The Temple of Horus at Edfu

Edfu sits on the west bank between Luxor and Aswan, and almost everyone arrives on a Nile cruise. The temple is a short calèche ride from the mooring.

It is the most complete ancient temple in Egypt. Where other sites are roofless shells, Edfu still has its ceilings, its inner rooms, its gateways and its doors' pivot holes.

Completeness is the whole point. Walking into Edfu is the closest you will come to understanding what an Egyptian temple was as a building rather than as a ruin: a bright open forecourt, then a darker hall, then a darker one, and finally a small black sanctuary at the centre where only the priesthood went. The light drops step by step as you walk in. That gradient is the design and it only survives here.

The walls carry the most complete surviving account of Egyptian temple ritual — the founding of the building, the daily service, the festival calendar — because they were inscribed at a moment when the priesthood was consciously writing everything down.

The black granite falcon at the entrance, wearing the double crown, is the single most photographed statue on the Nile cruise route, and it deserves it.

Edfu is Ptolemaic. It was begun in 237 BC and finished around 180 years later, in the reigns of the Greek kings who ruled Egypt after Alexander. That makes it about a thousand years younger than Karnak.

It was built on the site of a much older temple, in the traditional Egyptian style rather than a Greek one — the Ptolemies used Egyptian religious architecture deliberately, to rule as pharaohs.

The work went in stages under different kings. Ptolemy III laid the foundations, the inner rooms were finished under Ptolemy IV in 212 BC, and a revolt in Upper Egypt halted the site for about twenty years. The pylon and enclosure wall were finished only in 57 BC, under Cleopatra VII's father.

It survived because it was buried. Sand and then the village of Edfu covered it almost to the tops of the walls, and it was excavated in the 1860s by Auguste Mariette. Photographs from before the clearance show houses built on the temple roof.

The reliefs record the Festival of the Beautiful Meeting, when the image of Hathor was brought upriver from Dendera each year to be united with Horus of Edfu.

Because so much of it survived, Edfu carries the fullest body of temple texts in Egypt: the building's own account of its mythical foundation, ritual manuals, and a dramatic text on the fight between Horus and Seth, who appears as a deliberately undersized hippopotamus. Publishing them took the French Institute in Cairo fourteen volumes and four decades, from 1892.

• The pylon, one of the largest and best preserved in Egypt
• The black granite falcon of Horus at the entrance to the forecourt
• The roofed hypostyle halls, with their original ceilings and soot from later habitation
• The sanctuary and its granite shrine
• The Nilometer within the temple wall
• The ritual and festival texts covering the inner walls
• The corridor around the temple, carved with the fight between Horus and Seth
• The library and the laboratory, small side rooms listing ritual books and incense recipes