A 2,000-year-old temple is being restored to its original spectacular colors, adding new meaning to its ancient Egyptian inscriptions

• The temple of Edfu is over 2,000 years old and centuries of dirt had built up on its walls.
• All the grime covered vibrant colors that add a new layer of meaning to the inscriptions.
• Restoring the colors was a painstaking process that sometimes involved climbing tall scaffolds.

A restoration team is transforming the Temple of Horus from a dusty, grimy sight into a glimpse of the colorful masterpiece it once was.

"The Temple of Horus at Edfu is considered the icon of a typical Egyptian temple and part of any sightseeing tour in Egypt ," Martin A. Stadler, director of the project at the University of Würzburg, told Business Insider via email.

Yet, for decades tourists have been missing out on its true splendor.

The temple is covered, up to its ceiling, with inscriptions, images, and hieroglyphs that Egyptians painstakingly created more than 2,000 years ago.

But for many centuries , dirt and grease had turned many of the ancient walls a dingy, uniform grayish brown.

Recently, the restoration team from the University of Würzburg and the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism have uncovered some of the vivid colors underneath, changing the way experts see the structure and adding new significance to the words and images.

Take a look at the transformation and how it's shaping experts' understanding of the people who built it.

The temple is over 2,000 years old and is one of Egypt’s most well-preserved.

The structure is roughly 450 feet by 250 feet — larger than an American football field — and it stands nearly 115 feet tall in some areas.

It took 180 years to build. Today, it's considered the best-preserved temple of its kind in Egypt.

While the temple was a center for religious worship, it had other purposes.

In 237 BCE, King Ptolemy III Euergetes began construction of the temple . In addition to being places for religious worship, some temples were centers of commerce and education for the region.

"In Ancient Egypt, temples owned land that was rented to farmers, had workshops, employed craftsmen and artists, and were by this an economic center for the city and the region," Stadler said.

Inside are many rooms including a vestibule, sanctuary, and chapel. Halls connect the rooms and boast massive decorated columns.

But over time, a grimy mix of pollutants had dulled the temple's once-vibrant colors.

For over 2,000 years, a parade of people, animals, and the elements took their toll on the temple walls.

The excavators found evidence of bird droppings, incense grease, soot from oil lamps, and more, caking the ancient inscriptions, Victoria Altmann-Wendling, an Egyptologist involved with the project, told Business Insider via email.

Cleaning off the mess involved a number of steps, including dabbing on a chemical solution that they left on the walls for several hours. Restorers also applied a mix of chemicals to help the original paint better adhere to the walls.

Restorers had to climb up scaffolding to reach the high ceilings.

Because the ceilings are so high — 26 feet in some places — restorers stood on scaffolding for some of the work.

Only a few small openings in the ceiling let in light, so they had to bring in lamps to brighten the dim interior.

As they worked through the summer and fall, temperatures could reach over 104 degrees Fahrenheit. "A sweaty affair," Altmann-Wendling said.

Yet, it was all worth it to restore the temple walls to their original vibrance.

A before-and-after photo offers a glimpse at how different the temple looked 2,000 years ago.

Experts began to see reds, blues, greens, and other colors as they wiped away the grime .

"The rediscovery of the multi-colored temples of Egypt will revolutionize the impression of the sanctuaries" that otherwise blend in with the desert sand, Stadler said.

Researchers with the University of Würzburg have been studying the temple's inscriptions since 2016 but a large part of the story was untold because of the missing colors, Stadler said.

While the reliefs and inscriptions have meanings on their own, the colors also have symbolism and add their own significance.

Red, for example, could indicate a person was wearing leather, while blue sometimes signified divinity.

The rich colors could have practical and symbolic meanings.

The temple's colors have two purposes. The artists based them in reality, with green plants, black hair, and blue skies.

"On the other hand, they had great symbolic power ," Altmann-Wendling said.

For example, the lower walls depict objects in various shades of blue that represent the Nile's floods and the gods who, the Egyptians considered, were responsible for the annual event, she said. The blue symbolizes the religious tie to the event.

The full story of some inscriptions may never come to light.

While many images were carved in relief, some of the scene's details were only depicted in paint. Before the restoration, their accompanying inscriptions sometimes referred to objects hidden beneath the layers of gunk.

"That's important to keep in mind when reliefs are preserved entirely without color, which is the usual case in Egypt," Altmann-Wendling said.

Each newly discovered color is carefully recorded. The researchers also hope to use AI to reconstruct missing colors with pattern recognition.

These vivid, symbolic colors weren't the only thing the dirt was hiding.

Some images contain rare traces of gold.

While gold accents were common features in Egyptian temples, the fragile gilding often decayed or was removed. Many temples today have minimal gold left.

That's why restorers were surprised to come across large patches of gold in the Temple of Horus. It's possible the building's roof helped preserve and protect the remaining traces from decay over the millennia.

"So far, gilding has mainly been found in smaller side temples," related to the birth of a local child god, Altmann-Wendling said.

In the images, the king's necklace, crown, and bracelets are gold. Additionally, the gods Horus-Behedety and Harsomtus are entirely gilded. "This corresponds to textual descriptions that the body of the gods was made from gold," Altmann-Wendling said.

The luster may have symbolized their immortality while also adding "to the mystical aura of the room," Altmann-Wendling said in a statement .

The temple is dedicated to Horus, a sky god.

In the scene pictured above on the left, the king offers a wedjat eye to the god Harsomtus, which is the eye Horus lost while battling evil forces, according to the researchers.

The temple was dedicated to Horus, and images and references to the god appear on the wall. "In Edfu, he was venerated as a sky god, one eye being the sun, the other the moon," Stadler said.

In the sanctuary, there's a black granite shrine that's even older than the temple. Hymns inscribed along the sanctuary's door frame were meant to be sung in the morning to awaken Horus and the other sleeping deities. These gods and goddesses resided in 13 chapels surrounding the sanctuary.

Experts are currently cleaning a chapel dedicated to the moon god Khonsu as the restoration of the temple continues.

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