On the way back from Luxor to Berba we first passed Dendara and visited the Temple of Hathor. Dendera is a small town in Egypt situated on the west bank of the Nile, about 5 km south of Qena, on the opposite side of the river.

The Dendera Temple complex, which contains the Temple of Hathor, is one of the best preserved temples, if not the best, in all Egypt. Entering this temple from one hall to the next until you get to the Inner Sanctuary you can very well imagine how the Temple of Jerusalem looked like. A fascinating idea!

The whole complex covers some 40,000 square meters and is surrounded by a hefty mud brick wall. The present building dates back to the times of the Ptolemaic dynasty and was completed by the Roman emperor Tiberius, but it rests on the foundations of earlier buildings dating back at least as far as Khufu (known as the pyramid builder Cheops, the second king of the 4th dynasty [c. 2613–c. 2494 BC]). There are also Roman and pharaonic Mammisi (birth houses), ruins of a Coptic church and a small chapel dedicated to Isis, dating to the Roman or the Ptolemaic epoch.

There are some special designs in the reliefs which started the fantasy of some fringe authors who think that the Egyptian already had electrical energy and light.