Temple of Kom Ombo Tours & Tickets

Kom Ombo is the temple you arrive at by boat, up a flight of steps, usually in the late afternoon with the light going orange. It stands on a bend of the Nile between Edfu and Aswan, directly above the water with nothing between the river and the stone, and the approach is the best of any temple in Egypt. Cruise boats moor at the bank and you walk up.

The building is unique in Egypt for a simple reason: it is two temples in one, built as a perfect mirror. Every element is doubled. Two entrances, two courts, two colonnades, two sanctuaries, running side by side along a central axis that divides the building exactly in half.

Two gods, one building

The southern half belongs to Sobek, the crocodile god, and the northern half to Haroeris, Horus the Elder. They were not natural companions. Sobek is associated with the river's danger and fertility; Horus the Elder with the sky and with healing. Housing them together in one perfectly symmetrical building was a piece of theological diplomacy, giving two local cults equal standing without either taking precedence.

Walk up one side and back down the other and the symmetry becomes obvious and slightly uncanny. Egyptian temples are almost always single-axis buildings that narrow towards one sanctuary. This one refuses to choose.

The temple is Ptolemaic, begun in the second century BC and added to under the Romans, so like Edfu and Dendera it is late work by Egyptian standards, which is why so much of the carving is crisp.

The medical instruments relief

The most photographed thing at Kom Ombo is a panel on the rear wall showing what appear to be surgical instruments: scalpels, forceps, suction cups, scales, a set of objects laid out in rows.

It is genuinely a remarkable carving and worth queuing for, though it is worth knowing that its interpretation is debated. Many Egyptologists read it as surgical equipment, consistent with Haroeris being a healing god and with the temple having a sanatorium function. Others read at least some of the objects as ritual implements for temple ceremonies rather than medical use. Both readings can be true of the same toolkit, since the line between temple ritual and healing was not one the Egyptians drew.

Nearby is a calendar relief listing festivals and the offerings due on each, and a Nilometer, a stepped well shaft used to gauge the flood.

The crocodiles

Next to the temple is a small museum holding mummified crocodiles recovered from the local necropolis, some of them very large, displayed in a single dim room. Sobek's sacred animals were raised, venerated, and mummified in numbers.

It takes ten minutes, it is usually included in your ticket or costs very little extra, and it is the sort of thing people remember longer than another row of columns. Go in.

Visiting from a cruise

Nearly every Luxor to Aswan itinerary stops here, and the stop is usually short, around an hour, often in the late afternoon or early evening. That timing is a gift: Kom Ombo is lit after dark and the combination of floodlit stone directly above black water is the most photogenic moment on the river.

Because the temple sits immediately at the mooring, there is no transfer and no negotiation. You walk off the boat, up the steps, and you are there. Of all the stops on the route it is the easiest.

An hour covers the temple and the crocodile museum comfortably. The site is compact and there is no need to hurry.

Is Kom Ombo worth visiting?

On a cruise, the question does not really arise, because the boat stops and the walk is two minutes. Take it.

Judged on its own, it is not the most impressive temple on the route. Edfu is more complete and Karnak is incomparably bigger. What Kom Ombo has is the double plan, which exists nowhere else, the setting directly on the river, and the crocodiles. That is a good hour.