the horus temple in edfu

This is by far the largest temple I have seen so far! It is HUGE! It is about twice as tall as the rest, as well as longer and wider. It is even larger then the Phillae temple. The only problem with this particular temple is it is FULL of fucking tour groups! They fill up entire rooms and it’s difficult to get any photos while they are in there. It also makes it difficult to move around the temple. Fortunately there are rooms they just don’t go in (from what I can tell so far) so needless to say I will be choosing these for meditation. I walked to the temple at 7am when it wasn’t too hot yet, but only stayed about an hour and a half before the tour groups drove me nuts, then I took a horse drawn carriage (the popular transportation option in this area) back to my hotel. I returned to the Horus temple again later in the day, about 5pm. I decided I wanted to take a carriage there, but someone with a donkey cart offered me a ride for only `1LE (25cents US) and it looked like more fun then the horse drawn carriages so I went for it :). I gave him and extra dollar at the end since the horse drawn carriages seem to cost about 10LE if you don’t haggle too long. On the way back late at night the driver of the horse drawn carriage kept telling me he wanted sex, I about did everything but told him to “fuck off” since well I did want to make it as far as my hotel, and the police officer had me pay him up front. The driver “tried” to keep going past my hotel even though I pointed it out, so I screamed “stop” and well that got the attention of all of the locals, so he stopped. I must learn the word for “lecherous pervert” in Arabic. It’s fortunate that Egyptian men seem easily intimidated if you yell at them, well most, aside from the one that threatened to beat me up in Cairo, but I mean more in the small towns. I have no idea what shy and timid women do in this country.The visit to the temple was a million times better in the evening! There were barely any tour groups! I could actually walk around and see everything! I’m definitely not going in the morning again, but will wait until about 3-4pm I think. I was actually able to stand in front of the altar and shrine for half an hour alone which was quite awesome. I even noticed the statue definitely move at one point as I was walking by later! For a moment I thought a person nearby must have moved, but I was the only person in the entire area. The temple has an extremely strong presence of Horus when the tourists go home and the sun starts to go down. I saw 3 tour buses heading there for 7pm for the last hour of the temple being open though, so perhaps the presence wanes a bit during that time. The more quiet the temple gets, the stronger the presence of Horus and the other Gods. The temple actually felt quite eerie after the sun went down, especially in the back rooms. I couldn’t hear a sound anywhere, it was extremely peaceful, but oddly eerie in some areas. Eerie in a very peaceful manner that is. The temple actually got so completely quiet at one point, I couldn’t hear a single person, and hadn’t seen anyone for about 10 minutes, and thought they perhaps closed the temple and missed chasing everyone out. It would have been pretty neat to spend the entire night in the temple, but when I walked over to the main court I saw some other people, darn! lolAt the Edfu temple there are several rooms dedicated to other Deities, such as Hathor (obviously she would get one), Osiris, Min, Ius, Ra and Khonsu. In the temple there is the library (very small compared with the other rooms actually), a room of mourning, several rooms for offerings, a laboratory, the cloth and inventory room, a secondary sacred room, the main very inner chamber (which only the king and head priest were allowed to enter) which has the statue, the hall of joy, the hall of where Horus overcame Set, the purification passageways, and the birth hall. Outside of the temple there is also a birth house.There are two rooms that have stairs which lead to the roof of the temple. I would definitely like to go up to see the roof, but was a bit too tired this evening to do so. The gates to the roof are locked, but I’m sure it’s something that a little baksheesh couldn’t solve. I hear the views are just gorgeous from up there. Over the centuries when the temple was getting covered with more and more sand, at first people were living in the temple (the homeless, they made it their home), and they were living in the main part of it. Then when the sand got high enough, they started to live on the roof of the temple. Unfortunately much of the excavation project of removing the sand from the temple also involved moving centuries worth of garbage. I do have to say though, the centuries of sand covering the temple definitely did preserve it wonderfully! I have not seen any other temples in Egypt that are even nearly as nicely preserved. Most of the hieroglyphics and images are fully intact. This is pretty amazing considering that the hieroglyphics are carved as if they were embossed, so they would be easier to become damaged. The temple is extremely high; I would say about 15 feet high in many of the rooms, and about 30 feet high for the outer walls, front pieces, pillars and so on. This makes it difficult to photograph many of the wall designs unfortunately. I don’t think the temple staff would take too kindly to me bringing a step ladder so I can see them better :>. I did bring a pair of binoculars, which I will be using tomorrow to make a careful study of the uppermost hieroglyphics. I will also be going through the temple at a more relaxed pace with more meditation.