New sound-and-light show at Edfu Temple
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A new sound-and-light show at Edfu Temple was inaugurated on 1 June, an impressive LE35 million project managed and completed in 18 months by Misr Company for Sound, Light and Cinema, headed by Chairman and Managing Director Essam Abdel-Hady.
In an intriguing juxtaposition of state-of-the-art technology and Ptolemaic history, the show employs four high-definition projectors, three movable video projectors and 260 illumination units to create the special light effects.
The 50-minute show is divided into three parts, beginning at the north entrance situated at the back of the temple. Images of Horus, characteristically depicted as a falcon, and the different Graeco-Roman rulers projected onto the limestone blocks of the building and synchronised with the narration and music bring the story of the construction of the Temple of Horus to life. The building was started in 237 BCE and completed about a century later.
Visitors to the nightly show, mostly passengers from cruises on the Nile, are then led through a small door into the huge paved courtyard, where they are surrounded by the temple’s colonnades, columns and reliefs and faced with the imposing presence of a colossal black granite statue of Horus wearing the double crown of Egyptian kingship.
Here they hear about daily life inside the temple, the sanctuary of Horus, and the ancient worshipping of this god, during which falcons were carried by priests to the deity who would choose a favourite and set it free.
Attention is then soon drawn to two large circles that first appear as a mass of bird feathers and are then transformed into a pair of gigantic falcon eyes — those of Horus — which symbolically represent the sun and the moon.
The third and last part of the show depicts Horus’s mother and father, Isis and Osiris. The latter deity was killed by his brother Seth, the god of chaos, in ancient Egyptian mythology, and the show depicts the great battle of Edfu between Horus, avenging his father’s death, and Seth, who is represented in many temple wall reliefs as a shrinking hippopotamus.
The show ends at the front façade of the temple, used today as the main entrance for daytime visits.
Excerpted from an article by Ingrid Wassmann for Al-Ahram Weekly
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