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Kom Ombo: Temple of Sobek, relief of crocodile god  (Desc. Egy. 1799)

Fig.1: top: Relief of Sobek, the crocodile god, at Kom Ombo. Below: reliefs on portal (Description de l'Egypte 1809).

Kom Ombo was unique as a temple center in combining  temples devoted to the falcon god Horus and the crocodile god Sobek. Sobek was mainly worshipped in Upper Egypt. The relief at top, drawn by an artist in the 1799 French expedition, shows offerings being made to the seated deity.

In addition to temple shrines to Sobek at Philae and  Kom Ombo, tombs with mummufied crocodiles were found in abundance further down the Nile at Tebtunis. These mummies, dating from Ptolemaic times, were wrapped in cartonnage, or a kind of papier mache made from old papyrus documents. Large collections of these papyri with demotic, Greek, and Latin inscriptions have been retrieved and are archived in the Hearst Collection at the University of California at Berkeley.


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