Dendera And Abydos Private Day Tour From Hurghada

Pick up
Start the Dendera and Abydos Tour from Hurghada by being transferred from your hotel in Hurghada by an A/C vehicle to Dendera temple to meet your guide at the following fetching sight:

Dendera Temple Complex

Dendera Temple was built in Greco-Roman times between 30 BC and 14 AD and was built on top of an ancient temple. It is dedicated to the cow goddess Hathor, one of the most important goddesses of ancient Egypt. The cow goddess was the one who represented fertility, childbirth, motherhood, and was the one that the sick came to ask for healing. It was worshiped since pre-dynastic times and also represented love, beauty, eroticism, and joy.

So that you can distinguish it in the hieroglyphs, it is represented with two horns holding the solar disk. In the capitals of the columns of the Dendera temple, it appears with the head of a woman and the ears of a cow.

If in any hieroglyph you see a cow, see if its body is full of stars, it will also be her. Dendera Temple is in a very good state of preservation. It is the only Egyptian temple that retains its original colors since it was covered by desert sands for many years.

In 1798 Napoleon and his troops occupied Egypt. They camped in the area where the temple is located. One of his soldiers left an ammunition box on the ground and it collapsed. when they went to retrieve it they would find the temple, intact, with its original colors.

Lunch Time
We leave Dendera Temple and drive for about an hour (100 km) until we arrive in Abydos. We will have lunch in Abydos, then our cultural program begins in this historic city.

Abydos Temple
Considered one of the most important archaeological sites of Ancient Egypt, the sacred city of Abydos was the site of many ancient temples, including Umm el-Qa’ab, a royal necropolis where early pharaohs were entombed. These tombs began to be seen as extremely significant burials and in later times it became desirable to be buried in the area, leading to the growth of the town’s importance as a cult site.
Today, Abydos is notable for the memorial temple of Seti I, which contains an inscription from the nineteenth dynasty known to the modern world as the Abydos King List. It is a chronological list showing cartouches of most dynastic pharaohs of Egypt from Menes until Ramesses I, Seti’s father. The Great Temple and most of the ancient town are buried under the modern buildings to the north of the Seti temple. Many of the original structures and the artifacts within them are considered irretrievable and lost; many may have been destroyed by the new construction.
Abydos was one of the most important religious sites to ancient Egyptians. Much like modern Muslims hope to complete a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime, ancient Egyptians would have hopes to visit Abydos, which for them was strongly associated with the entrance into the afterlife.
Although there were several temples constructed here, the largest and most significant is known as the Temple of Seti I. Seti I was the father of the great Ramesses II, who actually completed the construction of most of the temple after his father’s death.
Coming to power only 30 years after the upheaval associated with Akhenaten’s heretical rule, known as the Amarna Period, Seti I was concerned with reestablishing faith in the pantheon of Pre-Amarna gods that Akhenaten had sought to destroy. As a result, the temple he built contains small chapels dedicated to each of the major gods: Ptah, Re-Harakhte, Amun-Re, Osiris, Isis, Horus, and also one to Seti himself. Much of the temple complex is no longer present, including the pylon and the first two courtyards so visitors to enter through a doorway into the hypostyle hall. Many of the wall reliefs inside are well preserved and the reliefs toward the back of the temple, completed during Seti’s reign, are considered to be among the finest in any temple throughout Egypt.

Back to Hurghada
At the end of the day, you will be transferred by a private air-conditioned vehicle to your hotel in Hurghada.