Philae, an island sanctuary of the goddess Isis near the first cataract of the Nile, is where ancient Egyptian religion made its final stand, and where it was formally closed.
An Isis temple on the Nubian frontier
The temples date mainly from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, the last few centuries BCE and first centuries CE, though the cult is older. Sited at the traditional boundary between Egypt and Nubia, Philae was a pilgrimage destination for devotees of Isis from across the Mediterranean, whose worship had spread as far as Rome itself. Isis here was the divine mother and magician who had gathered and revived the body of Osiris, and the temple staged that mythology in stone.
The closing of the cult
When the Roman Empire became Christian, worship of the old gods was suppressed, but Philae, protected by treaty arrangements with the Nubian peoples upstream who still revered Isis, kept its rites going longer than anywhere else. The last securely dated hieroglyphic inscription anywhere, of 394 CE, was carved here, and the last demotic inscription in 452 CE. The temple was finally closed by order of the emperor Justinian in the sixth century and converted to a church; Coptic crosses were cut into its walls.
Moved to save it
In the twentieth century the building of the Aswan dams left Philae flooded for much of the year. In an international campaign in the 1970s the temples were dismantled block by block and re-erected on the higher neighbouring island of Agilkia, landscaped to resemble the original. The reconstructed complex is reached by boat and is among the most visited sites of southern Egypt.