A visit to the temples of Philae, in southern Egypt, is not usually among the most memorable destinations in the land of the pharaohs. It does not have the majesty of the pyramids, nor the spectacularity of the temple of Karnak, nor the epic of the Valley of the Kings. But despite this, it is a key scenario to understand the end of its ancient civilization. In a discreet corner, which usually goes unnoticed by tourists, you can read a farewell message. A cry for help “for eternity”.
It is a crude inscription on the door that led to the temple of Abaton, one of the many tombs of the god Osiris. With a hasty gesture, a priest named Esmet-Akhom engraved what is considered the last Egyptian hieroglyph. It was August 24, 394. At that time, Egypt was under Roman rule and in the midst of a Christianization campaign. Pagan worshipers of ancient gods, like Esmet-Akhom, risked losing their lives to persist in their beliefs.
The hieroglyph appears precisely next to a representation of Mandilus, a deity of Nubian origin. It reads as follows: “Before Mandilus, son of Horus, by the hand of Esmet-Akhom, son of Esmet, second priest of Isis, for all time and for eternity. Words spoken by Mandilus, lord of the Abaton, great god.”
The priest was aware of being faced with the collapse of an era and a culture, the one we now call ancient Egypt. He was possibly the last person capable of mastering hieroglyphic writing (which would not be deciphered until 14 centuries later, thanks to the Memphis decree or Rosetta stone). And with the extinction of his lineage, the cult of the ancestral gods would also disappear.
A few years before this farewell message, in 391 or 392, Theodosius I the Great had ordered all pagan temples to be closed. He himself had promulgated an edict in 380 by which Christianity became the official religion of the empire. Those who did not profess “the religion that the divine apostle Peter gave to the Romans” would be judged “insane and crazy,” and “the infamy of heresy” would weigh on them. If the temples of Philae were able to survive the purge, it was thanks to their location on the margins of the empire. Even so, Esmet-Akhom – the son and grandson of priests, at least representing the third generation – knew the risk he was exposing himself to with his engraving.
Under the hieroglyphic text, he wrote another in a simplified script – the demotic – thanks to which the precise date is known: “on the birthday of Osiris” in the year 110, which is equivalent in the Gregorian calendar – as has been mentioned – to the 24th. August 394. The complex would have remained in charge of the Esmet-Akhom family for almost another century and a half, until it was closed by order of Emperor Justinian I, between the years 535 and 538. In its place, the island passed to host a church consecrated to Saint Stephen.
The oldest temple preserved in the Philae complex is a kiosk in honor of Pharaoh Nectanebo (4th century BC). The main temple, however, is the one dedicated to the goddess Isis, which was expanded in successive phases by the Greeks and Romans. In the 60s of the 20th century, the island was submerged due to the construction of the first Aswan Dam. But in the following decade, a titanic rescue operation was undertaken, under the sponsorship of UNESCO. The temples were isolated, dismantled and rebuilt on the nearby islet of Agilika, where they can be admired to this day.
