Kom Ombo | R. Doug Wicker

Rather than just post the usual Fun Photo Friday photo gallery/slide show, today I’ll post each photograph individually with a brief caption. I believe that’ll give you more enjoyment since there’s a lot here along the River Nile to take in. In today’s offerings I’ll be concentrating on the Temple of Kom Ombo and images taken as we cruised the River Nile aboard the Jaz Celebrity with our guide Mohamad Salah. I’ll begin with:

Great Hypostyle Hall — Temple of Kom Ombo

Слава Україні! (Slava Ukraini!)

Nile Cruise — The Temple of Kom Ombo

As you can probably tell from the past several weeks, so far it’s been a hectic, fun-filled two days. And this day in particular has been a long one with our ever-present travel companion/guide Mohamad Salah guiding the way. You may recall we began this day with an early morning car trip toward the Egypt-Sudan border to see Abu SImbel. We then made it back to Jaz Celebrity and set sail northward. Later that evening we arrived just as it was getting dark to our next sightseeing destination, the Temple of Kom Ombo. This is a rather unusual Egyptian antiquity, as it is two temple in one. One temple, the southern one, is dedicated to the Nile crocodile god Sobek, who also served as Egypt’s god of fertility.

Temple of Sobek; Ancient Egypt’s Nile crocodile god

The northern portion of the complex is a tribute yet again to our old friend, the falcon god Horus. This iteration of Horus is Heru-ur, the elder version of Horus.

Time has not been kind to Kom Ombo. It has been ravaged by Nile floods, earthquakes, and Copts, who in using the temple as a church decided to deface much of the bas reliefs. And as if all that weren’t bad enough, portions of the temple were carted off for use in other endeavors. Fortunately, much remains to hold your interest:

The Stars of This Show: Horus (left) and Sobek

How did Egyptian builders tie together these massive stones? Here’s one solution showing a slot in adjoining stones into which an attachment piece was once inserted: