Trajan’s Kiosk, or Pharaoh’s Bed (summer house?) as known to the locals, is a hypaethral (non-roofed) temple that is located nowadays along with the entire temple complex of Philae on Agilkia Island in the reservoir of the Old Aswan Dam on River Nile, southern (ancient Upper) Egypt.
The temple is attributed to Roman emperor Trajan (98 – 117 AD), depicted as Pharaoh on some interior reliefs(1), but a good part of the structure was apparently already built during the reign of Augustus around a century or even more earlier.
Standing about 16m high, as well as 20m long and 15m wide, it originally served as a prelude to the Philae temple complex on the namesake island before it was all relocated to its current place so as to be saved from the rising waters of the Nile due to the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s.
Sockets within the structure’s architraves suggest that it was probably timber-roofed shaping a slight vault in ancient times. It presents a rectangular room encompassed with a screening wall bound together by fourteen columns that feature lotus-shaped capitals in a 4 x 5 pattern, with entrances on the eastern and western side.
Here is a look at the layout of the complex of the Luxor Temple, or Ipet Resyt as it was in ancient Egyptian, on the east bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt.
Albeit Ipet Resyt is generally given as spelling ‘southern sanctuary,’ I feel that the proper interpretation of the name would actually be ‘Sanctuary of Ipet.’
Ipet, or Opet or Ipy, was an Egyptian goddess that was considered a protector of the Pharaoh himself as well as mother of Osiris in the local (Theban) theology.
According to ancient historians, as well as mythology, the Thebes (Thebai) in Boeotia (central nowadays Greece) gained their name from their Phoenician founder Cadmus in honour of his father, King Agenor of Tyre, out of the respective major city of Thebes on the Nile in ancient Upper Egypt, which the latter used to be a former ruler (Pharaoh) of.
In order to distinguish them, they were more precisely referred to as ‘seven-gated’ and ‘hundred-gated’ respectively and so they appear as early as Homer’s ‘Iliad’ for that matter.
All the same, King Agenor was more precisely an Egyptian, just as his wife and queen Telephassa, which by implication essentially renders Cadmus as such. But there was a fine line between Egypt and Phoenicia as the two considerably overlapped along the age of the second millennium BC.
The genuine Egyptian name for the Thebes of the Nile, Upper Egypt, was ‘Waset’ that breaks down as ‘Was-et’ spelling ‘City (-et) of the Was (the Sceptre of Pharaohs),’ an appellation that presents a semitic structure, since the city served as the capital of unified (or earlier of Upper) Egypt for long spells during the Middle and New Kindgom.
On the other hand, the name ‘Thebes’ probably comes from an earlier form of much later demotic Egyptian ‘tꜣ jpt,’ or even ‘tꜣ jpy,’ that was likely pronounced as ‘Ta(w)`jpet,’ and reads ‘Land/Place of the Temple.’ The sequence of ‘jpt/y’ stressed in the second component of the name effects a sound similar to ‘-be’ I should add here.
And I allude to the latter since ‘Θήβαι (Thebai/Thebes),’ which actually didn’t share the exact same location as modern Theba (central nowadays Greece), in Hellenic would be pronounced as ‘tε:-ba-i’ (probably level-stressed) since ‘θ’ was voiced as aspirated ‘t’ and ‘β’ as ‘b’ where the diphthong ‘ai’ was rendered as ‘a-i’ (as the two vowels separately that is).
Seeing that the name ‘Thebes’ of the Boeotian city came from the Phoenicians, it most likely descended from an intermediate Phoenician rendering of an earlier form of demotic Egyptian ‘tꜣ jpy’ ή ‘tꜣ jpy.’
After all, the Hyksos that prevailed and ruled over a large part of, mainly Lower, Egypt for about 150 to 180 years between roughly 1710 or 1680 and 1540 BC were largely Canaanites as were the Phoenicians, which draws that the two most likely substantially overlapped.
But Canaanites already settled in considerable numbers in the eastern Delta of the Nile as early as the Twelfth Dynasty (Middle Kingdom) and 20th century BC, around the same time that Cadmus was thought to have lived.
Consequently, the Boeotian Thebes most certainly bear the same meaning of ‘Land/Place of the Temple’ in accord with the namesake Egyptian city whilst the plural form of the name (Thebai/Thebae/Θήβαι) rather falls in tune with the respective forms of ‘Athenae’ (Athenai/Αθήναι) and Mycenae (Mykē̂nai/Μυκήναι) among others.
The main interpretation attributed is that the plural form was rather due to a sisterhood of probably priestesses (under the respective name) devoted to the cult of the (principal) goddess of a city who in this case (Thebes) would bear the epithet ‘Thebe’ (Θήβη, rendered as ‘Tε:bε:’ in Hellenic), spelling ‘the goddess/lady of Thebes.’
