Chapter IV: The Sacred Architecture of Egypt (4)

At Ipsamboul there are, as we have seen, two temples close to one another. Their façades, though conceived in the same spirit, executed by the same processes, and having a good deal in common in their design, are yet by no means similar. That of the temple of Hathor, generally called the _Smaller Temple_, is on a smaller scale than the _Great Temple_, but perhaps its design is the happier and more skilful of the two. The front is 90 feet wide and nearly 40 high. It is ornamented by six colossal upright statues, four of them Rameses himself, the other two his wife Nefert-Ari. These statues, which are about 34 feet high, are separated one from another by eight buttresses, two of them acting as jambs for the door, above which they unite and become a wide band of flat carving marking the centre of the façade. The gentle salience of these buttresses forms a framework for the statues (see Fig. 242), which are chiselled with great care and skill in the fine yellow sandstone of which the mountain consists.

The façade of the Great Temple is much larger. It is about 130 feet wide by 92 high. It is not divided by buttresses like the other, but it has a bold cornice made up of twenty-two cynocephalic figures seated with their hands upon their knees. Each of these animals is sculptured in the round, and is only connected with the face of the rock by a small part of its posterior surface. They are not less than seven feet high. A frieze, consisting of a dedicatory inscription carved in deep and firmly drawn hieroglyphs runs below the cornice. Above the doorway a colossal figure of Ra is carved in the rock, and on each side of him Rameses is depicted in low relief, in the act of adoration. This group occupies the middle of the façade. But the most striking feature of the building is supplied by the four colossi of Rameses placed two and two on either side of the door. They are the largest in Egypt. From the sole of the feet to the apex of the pschent which the king bears on his head, they are about sixty-five feet in height. Rameses is seated, his hands upon his thighs, in the pose ordinarily made use of for the royal statues at the entrances of the temples. In spite of these enormous dimensions the workmanship is very fine. The countenance, especially, is remarkable for its combination of force and sweetness, an expression which has been noticed by all the travellers who have written upon Ipsamboul.

The interiors of the two temples are still more different than the exteriors, and, in this instance, the variations are entirely in favour of the greater monument. The total depth of the smaller edifice is about ninety feet. A single hall, supported by six square Hathor-headed pillars, precedes the sanctuary. The latter is nothing but a narrow gallery, in the middle of which a small chamber or niche is cut, in which the rock-carved cow of Hathor may be seen with a statue between its legs. The other temple is a great deal larger. Its total length is about 180 feet. The first hall is 60 feet long and 53 wide; the roof is supported by eight pillars, against each of which a colossal figure 33 feet high is placed. A doorway in the middle of the further side leads to a second chamber not quite so large as the first, and supported by four thick square pillars. Three openings in its furthest side lead to a third chamber, as wide as the second, but only 10 feet deep. Through this the innermost parts of the speos are reached; they consist of three small chambers, those on the left and right being very small indeed, while that in the centre, the adytum, is about 13 feet by 23. In the middle of this chamber was an altar, or table for offerings; at the back of it a bench with four seated statues. The walls of both temples are covered with pictures like those of Luxor, Karnak, and the Ramesseum. They represent the battles and triumphs of Rameses, and the king seated upon the laps of goddesses, who act as the tenderest of nurses.

Besides the halls which form the main body of the temple, the plan shows eight lateral chambers, some perpendicular to the major axis of the building, others falling upon it obliquely. Several of these do not seem to have been finished. There are indications that they were utilized as depositories for the objects worshipped in the temple.

We have now briefly noticed the principal rock-cut temples in Egypt and Nubia. Neither in plan nor in decoration do they materially differ from the temples of wrought masonry. The elements of the building are the same, and they are arranged in the same order--an avenue of sphinxes when there is room for it, colossi before the entrance, a colonnaded court, a hypostyle hall acting as a _pronaos_, a _naos_ with its _secos_, or sanctuary; but sometimes one, sometimes many of these divisions are excavated in the living rock. Sometimes only the sanctuary is subterranean, sometimes the hypostyle hall is included, and at Ipsamboul the whole temple is in the mountain, from the _secos_ to those colossal statues which generally form the preface to the pylon of the constructed temple.

