Dendera

The ancient Egyptins had way too many gods for me to get my head around. Therefore, as a dairy-farmers daughter, it seemed appropriate for me to have a soft spot for Hathor, not only is her animal symbol a cow, but she is the goddess of love, music, pleasure &...joy! Her cult centre was Dendara & it was here that she & her consort Horus produced their son Ihy. It also happens to be the most intact of the ancient temples remaining in Egypt. This is possibly because in terms of ancient times...this one is fairly recent, recent enough to have Cleopatra shown on the back wall, with her son Cesearian paying respect to Hathor! I was in 7th heaven here. The colours remining on the reliefs were incredible. we were even allowed to go down into the crypt, which was an experience not for the seriously over weight or overtall! It was difficult enough as a moderately tall person! We had to go down stairs backwards & crawl under a heavy stone beam backwards before emerging into this incredibly in tact crypt. Thankfully it has had little damage due to very possibly being undiscovered for thousands of years!! We felt very honored. This was the first site where we encountered a tour bus load of people, however, they cant have seen much for we hardly saw them in the temple! I was disappointed that we were only there a couple of hours, as it was overwhelmingly beautiful & I would have liked to have been left alone here with my sketch pad for a month of Sundays! Thank heavens we live in the age of the camera!!! Even though I was sad to be there such a 'short'amount of time, this experience showed me how very wise we were to book a private independant tour & not go with a big tour company, as that bus load of tourists would have had half the time we had in there, if that!