Qena, located 39 miles (62 km) north of Luxor, has a population of 1.3 million people. Sugarcane and bananas are the main agriculture product. They produce aluminum. Qena is best known as the the gateway to some of the best preserved columns and hieroglyphics at the Dendara Temple. There is speculation that Alexander died here.
Main entrance to the temple of Dendara.
The main temple is Hathor (goddess of pleasure and love, and protector of the
dead) who supposedly gave birth here to Horus’ child, Ihy. Every year a barge carried Hathor to Edfu to be reunited with Horus. Hathor was represented as a cow or a woman with the headress of a cow’s horns with a sun disk between the horns.
The temple was preserved because it was 3/4 covered by sand. In 1866, it was discovered and excavated.
Dendara Zodiac, a bas-relief sculpture from the Roman period. This is a replica. The original sits in the Louvre, taken by the French in 1820.
The Dendara Zodiac: all the signs of the zodiac can be found on the disk, such as fish, scorpions, water, etc.
Two characters holding the zodiac.
Recent digging has uncovered the possibility that more antiquities are buried beneath the temple. In the photo below, the top of what appears to be a column was discovered under one of the floor rocks.
There are still buried antiquities that have yet to be discovered.
The human figure of Hathor with cow ears tops each of the 18 columns.
There are multiple passageways leading to the sanctuary with storerooms on either side.
Next blog is the Ancient Temple in Esna
About the Author:
In 2010, Annie Coburn created Fab Placez. In 2014, she changed the name of her website to FAB Senior Travel to better define her target audience, mature travelers. In order to provide diversity of locations and topics for her subscribers, she publishes travel articles from other writers, as well as her own.
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