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The Temple of Edfu stands on the west bank of the Nile between Aswan and Luxor, in the town of Edfu (ancient Behdet, called Apollonopolis Magna by the Greeks). Dedicated to the falcon god Horus, it is the best-preserved major temple in Egypt and, after Karnak, the second largest. It is also one of the latest, built entirely during the Ptolemaic period — Greek-descended pharaohs ruling Egypt — between 237 BCE, under Ptolemy III, and 57 BCE, under Ptolemy XII, the father of Cleopatra VII. Despite its late date and Greek royal patrons, it was built and decorated in the fully traditional Egyptian manner.
The temple's survival is owed to the desert sand and Nile silt that buried it almost completely after the cult ended, protecting the structure from quarrying and weathering until it was excavated by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette in the 1860s. As a result, the building survives to an extent unmatched elsewhere: the great entrance pylon stands some 36 metres high, still decorated with colossal reliefs of the king smiting his enemies; behind it lie a colonnaded court, two hypostyle halls, and the inner sanctuary, which still contains a granite naos (shrine) and a replica of the sacred barque in which the god's image was carried. Two black-granite statues of Horus as a falcon flank the entrance.
What makes Edfu uniquely valuable to scholars is the vast quantity of inscriptions covering almost every surface. Because the temple was conceived and decorated as a single, coherent programme over roughly 180 years, its texts form one of the most complete records of Egyptian temple ritual, mythology, festivals, and even the building's own construction and dimensions. The walls record the "Myth of Horus," including the dramatic battle between Horus and his rival Seth, and the annual festivals — such as the "Sacred Marriage," when the image of the goddess Hathor travelled upriver from Dendera to be united with Horus at Edfu.
The temple functioned until the suppression of pagan worship in the Roman period; some reliefs bear deliberate damage from later iconoclasm, and soot on the hypostyle ceiling marks a period when people lived inside the buried structure.