Except in the case of the peristylar court, the interior of the rock-cut temple did not differ so much in appearance from that of the constructed edifice as might at first be imagined. We have already explained how scantily lighted was the interior of the Egyptian temple; its innermost chambers were plunged in almost complete darkness, so that the absolute night which was involved in their being excavated in the heart of a mountain was no very great change from the obscurity caused by the thick walls and heavy roofs of the edifices in the plain. In the case of a hemi-speos the internal effect must have been almost identical with that of any other religious building. In the great temple of Ipsamboul the daylight does not penetrate beyond the second hall; from that point onwards artificial light is necessary to distinguish objects, but the Egyptians were so thoroughly accustomed to a mysterious solemnity of shadow, to a "dim religious light," in their temples, that the darkness of the speos would seem no drawback in their eyes.

The column occurs very seldom in these subterranean temples.[361] Even those chambers which correspond to the hypostyle hall by their places in the excavation and the general characteristics of their form, are hardly ever supported by anything but the rectangular piers in use in the early ages of the monarchy; but these piers are often clothed with an elaborate decoration which is unknown in the works of the primitive architects. This preference for the pier is easily to be explained by the necessity for having supports of sufficient strength and solidity to bear the weight of the superincumbent mountain.

[361] There are two polygonal columns resembling those at
Beni-Hassan in the small speos at Beit-el-Wali (Fig. 237).

Another and more constant peculiarity of the underground temples, is the existence in them of one or more seated statues carved from masses of rock expressly left in the furthest recesses of the excavation. These statues, which represent the presiding deity of the place and his acolytes, do not occur in the constructed temples. In the latter the tabernacle which stood in the _secos_ was too small to hold anything larger than a statuette or emblem. We think that the cause of this difference may be guessed. At the time these rock temples were cut, the Pharaohs to whom they owed their existence no doubt assigned a priest or priests to each. But their position, sometimes in desert solitudes, as in the case of the _Speos Artemidos_, sometimes in places only inhabited for an intermittent period, in the quarries at Silsilis for instance, or in provinces which had been conquered by Egypt and might be lost to her again, rendered it impossible that they could be served and guarded in the ample fashion which was easy enough in the temples of Memphis, Abydos and Thebes. All these considerations suggested that, instead of a shrine containing some small figure or emblem, statues of a considerable size, from six to eight or ten feet high, should be employed, and that they should be actually chiselled in the living rock itself and left attached to it by the whole of their posterior surfaces. By their size and by their incorporation with the rock out of which both they and their surroundings were cut, such statues would defend themselves efficiently against all attempts on the part of enemies. In spite of their age several of these statues came down to us in a sufficiently good state of preservation to allow Champollion and his predecessors to recognize with certainty the divine personages whom they represented. During the last fifty years they have suffered as much at the hands of ignorant and stupid tourists as they did in the whole of the many centuries during which they were exposed to all the vicissitudes of Egyptian history.[362]

[362] For _Beit-el-Wali_ and _Gircheh_, see plates 13, 30 and 31
in GAU, _Antiquités de la Nubie_. It seems that the statues,
when they were drawn by him, were in a fairly good state.

Our study of the Egyptian temple would not be complete without a few words upon the buildings called _Dayr-el-Bahari_.[363] By their extent, their picturesqueness, and the peculiar nature of their situation, these ruins have always had a great effect upon foreign visitors. Those who know Thebes will, perhaps, be surprised at our having said so little about them hitherto, especially as they are older than most of the buildings over which we have been occupied. We have not yet described them because they do not belong to any of the categories which we have been treating; they form a class by themselves; their general arrangement has no parallel in Egypt, and therefore we have reserved them to the last.

[363] These words mean _Convent of the North_. The name is
derived from an abandoned Coptic convent which existed among the
ruins of the ancient building.

