Dendera

Village in Upper Egypt on the west bank of the Nile opposite Kena. Once a city, it was the centre of the worship of the goddess Hathor, from the time of the building of the Pyramids. There is a well-preserved temple at the site.

The main temple at Dendera was built in the 1st century BC by the later Ptolemies and was finished by the emperor Augustus; much of the decoration is later. One of the most complete temples in Egypt, it has well-preserved reliefs and inscriptions, crypts, and zodiacs on the ceilings, in which the crab is represented as a scarab. One of these, from a chamber on the roof, was removed 1820 to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.