Temple of the Healing Goddess

Africa, especially Egypt, is a home to the most ancient places in the world. The Pyramids, the Sphinx, and so many more astonishing places of history, not to forget a good number of ancestral places of worship. There is a line of dotted ancient temples, most located in the Nile Valley. They range from the Mediterranean coast, all the way to the southern border with the Sudan, many located elsewhere too. One of them, but one of its kind, is the temple of Dendera. It is located to the north of Luxor, about 60 kilometers away. It lies opposite to the modern town of Qena. This is the temple of the healing goddess Hathor. It is similar to many other temples in Egypt, yet simultaneously, very different from all of them. It is one such temple which is an example particularly providing food of knowledge about rich variety of the later temples features.

Dendera is a location of a very old holy place. The astronomical alignment of the main temple of Dendera, before 5000BC, is found to be towards Gamma Draconis – a Pre-dynastic temple rebuilt during the Old Kingdom, and developed still more by the New Kingdom, of pharaohs. What we see there today marks the works of the Greek and Romans – who built the Hypostyle Hall in 1st century AD, along with the sanctuaries, that came into existence because of the Ptolemies in 1st century BC. The temple of Dendera was primarily a shrine for worshipping Hathor – a patroness of earthly love. She was a goddess who healed and provided feminine nourishment in a great way. In ancient times the place known as lunet or Tantere – or Tentyris, as known to the Greeks – which was the capital of the 6th nome of Northern Egypt and was a town of some importance – is now known as Dendera. The population of this place has graduated to Qena, across the river to the eastern bank of the Nile. This ancient temple is now a part of the ruins, lying isolated on the edge of the deserts.

According to studies conducted in recent times, the temple of Dendera was involved in several interrelated activities. Apart with being a place of pilgrimage it was also a healing destination where miraculous cures were provided by the goddess Hathor. It also used to be an ancient kind of hospital with various physical, physiological, and psychiatric therapies being practiced, that worked wonders. It played the role of the source and destinations for many festivals and processions. The Dendera complex encloses several other magical features like a sacred lake, a sanatorium where various magical healings were practiced, and, the most sacred of all, a temple of the goddess Isis. There are beautiful and knowledge consistent astrological calendars carved and painted on the ceilings with detail to seek interest of the viewers, inside the main temple of Dendera. There are some ceilings inside the temple which are in blackened condition. For information of future visitors – these blackened marks were from the cooking fires of the village people, when Napolean’s scholars had found a centuries-old Arab village established inside the temple, during their first visit to Dendera.