Esna Temple

About this place

A temple to the god Khnum, the creator who shaped humankind on a potter's wheel, and to the goddess Neith, in the heart of the town of Esna south of Luxor. The surviving temple was built in the Ptolemaic era, and in Roman times a large columned hall was added whose carving went on into the third century AD. Only that hall survives; the rest of the temple has vanished or still lies beneath the modern town, and it now sits in a pit about nine metres below street level, reached by a stairway. Its roof rests on twenty-four columns and half-columns, each with a different plant-form capital, no two alike. An Egyptian-German restoration project begun in 2018 has uncovered the temple's original bright colours beneath layers of soot and dust, so the astronomical ceiling of stars, zodiac signs and planets, and the decorated columns, look as they did nearly two thousand years ago. A foreign visitor's ticket costs about two hundred Egyptian pounds, and it opens from seven to five. Many Nile cruises stop here at the Esna lock, and it can be visited on the way between Luxor and Aswan.