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Showing posts with label Islands. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islands. Show all posts

The Temples of Philae on Agilika Island in Aswan , Egypt



In the 20th Century the island of Philae was flooded by the Low Dam. The High Dam waters of Lake Nasser completely submerged the island when it was be completed.


The temples on the island were therefor completely dismanteled and moved about 550 Meters north of Philae, between the years 1972 - 1980 AD to the island of Agilika on Lake Nasser.
Today it is still commonly said that the various monuments are on Philae Island, even though they really are on Agilika Island.
Tradition said that it was from Philae (Pilak in Egyptian) that Isis watched over the tomb of Osiris on the neighboring island of Biga. The Temple Of Isis and Horus The Child dominated the group of monuments erected between the 26th Dynasty and the Roman Period.

Sehel Island in Aswan , Egypt


The Famine SteleOn the summit of the eastern hill stands the most well-known of the rock-inscriptions on Sehel Island, known as the ‘Famine Stela’. The inscription is bruised lightly onto a large granite boulder and tells a story set in Dynasty III during the reign of the Horus Netjerikhet, king Djoser. The dating however is artificial, the text was carved during the Ptolemaic Period, shown by the style of the vocabulary and grammar and by the deification of Djoser’s architect Imhotep. It is possible that the text was re-worded from an earlier document but whatever the source, this is the earliest known connection between the names of the Pharaoh Netjerikhet, owner of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara and the name of King Djoser, by which he is now best known. The stela depicts King Djoser offering to the deities Khnum-Re, Satis and Anukis of the cataract region. The vertical rows of text below refer to the catastrophic effects of seven years of famine and drought during the reign of Djoser and how in a dream the god Khnum appeared to the king and promised to end the hardship if his instructions on the building of a temple at Elephantine were followed. The temple was duly built and a decree issued that a tax of one tenth of all produce from harvest, hunting and fishing as well as a proportion of precious minerals and materials brought from Nubia, should be donated to the temple of Khnum. No other official or administrator would be allowed to tax the people in the area designated by the king. It has been suggested that the erection of this stela was another case of political propaganda by the local priests of Khnum, on finding that the nearby Temple of Isis at Philae was gaining power in the region and that Khnum’s hold over the area from Aswan north to Esna was diminishing. Surely a decree of such apparent antiquity and under the protection of Khnum himself could not be ignored.