The Temple of Khnum at Esna

Esna is a Nile town about 55 kilometres south of Luxor, best known to travellers as the place where cruise boats queue for the lock. The temple is a few minutes' walk from the water, in the middle of the market.

Only the hypostyle hall survives. The rest of the temple is still under the modern town, and the hall itself stands at the bottom of a deep excavated pit — you look down into it from street level before you go in.

The colour. For centuries the hall was buried, then used as a store, and its ceiling was black with soot, dust and bird droppings. A joint Egyptian and German cleaning project working through recent years has taken that layer off, and what is underneath is astonishing: painted zodiacs, vultures with outstretched wings, rows of deities in reds, blues and yellows that look freshly finished. Very little else in Egypt gives you a painted temple interior at this intensity.

The twenty-four columns are the other reason. Their capitals — palm, papyrus, lotus, grape and combinations of them, in more than a dozen designs — are carved with real invention, and every column shaft is covered in text.

And the writing is genuinely strange. The Esna texts include famous cryptographic hymns, one written almost entirely with crocodile signs and another with ram signs. They are late, deliberately difficult, and were designed to be decoded by priests rather than read.

The surviving hall is Roman. Work on it ran through the first to the third centuries AD, with decoration continuing under a succession of emperors, and their cartouches are on the walls in full pharaonic dress.

The temple was dedicated to Khnum, the ram-headed god who was believed to shape human beings on a potter's wheel, together with Neith, Heka, and his consorts Menhit and Nebtu.

The potter's wheel is the key to the texts: the hymns describe Khnum shaping people, animals and even the other gods on his wheel — creation as a craft, endlessly repeated. Esna is the fullest surviving statement of that theology anywhere.

The soot the restorers removed was itself a kind of history: the hall spent part of the nineteenth century as a cotton store, and generations of the town lived, cooked and traded around a temple buried to its capitals. What came off the ceiling was, in effect, two centuries of the town's daily life.

The town simply grew up over it. Debris accumulated around and above the hall for centuries, which buried it, protected it, and left it standing nine metres below the streets that surround it now.

• The cleaned ceiling, with astronomical scenes and original paint
• The restored vultures of the entrance bay, wings out, in full colour
• Twenty-four columns, their capitals in more than a dozen designs
• Roman emperors carved as Egyptian pharaohs
• The cryptographic hymns written in crocodile and ram signs
• The view down into the pit from the surrounding streets