Edfu to Aswan · Ptolemaic, Roman
The island temple of Isis, where the last known hieroglyphic inscription was carved in AD 394.
Isis was worshipped on Philae from at least the 4th century BC, and the Ptolemies and Romans built a whole island of temples around hers: the main temple with its pylons, birth house and colonnades, the kiosk of Trajan, and shrines to other gods. Pilgrims came from Egypt and from Nubia, and the cult of Isis lasted here longer than any other in Egypt, into the Christian centuries.
On 24 August AD 394, a priest carved a figure of the Nubian god Mandulis and a short text in hieroglyphs on Hadrian's gateway: the last dated hieroglyphic inscription known. The last dated Demotic graffito at Philae was written in AD 452. The temple was closed under the emperor Justinian, in the 530s.
After the first Aswan dam (1902), Philae was under water for much of each year. When the High Dam was built, UNESCO and Egypt took the temples apart, block by block, and rebuilt them between 1977 and 1980 on Agilkia Island nearby, landscaped to look like the old island.
An obelisk from Philae with a Greek inscription on its base, taken to England by William Bankes and set up at Kingston Lacy in Dorset, gave Champollion the hieroglyphic spellings of Ptolemy and Cleopatra.
3 short, well-known texts from Philae, each with its transliteration (the Egyptian sounds in Latin letters) and a translation. Tap Sign by sign to see what each sign is and how it is read. Royal names are drawn in their cartouches.
Where: On almost every wall of her temple, often as "Isis, giver of life, lady of Philae".
Her name is written with the seat (or throne) sign, which she wore on her head, then t and the egg used for goddesses. Next to Philae lay the Abaton, a holy place on the island of Biga where Osiris was believed to be buried.
Reading: The standard spelling; the Wikipedia article "Isis".
Where: On the obelisk taken from Philae to Kingston Lacy, Dorset, England; the Greek text on its base names Ptolemy VIII and his queens called Cleopatra.
Comparing these two cartouches, Champollion saw that the sounds the names share, p, o and l, were written with the same signs, while t was written two ways (the loaf and the hand): the signs spelled sounds, and a sound could have more than one sign. This Cleopatra is not the famous Cleopatra VII, who lived about a century later.
Reading: The standard reading; the Wikipedia articles "Philae obelisk" and "Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts".
The graffito's signs are rough and partly in late forms that the site's font does not draw, so it is given in translation only.
Where: On Hadrian's gateway, beside a carved figure of Mandulis; a Demotic text next to it dates it to the birthday of Osiris, year 110 of the era of Diocletian: 24 August AD 394.
The priest's name is also written Esmet-Akhom. His Demotic note says he carved the figure "for all time, because he is fair of face toward me". After this, no one is known to have carved a hieroglyphic text again; the script was forgotten until 1822.
Reading: As read by F. Ll. Griffith (1937) and translated by Carol Andrews (1999), given in the Wikipedia article "Graffito of Esmet-Akhom"; put into plain English here for Teddy Rook Book.
Dates follow Shaw, ed., The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000); before 664 BC they are approximate. Readings are the standard ones in the sources named under each inscription; translations are Teddy Rook Book's own. The hieroglyphs are drawn in the site's font, TRB Hieroglyphs, so their shapes are simplified; where an inscription's arrangement or signs can't be shown faithfully, the card says so.