The Temple of Dakka

Ad-Dakka was a place in lower Nubia, which was located approximately 100 Km south of Aswan. The Greco-Roman Temple of Dakka, dedicated to Thoth, the god of wisdom, was initially a small one room shrine or chapel that first begun in the 3rd century B.C. by a Meroitic king named Arkamani (or Ergamenes II) in collaboration with Ptolemy IV who added an antechamber and a gate structure.

Ptolemy IX subsequently enlarged the temple by adding a pranaos with two rows of probably three columns.

During the Roman period, the Emperors Augustus and Tiberius further enlarged the structure with the addition, at the rear, of a second sanctuary as well as inner and outer enclosure walls with a large pylon. The sanctuary contained a granite naos.

The Temple of Dakka was transformed into a temple fortress by the Romans and surrounded by a 270 X 444 meter long stone wall with an entrance along the Nile.

A large dromos leads to the pylon which formed the entrance to the temple and each of the pylon’s towers are decorated in high relief and bear numerous graffiti from visitors, mostly in Greek but some in Demotic and Meroitic script. Inside the gateway, the Meroitic king Arqamani is shown on the left scarifying to Thoth, with Tefnut and Hathor above and Isis below.

There are reliefs of cows offered as gifts to the god Thoth carved into the naos of the Temple of Dakka. While the temple of Dakka was similar architecturally to the temple of Wadi El Soboua, it lacked a front courtyard of sphinxes; however, its 12-meter-high pylon is in near perfect condition. A 55-meter-long processional approach ran from the temple’s pylon to a cult terrace at the Nile.

During the Christian period of Egypt, the facade of the pranaos was converted for use into a church and Christian paintings were still visible here in the 20th century before the temple was enveloped by the Nile floods.

The temple of Dakka collapsed in 1908-1909 and was subsequently rebuilt by Alessandro Barsanti. With the construction of the Aswan dam in the 1960s, the temple was dismantled and moved to the site of Wadi El Soboua some 40 Km upstream between 1962 and 1968.

At the time of its removal, some reused stone blocks from Thutmose III, Seti I and Merneptah were discovered which originated from an earlier New Kingdom structure in or near Kubban. Today, the Temple of Dakka sits dramatically on a small bluff and is the only Nubian temple with a facade that faces to the north and enjoys a north-south orientation to parallel the course of the Nile.

The temple’s pylon is now separated from the remainder of the temple due to the missing enclosure walls of the open court.