Who, in turn, would be most likely Phrygian supreme goddess Cybele as she was venerated as principal goddess in the Thebes and quite likely as early as the Mycenaean era.
The legendary heroine Thebe that is linked with the Boeotian Thebes seems to be also Asian as daughter of Prometheus (see relative post) where there was a respective Thebe, daughter of Nile and therefore Egyptian, associated with the Egyptian city.
For that matter, there was an Egyptian local goddess named Waset venerated in the Egyptian Thebes (named also Waset by the Egyptians), Amun’s first consort at that, that may correspond to the latter Thebe spelling that this could be a conception coming all the way from Egypt as well.
This is a reconstruction of ancient Thebes as it would likely look during the reign of Ramesses II (or the Great) between 1279 and 1213 BC, Nineteenth Dynasty in the New Kingdom.
Since about 1500 BC, the city was likely the largest in the (at least known) world boasting a population or around 75000 people and remained so until the late 10th century BC.
This is the fabulous Funerary Stele of Amenemhat, made of painted limestone, that was discovered during excavations at the necropolis of El-Assassif, on the West Bank near Luxor, by the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York in 1915-1916.
Measuring 50cm in length and 30cm high, the stele still remarkably retains the brightness of its colours after about 4000 years since it dates back to the 11th Dynasty, Middle Kingdom, and around 2000 BC.
Amenemhat was a high-ranked official that lived around that time whose name apparently spells ‘Amen (Amun) is at the fore’ (although I am not convinced this is a correct interpretation).
On the stele, he appears to be sitting on a long bench along with his son, Antef, in the middle and his wife, Ly, on the far left in a moment of intimacy and affection while his daughter-in-law Hapy is standing on the far right apparently showing deep emotion with her hand over her heart.
There is also a table heaped with goods as offerings for the hearafter while there is a hieroglyphic inscription on top invoking Osiris, god of the afterlife, to provide for the honourable couple, Amenemhat and Ly, in a trademark motif of a funerary stele.
The artefact is nowadays to be seen at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
PS The final component ‘-hat’ in Amenemhat’s name also means ‘forehead, brow’ so I wonder whether his name actually spells, ‘Amen’s vision/eye,’ since the forehead is also connected to the so-called third eye and vision.
Nekhbet, or alternatively Nekhebet, was an early predynastic goddess depicted as a griffon vulture who was initially the patron deity of the city of Nekheb (El Kab), hence her name meaning ‘She of Nekheb,’ on the east bank of the Nile and eventually became the guardian of the entire Upper Egypt.
Just like Horus, she was also often shown to grasp the Shen (Spheres), standing for eternal protection, in her claws hovering with her wings spread, many times over a royal image, while later she would often appear together with her counterpart Wadjet of Lower Egypt as the Two Ladies (Nebty), the two guardians of Egypt once unified.
Thereby, the two guardian goddesses appeared in a combined, double uraeus as a vulture (Nekhbet) and a cobra (Wadjet) respectively on top of the crown or headdress of the Pharaoh representing union while they oversaw the keeping of the laws, protected both the rulers and the land as well as promoting peace thereover.
Nekhbet was often called as ‘Hedget,’ namely the White Crown of Upper Egypt, and would also take the shape of a woman, or a woman with the head of a vulture, wearing the White Crown further holding a lotus flower (rebirth), wreathed with a cobra, along with an ankh (symbol/key of life). As a vulture, she could also be seen bearing Ma’at’s Feather, representing truth.
The shrine of Nekhbet at Nekheb was among the earliest known temples across the entire Egypt as the city was a companion to Nekhen, standing on the west bank of the Nile, which shaped the political and religious capital of Upper Egypt towards the end of the Predynastic Era (pre c. 3150 BC) and likely into the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3150 – 2686 BC).
Nekheb actually carried the exonym Eileithyiapolis, spelling ‘the city of goddess Eileithyia,’ among the Helenes (or Hellenes) et al which means that they identified Eileithyia, associated particularly with the island of Crete, with Nekhbet as the latter was also held as a (originally royal) mother goddess, occasionally depicted as a wet-nurse suckling the Pharaoh himself, as well as protector of (initially royal) pregnant women, childbirth and children.
Sometimes, Nekhbet appeared as consort to god Hapi, since a patron of Upper Egypt himself, but was also associated with Horus, whose cult centre was Nekhen for that matter, alongside whom she fought in the shape of a winged cobra against Seth. But she was also linked with Mut, a mother goddess in her own right, as well as bovine goddess Hathor, divine mother of both Horus and Ra.
The above pictured pendant in the shape of Nekhbet is part of Tutankhamun’s treasure which was found in the tomb of the famous Egyptian Pharaoh (ruled between roughly 1332 and 1323 BC), suspended from his very neck, in the Valley of the Kings by Howard Carter in 1922.
Breaking through History 