The Temple of Hathor at Dendera

Dendera is about an hour north of Luxor, and it is the best temple in Egypt that most visitors never see. It is usually offered as a half-day trip paired with Abydos.

Its hypostyle hall has been cleaned of centuries of soot, and the ceiling above it is the single most astonishing surface in Egyptian archaeology.

The ceiling. Deep blue grounds, the sky goddess Nut arching across the length of it swallowing and giving birth to the sun, bands of astronomical figures, vultures, boats and zodiac signs — all in colour, cleaned back over recent decades from black. Photographs undersell it badly. Standing under it is the closest anyone gets to seeing an Egyptian temple as it was meant to look.

The columns are Hathor columns: each face carved as the goddess with cow's ears, four to a capital, facing the four directions. Many were deliberately defaced in later periods, which is itself part of the story.

You can also go down. Dendera has crypts beneath the floor — narrow, decorated passages where the temple's ritual equipment was stored, including a famous relief sometimes claimed to depict electric lighting and which is, more prosaically, a lotus and a snake in a ritual scene.

And on the exterior rear wall there is a large relief of Cleopatra VII with her son Caesarion — one of the very few contemporary Egyptian depictions of her.

The temple as it stands is Ptolemaic and Roman, built between roughly the first century BC and the first century AD, on a site used for far longer.

The Cleopatra relief carries a political argument: her son Caesarion is shown as a grown pharaoh making offerings — a claim in stone that Egypt had a legitimate king of its own. Augustus, who had the boy killed, went on decorating the same temple anyway; the empire absorbed the building rather than defacing it.

Dendera also had a reputation for healing. A mudbrick sanatorium stood in the enclosure, where pilgrims came to sleep, bathe in and drink water sanctified by the goddess — one of the clearest surviving examples of an Egyptian temple working as a place of cure.

The original zodiac ceiling relief from the roof chapel was removed in 1821 and is in the Louvre; a cast is in place at Dendera.

In the Christian period the temple was occupied and partly converted, and much of the smoke damage cleaned off in the modern restoration came from centuries of habitation inside the halls.

Dendera and Edfu were ritually linked: the image of Hathor travelled upriver from here to Edfu each year for the Festival of the Beautiful Meeting.

• The restored astronomical ceiling of the hypostyle hall
• The Hathor-headed columns
• The crypts beneath the temple floor
• The roof chapels and the cast of the Dendera zodiac
• The relief of Cleopatra VII and Caesarion on the exterior rear wall
• The dry sacred lake, now a sunken palm grove
• The Roman birth house in the forecourt