The Temple of Dendur Of all the remarkable artworks that the Metropolitan Museum of New York has on display, the most thrilling is arguably the Temple of Dendur - a whole original Egyptian temple donated by the Egyptian government in the 1960s as a token of friendship and gratitude for the aid the American government gave to tackle serious flooding in the region. It was shipped and reassembled at great cost in an ad hoc wing in the Egyptian pavilion, and it's surrounded by a shallow ditch whose functions are partly scenic and partly evocative of the original setting. On the right hand side, the brightness of the daylight enters the large room making the contrast between the ancient building and the modern glass wall fully palpable, while at the same time lightening the temple in a very dramatic way. On the left, a long wall displays minor artefacts and boards filled with facts about the history of the temple and Egypt under Roman rule. The temple consists of two buildings facing each other: the gate and the temple itself. The former is a thick construction whose narrow entrance leads to a small court from which visitors can admire the solid architecture or the main building. The latter was originally surrounded by two flanking walls, whose stones were probably re-used elsewhere. Built around 15 BC, the temple was dedicated to Isis, goddess of health, marriage and wisdom, and Osiris, god of life, death, afterlife and resurrection - both central figures in the polytheistic millennia-long Egyptian religion. It was Augustus himself who commissioned the construction as part of an effort to maintain political and social continuity at the southern periphery of the Roman Empire, shortly after the last Ptolemaic Queen Cleopatra and her lover Mark Antony died during Augustus' (then Octavianus) campaign. This resulted in the establishment of a Roman Province in the place of the previous Ptolemaic Kingdom, which was created after Alexander the Great died in 323 BC by one of his generals (Diadochi), Ptolemy I. Accordingly, Augustus pushed to be depicted as a pharaoh making offerings to Egyptian deities on the outer walls - a means of respecting heartfelt regional beliefs while stressing that Egypt had a new ruler from then on. In this light, the temple of Dendur narrates the collapse of a kingdom and its annexation by a larger empire, in a way that may be interpreted to be consistent with the process of transition and regeneration that Osiris was believed to oversee.