The Temple of Horus rises from the west bank in near-perfect condition, its great pylon - the twin-towered gateway - standing about 36 meters high, its walls carved from top to bottom with hieroglyphs and reliefs. Guarding the entrance is a statue of Horus himself in the form of a falcon, sculpted from black granite, watchful and still. Inside, columns with richly varied capitals lead through courtyard and hall to the dim inner sanctuary, where the cult statue once stood. Because the building was buried so completely and so early, its roof, its chambers, even its inscriptions survived where other temples were quarried away or weathered to ruin. To walk through Edfu is to walk through a complete ancient Egyptian temple, not a reconstruction of one.

Edfu is ancient, but the temple standing today is not. It was built by the Ptolemies, the Greek dynasty descended from one of Alexander the Great's generals, who ruled Egypt for nearly three centuries. Construction began on 23 August 237 BC and continued, on and off, for some 180 years, finishing around 57 BC - in the reign of Cleopatra VII's father, Ptolemy XII. That makes Edfu a curious thing: a thoroughly Egyptian temple, raised to an Egyptian god in the old style, by foreign kings who wished to be seen as pharaohs. The Greeks called the town Apollonopolis Magna, identifying Horus with their own god Apollo, and the temple's reliefs record Ptolemaic rulers performing rites that stretched back thousands of years before them.

Once a year, the falcon-god received a visitor. In the Festival of the Beautiful Reunion, the cult statue of the goddess Hathor was carried by boat upriver from her temple at Dendera, a journey of two weeks, to be united with Horus at Edfu in a sacred marriage. Her barque docked amid music and ceremony, and the divine couple spent a fortnight together while priests performed rites and the wider population joined in feasting, processions, and visits to the tombs of the ancestors. The festival celebrated, among other things, the birth of their son, the young god Harsomtus. For two weeks the rituals spilled outside the temple walls, so that ordinary people could witness what was usually hidden - one of the few moments when the sealed world of the temple opened to the town.

Beside the gleaming temple lies a quieter and, to archaeologists, even richer site: the mound of Tell Edfu, the remains of the ancient town. Unglamorous to tourists, it holds more than three thousand years of continuous occupation, stacked up to twenty meters high, from the Old Kingdom through the Roman age. Excavations here - carried out in recent decades by teams working at Edfu, including a long-running project now based at Yale University - have uncovered the administrative heart of the provincial capital: a columned hall, and a courtyard of huge round grain silos, the largest yet found in any ancient Egyptian town. About five kilometers south stand the eroded remains of a small step pyramid, one of seven mysterious provincial pyramids built along the Nile, loosely attributed to King Huni of the Third Dynasty, their purpose still unknown.

Ancient writers noted a peculiar local rivalry. The people of Edfu, the Greek and Roman sources say, were enemies of the crocodile and those who worshipped it - a pointed jab at their downstream neighbors at Kom Ombo, where the crocodile-god Sobek was revered. Such town-by-town allegiances ran deep in Egypt, where each district had its own gods, its own sacred animals, and its own ancient grudges. Edfu's god was the sky-falcon, lord of kingship, and the temple's walls tell his myth in stone, including the great battle in which Horus avenges his murdered father Osiris against the god Set. Today the temple is one of the most visited monuments on the Nile, a regular shore stop for cruise boats, where horse-drawn carriages still clatter visitors up from the river to the falcon's house.