The Edfu Laboratory: The Temple Room With Its Recipes Carved on the Walls

A room with its own name

Most of what people imagine about Egyptian temple recipes comes from guesswork. At Edfu, some of it is carved on a wall.

The Temple of Horus at Edfu is one of the best preserved temples in Egypt. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities records that its construction began under Ptolemy III in 237 BC and was completed under Ptolemy XII in 57 BC, a hundred and eighty years later.

Inside it is a small room that the French Egyptologist Émile Chassinat headed “Laboratoire” when he published the temple’s inscriptions, in the volume that appeared in 1918.

It is not a laboratory by metaphor. It is a named room with a real door, a lintel and door jambs, and inscribed bands that describe what the room is for. Its walls are covered with scenes and with the texts of recipes.

I want to be careful with one word here. It is tempting to call this a secret room. Nothing in the inscriptions read so far says who was or was not allowed inside, so I will not.

Twelve recipes on the walls

The laboratory’s inscriptions fill forty-two printed pages of Chassinat’s edition. Across them, his editorial headings mark twelve separate recipe blocks, spread over ten carved scenes. He labelled each one formule.

That count needs one honest qualification. It is a count of headings. It is not a count of recipes that anyone has read and understood. Mapping where the twelve sit is a different thing from translating what they say.

Some of what they concern is known from the published scholarship. There are recipes for sacred anointing oils, for pellets made with natron, for unguents, and two elaborate recipes for kyphi, the most famous incense of ancient Egypt.

Edfu is not alone. The temple at Esna had its own laboratory, which the Egyptologist Réka Vadas studied in a 2020 article whose title quotes its ancient name: “The Beautiful Place of Kyphi and Wine”.

The oil with the lotus in it

Two passages on these walls touch the lotus. Only the first is inside a recipe block.

The first is part of a run of short recipes carved together for the sacred oils used in the Opening of the Mouth, the ritual that brought a statue or a mummy to life. Nine such oils were used in that rite.

For one of them, an oil called mḏ, the abbreviated recipe lists its contents. In Vadas’s translation: “a pinch of nḏm, the essence of sšn-lotus and ḥḏw-substances.”

So the flower’s essence went into an oil for bringing the divine to life. It is one oil among several in a single sequence, not a stand-alone lotus recipe.

The inscription does not say which water lily is meant. The word is simply the ordinary Egyptian word for the lotus, and no species is named. I will not call it the blue one on this evidence alone.

Hathor’s line, and a word with two meanings

The second lotus mention is not in a recipe block at all. It sits in a speech spoken in the goddess Hathor’s voice, in a scene on the same wall, above a recipe for natron pellets.

Hathor’s text names a particular ointment. Vadas describes it as “probably made with the addition of nḫb-lotus also known for its sweet and strong smell”, used “to anoint the statue of the deity”. The word “probably” is hers, and it stays.

There is a reason for the caution. The Egyptian word nḫb means the lotus bud. It is also the name of a town, el-Kab. And both meanings are active on these very walls: the pellet recipe just below names natron “of el-Kab”, the place.

Two specialists read this word as the lotus bud here, and that reading stands. But the double meaning belongs beside it every time.

Kyphi, and a lotus that is not there

Kyphi was the great compound incense of Egyptian temples, and the laboratory at Edfu carries two elaborate recipes for it.

It would be natural to assume the sacred flower was in it. Across the four sources checked, the published scholarship on these recipes, the standard lexicon of Ptolemaic Egyptian, the dictionary of Egyptian drug names and a structural reading of the two kyphi blocks, no lotus ingredient is named.

That is a scoped negative, not a universal one. The kyphi blocks themselves have not been translated in full. But on everything read so far, the lotus is scarce even in the room built to hold the temple’s scented recipes.

One more recipe was read directly for this project, the seventh block. Its subject is an unguent, and there is no lotus sign, open flower or bud, anywhere in the line.

Two copies, and a sculptor’s slip

Two of these recipes were copied long before Chassinat’s edition. The German Egyptologist Johannes Dümichen published a plate of them in 1866, drawn from the wall by hand.

That gives two witnesses to the same carved text, half a century apart, and comparing them produces one lovely moment.

Chassinat notes in a footnote that Dümichen’s copy shows a mallet sign at one point, where the wall itself, carved with a sculptor’s error in Chassinat’s judgment, shows a plain oval. Checked against both, Dümichen’s plate really does carry the mallet. A copyist in 1866 wrote what the text should say. The editor in 1918 printed what the stone actually says.

The room also shows its work was never quite finished. In one scene the king’s usual cartouches were left uncarved, which Chassinat notes directly. Elsewhere a divinity’s name is left as a blank line in the edition.

What is still unread

Here is the part that surprises people most. No full translation of the Edfu recipe blocks exists in anything I have been able to read.

Their headings are catalogued. A few named ingredients have been identified by specialists. But most of the ingredient words are still unread, and only a few of the twelve blocks have really been opened.

That is not a gap anyone should fill with confident guesses, and I will not. It is simply the honest state of one of the most intriguing rooms in Egypt: the recipes are there, carved in stone, and most of them are still waiting to be read.

For where the lotus sits in the wider story of Egypt’s temples, start with the complete guide to Blue Lotus, and for the part of the plant the ancient texts actually name, see the article on Blue Lotus leaves and root.

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