Edfu Temple

ED-foo

egyptian: Behdet

Definition

Edfu Temple is the great Ptolemaic temple of the falcon-god Horus at Edfu (ancient Behdet) in Upper Egypt. For the history of astronomy its most important feature is its temple library: a wall-inscribed catalogue listing the books once kept there, among them astronomical works on the cycles of the Sun, Moon, and stars. That catalogue is some of the clearest surviving evidence that Egyptian priests organised astronomical knowledge into a formal body of scholarship.

In Tradition

Egyptologists read the Edfu library catalogue as a window onto temple-based astronomical scholarship in late Ptolemaic Egypt. The list names books on the "periodic returns" of the Sun, Moon, and stars — that is, the cycles by which they repeat. Otto Neugebauer argued that Clement of Alexandria, writing in the 2nd century CE, had read a catalogue like this when he described the four astronomy books an Egyptian "Horoscopist" priest had to know by heart, tying the Edfu inventory into the later Hermetic tradition.

In Practice

The catalogue (recorded by Clagett, after Neugebauer) names two astronomical titles directly: "Knowledge of the Periodic Returns of the Two Celestial Spirits: the Sun and the Moon" and "Governing of the Periodic Returns of the Stars." Clement's parallel list of four Hermetic books — on the fixed stars, on the positions of Sun, Moon, and the five planets, on the conjunctions and phases of Sun and Moon, and on the risings — maps closely onto it, which is why historians treat the Edfu library as a bridge between Egyptian temple astronomy and the Greek-language Hermetic writings. The role of the priest-astronomer at temples like Edfu and Esna is attested in their inscriptions: titles such as "astronomer of Khnum" and "chief of the astronomers of Amun-Re" mark the men who watched the sky and kept the calendar, work that in the Greco-Roman period began to shade into the role of astrologer.

Historical Origin

The Temple of Horus at Edfu was built under Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II (reigns 170-163 and 145-116 BCE). Its library catalogue is reported in Clagett, *Ancient Egyptian Science* Vol II (Doc III.18 Introduction, p. 491) and Vol One (pp. 45-46), drawing on Neugebauer's *Egyptian Planetary Texts* (1942); Clement of Alexandria's description of the four Hermetic astronomy books is the linked 2nd-century-CE Greek source. The Edfu/Esna astronomer titles are surveyed in Belmonte & Lull, *Astronomy of Ancient Egypt* (§2.4).

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading