Temple of Isis in Philae
— — a temple the river had to be moved for.
Not only on a wall.
“The Temple of Isis once stood on the island of Philae, downstream of the First Cataract. When the Aswan High Dam went up in the 1960s the river rose to swallow it, and a UNESCO rescue cut the sandstone into forty thousand blocks and rebuilt it on higher ground at Agilkia. The reliefs of Isis, Osiris, and Horus came too. It reads now as it did before the water came. The boatmen wait at Shellal for the short crossing.
Temple of Isis in Philae, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Temple of Isis is the principal monument of the Philae complex, now standing on Agilkia Island in Lake Nasser, about 12 kilometres south of the city of Aswan. The earliest surviving structures on Philae date to the reign of Nectanebo I in the fourth century BCE, with the main temple of Isis built largely under the Ptolemies in the third and second centuries BCE and extended by Roman emperors. It was one of the last working temples of the old Egyptian religion, with rituals recorded as late as the sixth century CE under Justinian.
The temple is sandstone, raised on a stepped platform with a first pylon roughly 18 metres high. The walls carry reliefs of Isis nursing Horus, of Osiris reassembled, and of Ptolemaic and Roman rulers offering to the gods. After Theodosius closed the temples in 391 CE, Coptic Christians cut crosses into the columns and converted the inner hall to a church, and that overlay is still visible. Demotic and Greek graffiti record pilgrims from across the late Roman world.
Reached only by boat from the Shellal landing south of the old Aswan Dam, the crossing takes about fifteen minutes. The site opens daily, with a separate evening sound-and-light programme. The relocation between 1972 and 1980, led by UNESCO and the Egyptian Antiquities Service, lifted some 40,000 blocks from the flooded Philae and reassembled them on Agilkia, an island reshaped to match the original's profile. Visitors today see the temple essentially as it stood, on different ground.