A New Year’s tableau from ancient Egypt was revealed by researchers while rebuilding the ceiling of the Temple of Esna. Carved and painted about 2,200 years ago, the site later underwent a major restoration roughly two millennia ago during the period of Roman rule in Egypt. The discovery emerged as part of ongoing efforts to understand the temple’s decorative program and religious symbolism. Attribution: Live Science.
For generations, the temple’s interior walls and ceiling carried the dust, grime, and bird droppings that accumulate over centuries. Over the past five years, a team from the University of Tübingen has methodically cleaned the ceiling, uncovering a spectrum of imagery that includes ancient zodiac signs, star patterns, depictions of mythic goddesses, and more than 200 inscriptions that had never been documented before. The restoration work is revealing details that were once invisible under thick layers of sediment, offering new windows into how the temple was read and used in ritual time.
Scholars believe the Esna temple was dedicated to multiple deities. The New Year’s scene shows a procession of divine figures in floating vessels, including Orion the hunter and constellation figure, Sothis representing the sacred star Sirius, and Anukis, a goddess associated with the Nile’s waters. The sky goddess Nut arches overhead, depicted as swallowing the evening sky. In ancient Egyptian timekeeping, Sirius’ reappearance signaled the Nile’s flood cycle, with the river’s waters peaking as much as 100 days later; those waters were believed to be drained by Anukis, marking a seasonal transition tied to agriculture and ceremonial life. These elements underscore how the temple combined astronomical observation with cosmological myth in its decorative program.
Among the seasonal imagery conserved there is a striking figure—the body of a four-winged lion paired with the head of a ram—identified in the inscriptions as representing the southern wind, likely the intense heat of summer. This emblematic pairing reflects the Egyptians’ careful cataloging of wind forces and seasonal weather as part of temple iconography designed to convey climatic cycles and divine influence in daily life.
With the ceiling now stabilized, the restoration team has shifted focus to the adjacent walls and columns. The ongoing cleaning is expected to unveil a wealth of color and detail that have been obscured for centuries, including fabric textures, throne decorations, and finer garment details that once conveyed status and ritual significance. Each layer peeled back offers experts a clearer idea of the scale and planning of the temple’s overall program, as well as how artisans of the time integrated architectural space with celestial and mythological narratives.
Previously, other research efforts highlighted a broader range of discoveries within the region’s archaeological record. For instance, a different project examined surprising body art on a Sudanese man from antiquity, noting a rare tattoo bearing Christian symbols carved on his leg, which sheds light on how distant cultures intersected in the broader ancient world.