The building in question is situated at the foot of the Libyan chain, in a deep amphitheatre hollowed out by nature in the yellow limestone rocks which rise on the north-west of the necropolis. On two sides, on the right and at the back, it rests against perpendicular walls of rock cut by the pickaxe and dominating over the built part of the temple. On the left this natural wall is absent and is replaced by an inclosure of bricks (Figs. 250 and 251).

Under such conditions we need feel no surprise at finding part of the temple subterranean. In backing his work against the mountains in this fashion the architect must have been partly impelled by a desire to make use of the facilities which it afforded. The mausoleum of Hatasu, unlike the other funerary chapels at Thebes, is, then, a triple hemispeos. At a point immediately opposite to the door in the external pylon, but at the other extremity of the building, a chamber about sixty-five feet deep was excavated in the rock. This must have acted the part of a sanctuary. Right and left of it, and at a shorter distance from the entrance, there are two more groups of rock-cut apartments. The whole arrangement may be compared to the system of three apsidal chapels which is so common at the east end of European cathedrals.

In approaching this temple from the river bank, a dromos of sphinxes had to be traversed of which very scanty traces are now to be found, but in the time of the _Institut d'Égypte_ there were still two hundred of them to be distinguished, a few of the last being shown in the restoration figured upon the opposite page (Fig. 251). At the end of the dromos, upon the spot where a few traces of the bounding walls still remain, we have placed a pylon with a couple of obelisks in front of it. We have done so not only because nearly all the important temples had such a preface, but also because Sir Gardner Wilkinson says that he saw the foundations of two obelisks and of a doorway. After passing the pylon, a first courtyard was entered, which communicated with a second by an inclined plane stretching almost across its width.[364] Here the arrangements which constituted the real originality of Dayr-el-Bahari began. The whole interior of the temple, between the pylon and the commencement of the speos, consisted of four courtyards, rising in terraces one above another like the steps of a gigantic staircase. The walls upon which these inclined planes and terraces were constructed are still to be traced in places. In order to furnish the vast courts, we have supposed them to contain seated statues at regular intervals along the inner faces of their walls; in such matters of decorative detail a little conjecture may perhaps be allowed.[365] As for the portico which ornamented the further side of the second court, its remains were visible even before the excavations of Mariette.[366]

[364] This wide inclined plane agrees better, as it seems to us,
with the indications in M. Brune's plan of the actual remains at
Dayr-el-Bahari, than the narrow flight of steps given in his
restoration; the effect, too, is better, more ample and
majestic.

[365] The same idea caused M. Brune to place sphinxes upon the
steps between the courts; he thought that some small heaps of
_débris_ at the ends of the steps indicated their situation; but
M. Maspero, who recently investigated the matter, informs us
that he found no trace of any such sphinxes.

[366] We must refer those who wish to study the remains of this
temple in detail to the work devoted to it by M. Mariette. The
plan which forms plate 1 in the said work was drawn, in 1866, by
an architect, M. Brune, who is now a professor at the École des
Beaux Arts. M. Brune succeeded, by intelligent and conscientious
examination of all the remains, in obtaining the materials for a
restoration which gave us for the first time some idea of what
this interesting monument must have been in the great days of
Egypt. Plate 2 contains a restored plan; plate 3 a view in
perspective of the three highest terraces and of the hill which
forms their support. We have attempted to give an idea of the
building as a whole. Our view is taken from a more distant point
than that of M. Brune, but except in some of the less important
details, it does not greatly differ from his.

Those excavations have since 1858 led to the discovery of the porticos of the third court. There seems to have been only a plain wall on the left of this court, while on the right there was a long colonnade which masked a number of chambers cut in the rock which rose immediately behind it. Facing the entrance to the court there was also a colonnade which was cut in two by the steps leading to the fourth and highest terrace. In the middle of this terrace a line doorway leading to the principal speos was raised. While all the rest of the temple was of limestone, this doorway was built of fine red granite, a distinction which is to be explained by its central situation, facing the gateway in the pylon though far above it, and forming the culminating point of the long succession of terraces and inclined planes. The attention of the visitor to the temple would be instantly seized by the beauty and commanding position of this doorway, which, moreover, by its broad and mysterious shadows, suggested the secos hidden in the flanks of the mountains, to which all the courts were but the prelude.

