The Temple of Kom Ombo

Kom Ombo stands directly on a bend of the Nile between Edfu and Aswan, on a low hill above the water. Cruise boats moor at its foot and you walk up.

It is unique in Egypt: a completely double temple, mirrored along its central axis, with two entrances, two hypostyle halls and two sanctuaries.

The symmetry is the attraction. The southern half belongs to Sobek, the crocodile god, and the northern half to Haroeris — Horus the Elder. Everything is duplicated. Two gods with separate priesthoods and separate rituals, served in one building, with a shared wall down the middle.

It has the best position of any temple on the river. It sits right at the water's edge, and at sunset, lit, seen from a boat deck, it is the image people remember from a Nile cruise.

The famous relief on the outer wall shows a set of objects usually interpreted as surgical instruments — scalpels, forceps, scales, suction cups. Egyptologists disagree about how literally to read it, but it is a striking wall either way.

And there is the crocodile museum beside the temple, which holds mummified crocodiles recovered from the area. Sobek was worshipped here because this stretch of river was full of them.

Like Edfu, Kom Ombo is Ptolemaic, built mostly in the second and first centuries BC on the site of earlier structures, and added to under the Romans.

The double dedication reflects a genuinely divided local religious geography rather than an architectural whim: Sobek the crocodile god and Haroeris, Horus the Elder, were both long established here, and the building gives them equal standing — twin entrances, twin colonnades, twin sanctuaries, one perfectly mirrored plan.

Crocodiles were the reason for the Sobek cult and the reason the site is where it is. This stretch of river was known for them, and the animals were kept, fed and mummified as part of the temple's business. Several hundred mummified crocodiles were found in the area.

The site was damaged over time by the river itself — the Nile eroded part of the front of the temple away — and by earthquake and by stone robbing. What stands is roughly the back two-thirds of the original building.

• The mirrored double plan, with two sanctuaries side by side
• The relief usually read as a set of surgical and medical instruments
• The calendar wall, listing the festivals of the temple year
• The Nilometer within the enclosure, a deep circular well used to gauge the flood
• The Crocodile Museum and its rows of mummified crocodiles
• The Roman-period colour surviving on the ceiling of the outer hypostyle hall
• The temple's position directly above the river, best seen from the water at dusk
• The remains of the birth house at the front, half-taken by the Nile