of this space, but took it in a new and different direction that we still struggle to understand.
The Temple of Isis contains two unusual images, above, of Hathor, the nursemaid (and later the wife) of Horus, suckling him. As you may remember from a previous post, Isis the mother of Horus conceived him after she reassembled her murdered husband Osiris from the 42 widely scattered pieces into which her evil brother-in-law Seth had rendered him. What a powerful story.
And, there are more structures on Philae Island to fit into the puzzle of times long past that continue to affect us in subtle ways.