These terraced courts have surprised all visitors to the cenotaph of Hatasu. "No one will deny," says Mariette, "that the temple of Dayr-el-Bahari is a strange construction, and that it resembles an Egyptian temple as little as possible!"[367] Some have thought foreign influence was to be traced in its arrangements. "Are we to consider it an accident, asks Ebers, that the stepped building at Dayr-el-Bahari was built shortly after an Egyptian army had, under Thothmes, trodden the soil of Mesopotamia for the first time, and found monumental buildings constructed in terraces in its great cities? Why did the Egyptians, who as a rule were so fond of repeating themselves that they became almost incapable of inventing new forms, never imitate the arrangements of this imposing building elsewhere, unless it was because its forms reminded them of their foreign enemies and therefore seemed to be worthy of condemnation?"[368]

[367] MARIETTE, _Dayr-el-Bahari_, letterpress, p. 10.

[368] EBERS, _Ægypten_, p. 285.

We are content with asking the question and with calling attention to its interest. The materials are wanting for a definite answer but the suggestion of Professor Ebers is probable enough. Twelve or thirteen centuries later the Persians, after their conquest of Egypt, carried back with them the notion of those hypostyle halls which gave to the buildings of Persepolis so different an aspect from those of Assyria, although the decorative details were all borrowed from the latter country. So too the Egyptians, in spite of the pride which they felt in their ancient civilization, may have been unable to control their admiration when they found themselves, in the wide plains of Persia, before those lofty towers with their successive terraces, to which access was obtained by majestic flights of steps. It seems by no means unlikely that one of their architects should have attempted to acclimatize an artistic conception which was so well calculated to impress the imaginations of the people; and none of the sovereigns of Egypt was better fitted to preside over such an attempt than the high spirited and enterprising Hatasu, the queen who reared two obelisks in the temple of Karnak, one of them being the highest that has remained erect; who made the first recorded attempt at acclimatization;[369] and who was the first to launch a fleet upon the waters of the Red Sea.

[369] MASPERO, _Histoire Ancienne_, pp. 202, 203. The
bas-reliefs at Dayr-el-Bahari represent the booty brought back
by Hatasu from the expedition into Pount. Among this booty
thirty-two perfume shrubs, in baskets, may be distinguished;
these shrubs were planted by the orders of Hatasu in the gardens
of Thebes. On the subject of Hatasu and her expedition, see
MASPERO'S paper entitled: _De quelques Navigations des Égyptiens
sur les Côtes de la Mer Érythrée_ (in the _Revue Historique_,
1878).

Whether Hatasu's architect was inspired by those artistic creations of the Chaldees which, as time went on, were multiplied over the whole basin of the Euphrates and even spread as far as northern Syria, or whether he drew his ideas entirely from his own brain, his work was, in either case, deserving of high praise. In most parts of the Nile Valley sites are to be found which lend themselves readily to such a building. The soil has a gentle slope, upon which the erection of successive terraces would involve no architectural difficulties, and there is no lack of rocky walls against which porticoes could be erected, and in which subterranean chambers could be excavated. Upon a series of wide platforms and easy gradients like these, the pompous processions, which played such an important part in the Egyptian ritual, could defile with great effect, while under every portico and upon every landing place they could find resting places and the necessary shelter from the sun. Why did such a model find no imitators? Must we seek for the reason in the apparent reaction against her memory which followed the death of Hatasu? "The Egyptian people chose to look upon her as an usurper; they defaced the inscriptions which celebrated her campaigns; they effaced her cartouches and replaced her titles with those of her brothers."[370]

[370] MASPERO, _Histoire Ancienne_, p. 203.

