The island of Philae was originally a nearly-permanent island within the Nile River in Egypt. In long, meandering rivers, islands occasionally form inside the rive from carried by the waters. These islands are long-lived but not truly permanent; the waters will split around them during normal flow, but during occasional hundred or thousand year floods the waters could cover an island and can erode or even destroy it.
This was the origin of the island Philae. It sat in the middle of the Nile River, surrounded by its waters on both sides. The island became the home of one of the Egyptian civilization’s most amazing temples, the Temple of Isis.
In the 1960s, the Aswan High Dam was built on the Nile River, creating Lake Nasser and providing energy and stable water flow to the nation of Egypt. The creation of this lake flooded much of the island of Philae. Some of the remnants of the temple were moved to higher ground before the construction of the dam. These photos reflect how it appears today, with some portion of the island flooded but some parts still in tact.
The island of Philae recently gave its name to the spacecraft built by the European Space Agency that dropped onto the surface of a comet from the Rosetta Spacecraft. The craft was named after the Rosetta stone that originally allowed translation between the ancient Egyptian Language and Greek. The island of Philae hosted an additional obelisk with the same setup –hosting Egyptian hieroglyphs and a translation into Greek.
The Rosetta spacecraft was named in the hopes that its data would allow humanity to translate some of the history of Earth as comets may have been part of the solar system soup combined together to form the planet we see today.
