We’ve reached a favorite spot of museum visitors: the Temple of Dendur. The front of the temple is dominated by two columns with floral capitals. This emphasizes an ancient Egyptian idea: a temple represents the world with plants growing from the fertile earth (the temple floor) towards the sky (the temple roof). The walls of the temple and the gate are decorated with reliefs showing the Pharaoh making offerings to deities. The Dendur temple belongs to a late phase of ancient Egyptian architecture. The pharaoh here is actually the Roman Emperor Augustus, because at that time—roughly 2000 years ago—Egypt had become part of the Roman Empire. In its function and appearance, the temple is, however, fully Egyptian.

Unlike religious buildings of modern times, the ancient Egyptian temples were not built as meeting places for people to pray. Instead, they were thought to be the houses of the gods where rituals were performed every day, ideally by the king. In practice, priests served as his substitutes. If you look inside the temple you will see that we placed a statue of a priestess to represent this. In ancient times, statues of the main deities would have been kept inside shrines in the back rooms. But during festivals, ordinary people could encounter the deities when their statues were carried outside onto the terrace overlooking the Nile.

This comparatively small but impressive temple once stood at the bank of the Nile River in Nubia, a region in the very south of Egypt, at a place called Dendur. When the High Dam at Aswan was built in the 1960s, a gigantic artificial lake was expected to flood a large number of ancient monuments. The United States helped to save them from being submerged forever. And Egypt presented this temple—one of the rescued monuments—as a thank-you gift to the American people.

This Museum wing was purposefully built to house the ancient building—so we can experience a real Egyptian temple here in New York.