The banks of the Nile are lush, lined with palms and green fields, but they are narrow, won from the surrounding deserts thanks only to the gift of fertility bestowed upon them by the eternal river. It’s the same story all the way from Cairo to Aswan, where the High Dam has permanently changed the divine landscape of the pharaohs by creating Lake Nasser, one of the largest man-made bodies of water in the world, which continues south to cross the border with the Sudan. As the level of the lake rose during the 1960s many Ancient Egyptian sites, such as the Fortress of Buhen, were submerged. Others such as world-famous Abu Simbel, and the stunningly beautiful little Temple of Isis at Philae, were rescued by being moved block by block and re-erected on higher ground.

Others still were dismantled and shipped overseas—for example the Temple of Dendur, now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Temple of Debod, now in the Parque del Oeste in Madrid, and the Temple of Taffeh, now in the Rijksmuseum Van Oudheden in Leiden, in the Netherlands. By such means, the sacred realm of the gods that continuously remade and re-manifested itself in Egypt over untold thousands of years in antiquity can be said still to undergo resurrection and rebirth in far-off lands even today.

So it was, too, according to its own inscriptions, with the Temple of Horus at Edfu. Known as Behdet in ancient times (hence its patron, the falcon god Horus, is often referred to as Horus the Behdetite) Edfu stands on the west bank of the Nile 110 kilometers (68 miles) north of Aswan and was thus spared from flooding by Lake Nasser. The temple as we see it today, its golden sandstone blocks radiant and graceful beneath the fierce sun of Upper Egypt, is relatively young, the whole complex having been completed during the Ptolemaic period in a series of stages between 237 BC and 57 BC. 1 In every meaningful sense, however, what confronts us here is merely the latest incarnation of much older temples that previously occupied this site dating at least to the Old Kingdom (2575-2134 BC) 2
full text
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/05/part-5-magicians-of-godsisland-of.html