It is certain that nowhere in Egypt has any building of considerable dimensions been discovered in which the peculiar arrangements of Dayr-el-Bahari are repeated. At most it may be said that something of the same kind is to be found in those rock-cut temples of Nubia which are connected with the river bank by a dromos and flights of steps. When the princes of the nineteenth dynasty wished to raise funerary temples to their memory in their own capital, it would have been easy, had they chosen, to find sites upon the slopes of the western chain similar to that which Hatasu had employed with such happy results; but they preferred a different combination. They erected their cenotaphs in the plain, at some distance from the hills, and they chose a form which did not essentially differ from that of the great temples on the opposite bank of the Nile.

The religious architecture of Egypt, in all its richness and variety, is known to us only through the monuments of the second Theban Empire, through the great works of the kings belonging to the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. We are tempted, however, to believe that the architects of the Sait period must have introduced fresh beauties into the plans, proportions, and decorations of those temples which the princes of the twenty-sixth dynasty, in their desire that their capital and the other cities of the Delta should rival or excel the magnificence of Memphis and Thebes, confided to their skill. Both the statues and the royal tombs of the Sait period have characteristics which distinguish them from those of earlier epochs. In all that we possess from this last period of artistic activity in Egypt, there is a new desire for elegance, for grace, carried sometimes to an extreme which is not free from weakness and affectation. It is probable that the same qualities existed in the religious architecture of Sais.

Unhappily all the buildings constructed in Memphis and Lower Egypt during the Sait supremacy have disappeared leaving hardly a trace behind, and the Greek writers have left us nothing but vague accounts to supply their place. Herodotus goes into ecstasies over the propylæa, that is, the pylons and outer courts, which Amasis added to the temple of Neith at Sais, and over the enormous size of the stones employed. He describes in great detail a chapel carved out of a single block of Syene granite, which Amasis transported from the quarries at great cost in order that it might be erected in the sanctuary of the said temple; unhappily it was so much injured on the journey that his intention had to be abandoned.[371]

[371] HERODOTUS, ii. 175.

All that we learn from the historian is that the Sait princes made use of colossal stones in their buildings without much regard to their appropriateness, but simply to impress their contemporaries with an exaggerated idea of their wealth and power. The contractors of an earlier age were also in the habit of employing blocks which seem astonishing to us from their length and size, but they were never used except when they were required, to cover a void or some other purpose; the earlier architects never made the mistake of seeking for difficulties merely to show how cleverly they could overcome them.

It is to be regretted that we know so little of the monument attributed by Herodotus to Psemethek, and described by him in the following terms:--"Having become master of the whole of Egypt, Psammitichos constructed those propylæa of the temple of Hephaistos which lie to the south of that building. In front of these propylæa he also caused to be constructed an edifice in which Apis was nourished as soon as he had manifested himself. It was a peristyle ornamented with figures. Colossal statues, twelve cubits high, were employed as supports, instead of columns."[372] We may assume that these colossi were, as in other Egyptian buildings, placed immediately in front of the real supports, and did not themselves uphold an entablature. Herodotus was not an architect, and, in taking account merely of the general effect, he doubtless used an expression which is not quite accurate.

[372] HERODOTUS, ii. 153.

The most important point to be noticed in this short extract from the Greek historian is the hint it contains of the attempts at originality made by the later generations of Egyptians, by "men born too late in too old a century," and of the means by which they hoped to rival their predecessors. The architect of Psemethek borrowed a motive which had long been disused, of which, however, there are many examples at Thebes, and employed it under novel conditions.

The caryatid form of pier is generally found, in temples, in the peristyles of the fore-courts or the hypostyles of the pronaos. Psemethek made use of it for the decoration of what was no more than a cattle stable.[373] The stable in question had, it must be confessed, a god for its inhabitant, and so far it might be called a temple; but it was a temple of a very peculiar kind, in which the arrangements must have been very different from those required in the abode of an inanimate deity. In it the god was present in flesh and blood, and special arrangements were necessary in order to provide for his wants, and to exhibit him to the crowd or conceal him, as the ritual demanded. The problem was solved, apparently, in a method satisfactory to the Egyptians, as the guide who attended Herodotus called his attention to the building with an insistance which led the historian to pay it special attention.

