Philae is dedicated to Isis – the Goddess of motherhood, magic and fertility. As symbolic mother of the king, she appears as a woman with a throne-shaped crown, or sometimes depicted with the sign of motherhood and fertility: the two horns and the solar disc between them. Her cult spread over Europe since the Greco-Roman period.
The cult of Isis at Philae goes back to the 7th century BC, but the earliest remains date from the 4th century BC.
 And Isis was being worshipped at Philae until the 6th century AD! By Roman times Isis had become the greatest of all the Egyptian gods, worshipped right across the Roman Empire even as far as Britain.


Early Christians transformed Isis Temple into a chapel and defaced many of the reliefs – these which were not buried from the sand. Muslims later destroyed their inscriptions.
 Later, French soldiers fghting for Napoleon Bonaparte left their graffities.

After Old Aswan Dam (1902) was built, Philae was swamped half of each year by the high waters, so tourists rented rowing boats to glide among the columns and peer down through the water of the Nile. 

When Aswan High Dam was completed in 1971, the temples on Philae would have entirely disappeared, but they were rebuilt by the UNESCO on a nearby Island: Agilkia.