Athribis (Temple of Repit)
A Ptolemaic temple of the lion goddess Repit near Sohag, with painted rooms and a huge archive of inscribed potsherds.
The temple of the lion goddess
Athribis (Hut-Repit) lies on the west bank of the Nile a few kilometres south-west of Sohag, near the White Monastery. It was a cult centre of the lion-headed goddess Repit and her consort, the fertility god Min. Its main surviving monument is a large temple built in the late Ptolemaic period, under Ptolemy XII, and decorated into the Roman era, together with the remains of an earlier temple of Ptolemy IX and a settlement and quarries.
Rediscovery
Since 2003, the site has been excavated and restored by a joint Egyptian–German mission led by the University of Tübingen, as part of the Athribis Project. Removing the rubble that filled the temple, the team has uncovered walls and rooms with well-preserved reliefs, many still with their original colours, as well as dozens of side chambers and crypts. Among the discoveries are rooms painted with scenes of offerings and astronomical images, and an extraordinary quantity of ostraca — potsherds and limestone flakes inscribed in demotic, Greek, Coptic and other scripts — that document the everyday life of the temple and the town: accounts, school exercises, lists and drawings.
Visiting
Athribis is one of the newest archaeological sites to be opened to visitors in Upper Egypt and receives few tourists. Its proximity to the White and Red Monasteries makes it easy to combine them in a single visit: many blocks of the White Monastery were taken from the temples here.
Exhibo editorial
Athribis is a temple still emerging from the ground. You walk through rooms that were packed with rubble only a few years ago, and on the walls, the colours are startlingly fresh — the goddess Repit with her lion's head, Min with his plumed crown, ochre, blue and green.
It is the perfect companion to the monasteries next door: the pagan temple and the Christian church that was built partly from its stones, facing each other across a few kilometres of fields. Come in the morning, and you will probably share the site only with the guards and the archaeologists.
Gallery
How to find it
Athribis lies on the desert edge a few kilometres south-west of Sohag near the village of Wannina, a short drive from the White Monastery. Ask a taxi for the Athribis temple (Ma'bad Atribis); the ticket office is at the entrance to the site.