DENDERA, a village in Upper Egypt, situated in the angle of the great westward bend of the Nile opposite Kena. Here was the ancient city of Tentyra, capital of the Tentyrite nome, the sixth of Upper Egypt, and the principal seat of the worship of Hathor (Aphrodite), the cow-goddess of love and joy. The temple of Hathor was built in the 1st century B.e., being begun under the later Ptolemies and finished by Augustus, but much of the decora tion is later. A great rectangular enclosure of crude bricks, meas uring about 9oox85oft., contains the sacred buildings; it was entered by two stone gateways, in the north and the east sides, built by Domitian. Another smaller enclosure lies to the east with a gateway, also of the Roman period.
The temple building, which is of sandstone, measures about 3oof t. from front to back, and consists of two oblong rectangles; the foremost, placed transversely to the other, is the great hypostyle hall or pronaos, the broadest and loftiest part of the temple, measuring 135ft. in width, and comprising about one-third of the whole structure; the facade has six columns with heads of Hathor, and the ceiling is supported by 18 great columns. The second rectangle contains a small hypostyle hall with six columns, and the sanctuary, with their subsidiary chambers. The sanctuary is surrounded by a corridor into which the chambers open; on the west side is an apartment forming a court and kiosk for the cele bration of the feast of the New Year, the principal festival of Dendera. On the roof of the temple, reached by two staircases, are a pavilion and several chambers dedicated to the worship of Osiris. Inside and out the whole of the temple is covered with scenes and inscriptions in crowded characters, of ceremonial and religious import ; the decoration is even carried into a remarkable series of hidden passages and chambers or crypts made in the solid walls for the reception of its most valuable treasures. North east of the entrance is a "Birth House" for the cult of the child Harsemteu, and behind the temple a small temple of Isis, dating from the reign of Augustus. Petrie's excavation of the cemetery behind the temple enclosures revealed burials dating from the fourth dynasty onwards, the most important being mastabas of the period from the sixth to the 11th dynasties; many of these exhibited a peculiar degradation of the contemporary style of sculpture.
One of the zodiacs of the temple, from a chamber on the roof, was removed in 1820 to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Fig ures of the celebrated Cleopatra VI. occur amongst the sculptures on the exterior of the temple, but they are purely conventional, without a trace of portraiture. Horus of Edfu, the enemy of the crocodiles and hippopotami of Set, appears sometimes as the con sort of Hathor of Dendera. Juvenal, in his 17th satire, takes as his text a religious riot between the Tentyrites and the neighbour ing Ombites, and Sir Flinders Petrie has shown that the Ombos in question was opposite Coptos, only about 15m. from Tentyra, where the hippopotamus sacred to Set was venerated.