The Temple of the Lion-Goddess Repit in Athribis

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.

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Athribis lies on the west bank of the Nile about 15 kilometres southwest of Sohag, today’s provincial capital. The most important building is the temple of Repit and Min. Construction on the temple began under Ptolemy XII and was completed in stages by subsequent Roman emperors of the 1st century AD. In 2003 the university of Tübingen launched in cooperation with the Ministry of Antiquities a large project to excavate, renovate and publish all the more than 1200 reliefs and inscriptions of the temple, an enterprise which has recently be finished. The temple itself is now open for visitors.

The lecture provides an overview about the unique decoration of the temple which is in fact the largest mammisi or birth-house conserved in Egypt. Among the highlights of the temple are the three Punt chambers with the reliefs of the myrrh trees or the 110 column-long hymn to the god Min with a parallel to the Min festival in the temple of Medinet Habu.

Christian Leitz studied Egyptology, Assyriology, Coptology at the Universities of Marburg and Göttingen from 1981 to 1989, and earned his doctoral degree in Egyptology at Göttingen University in 1989 (theme: Egyptian Astronomy). In 1993 he passed his habilitation at Cologne University and received in the same year a Heisenberg-scholarship for 5 years. In 2004 he was appointed as director of the Institute of Egyptology at Tübingen University.

Leitz’s main areas of Research includes: Egyptian astronomy, zoology, and medecine; religious texts and the temples of the Ptolemaic and Roman period. He is directing the excavation at the site of Athribis since 2003 and was leading a major lexicographical project from 1995 to 2003 which has been published in 8 volumes or 6.500 pages. He is the editor of the several series, e.g. „Studien zur spätägyptischen Religion“. He has received an invitation as visiting professor in 2007 at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 2009 at the Collège de France, Paris and 2013 at Cairo University.

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