Philae
The story of my temple
 |
Two piers besidea monumental portal precede the temple.The first
pier, that externally look over the dromo, is 45,50 m wide and 18 m high,
it has the traditional scene of the sovereign (Neo Dionisio) who
sacrifices the prisoners to the divinities (Isis, Horo of Edfu and Hator)
and it’s preceded by two lions of pink granite which were accompanied by
two obelisk moved to Great Britain between 1819 and 1830; the portal is
decorated with Nectabebo’s I cartouche and was part of a previous complex
that no longer exists. After this pier you enter a courtyard on the sides
of which there are two buildings preceded by a columnade: in the western
one there is the mammies; pariptero, and in the estern one various
outbuildings(offices and deposits), In the mammisi, formed by three rooms preceded by a pronao begun by Tolomeo II and enlarged by Tolomeo VI, Horo’s birth and Isis’s maternity were worshipped: the construction is elegant and decorated with beautiful relief (Horo’s birth, chilhood and education) and beautiful capitals that end with hathoric sistri. The second pier (32 m wide and 22 m high), has a decoration similar to the first one, but not coassiale, with a portal that goes back to Evergete II, it includes a staircase, of Amasis’s time, that preceded this pharaoh’s temple, from the XXVI dynasty, of which the foundations have been found; the eastern massive building includes a pre-existant granite mass, given by the nubian land to the File temple: the pier leads to the pronao with two groups of five colums with floral polychrome capitals and decorations on the ceiling (the symbolic vultures of upper and lower Egypt, solar boats and astronomical representations), in some architraves (the hours), on the walls and on the colums (mythological subjects) that go back to Evergete II. The naos follows which includes twelve rooms and a crypt, decorated with scenes of offering and liturgical subjects; on the terraced-roof there is Osiris’s funeral chapel made by a hall (a scene of Osiris’s embalming) and by a chapel (scene of offerings, besides the funeral, the cult for the mummy, the magic rituals for Osiris’s resurrection and his resurrection). The outside of the temple, surrounded by walls, now vanished, has paintings of offerings that go back to Augusto and Triberio. The events of Osiris’s mythwere celebrated, in the winter, with a celebration that was almost a month long and with thousands of pilgrims’s presence |
