Nile & Aswan

Aswan is where Egypt used to end. In the Early Dynastic Period and the Old Kingdom the border with Nubia traditionally lay here, just north of the first cataract, and the town's modern name comes, it is thought, from the ancient Egyptian word swenet, "trade".

The first town was on the island of Elephantine. In or after the New Kingdom a twin town grew on the east bank, Syene, and it eventually reached about six times the area of the old island town. Under Rome, cohorts of soldiers were stationed at Syene to guard the southern border. A Greek scholar used it too: Eratosthenes, director of the Library of Alexandria, calculated the circumference of the earth from the shadows cast at the same time of day in Aswan and in Alexandria.

Aswan's granite was quarried for obelisks, and the Unfinished Obelisk still lies in its quarry. In our judgement the twentieth century changed the river here more than any earlier age: the Aswan High Dam ended the annual flood, Lake Nasser filled behind it, Philae was taken apart and rebuilt on a neighbouring island, and Abu Simbel was cut into blocks and moved.

Edfu is a town built around one of the best-preserved temples in Egypt, and around a god who was worshipped here for well over a thousand years before it was built. A Horus cult at Edfu had become prominent by the early Middle Kingdom and stayed so into Ptolemaic and Roman times; the names Behdet and Mesen came to be used for the town in recognition of its symbolic status.

The Edfu Temple itself was built under the Ptolemies between 237 and 57 BC, and its walls carry myth, ritual and festival calendars in unusual detail. Edfu also sat at the end of a road. In Roman times a branch of the desert route from the Red Sea port of Berenice led west to Apollinopolis Magna, as Edfu was then called.

Kom Ombo is a double temple on a rise above the river, built for two gods at once: Sobek, the crocodile, and Haroeris, Horus the Elder. Richard Wilkinson gives it the most spectacular setting of any of Egypt's river temples.

The town was Pa-Sebek, "the domain of Sobek", and the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities traces the name Ombo to the Egyptian Nubt, "the golden (city)". It rose to prominence only under the Ptolemies. Wilkinson records that the temple was built by troops stationed here, and that Kom Ombo was a training ground for the African elephants used by the army. The Kom Ombo Temple page follows the two gods, their two families and the people who came here to ask for healing.