[373] Herodotus uses the word αὐλή, of which stable or
cattle-shed was one of the primitive meanings.

Herodotus does not tell us what form the caryatides took in this instance. It is unlikely that they were Osiride figures of the king, as in the Theban temples, but as Apis was the incarnation of Ptah, the great deity of Memphis, they may very possibly have been carved in the image of that god.

Between the days of Cambyses and those of Alexander, Egypt temporarily recovered her independence more than once. The art of that period--during which numerous works were carried out and many others restored--was a prolongation of the art of the Sait princes. Its aims, methods, and taste were entirely similar. We may, therefore, in spite of the limits which we have imposed upon ourselves, mention a work carried out no more than fifty years before the Greek conquest, in the reign of Nectanebo I. We mean the small building which is sometimes called the southern temple, in the island of Philæ. It is the oldest building upon the island, all the rest being Ptolemaic or Roman.

Its arrangements are different to anything we have hitherto encountered in religious architecture. There are no internal subdivisions of any kind, nothing which resembles a secos. According to all the plans which have been published, it contained only one hall, or rather rectangular court, inclosed by fourteen graceful columns and a low, richly-decorated wall, which forms a kind of screen between the lower part of the columns. This screen does not extend quite half-way up the columns; these latter support an entablature, but there has never been a roof of any kind. There can be no doubt that the building was consecrated to Isis, whose image is carved all over it; but could an edifice thus open to the outward air and to every prying eye be a temple? Ebers is disposed to look upon it as a waiting-room.[374] Close to it the remains of a wide staircase are to be traced, against which boats were moored, and upon which they discharged their loads. Thus the faithful who came to be present at the rites of Isis would assemble in the waiting-hall, whence they would be conducted by the priests to that sanctuary which became the object of so many pilgrimages in the later years of the Egyptian monarchy.

[374] _Égypte_, etc. p. 406.

Certain peculiarities in the management of the column, which grew into frequent use in the Ptolemaic epoch, are here encountered for the first time. This is not the place for its detailed consideration, but one must point it out as a second result of the desire shown by the architects of the period to achieve new developments without breaking the continuity of the national traditions. Here, as in the monumental cattle-shed at Memphis, there is no invention of new forms; all the architectural elements introduced are to be found in earlier buildings. It is the general aspect and physiognomy of the building that is new. Whatever we may call it, the edifice erected by Nectanebo at the southern point of the island is certainly novel in form; we have found nothing like it either in Egypt or in Nubia, but the repetition of its forms in a much later generation proves that it answered to a real change in the national taste and to new aspirations in the national genius. Painting, engraving, and photography have given us countless reproductions of the picturesque building which rises on the eastern shore of the island, amid a bouquet of palm-trees. It has been variously called the _bed of Pharaoh_, the _eastern temple_, the _great hypæthra_, the _summer-house of Tiberius_, &c. It is nothing more than a replica of Nectanebo's creation; it is larger and its proportions are more lofty, but its plan is quite similar.[375] In the sketch lent to us by M. Hector Leroux, the eastern temple is seen on the right, while the left of the drawing is filled up with the pylons of the great temple of Isis (Fig. 252).

[375] The temple of _Kerdasch_ or _Gartasse_ in Nubia resembles
the Eastern Temple at Philæ in plan; its date appears to be
unknown.

If we knew it better, we should probably find that the architecture of the Sait period formed the transition between that of the second Theban empire and that of the Ptolemies. We should find in it at least hints and foreshadowings of those original features of which we shall have to speak when we arrive at the Græco-Egyptian temples. Unhappily, as none of the temples built by Psemethek, Amasis, and their successors have been recovered from the sands of Egypt, we shall be reduced to conjecture on this point. But must all hope of recovering something from the ruins of Sais be abandoned? Mariette himself made some excavations upon its site, and confessed that he was discouraged by their result, or rather by their want of result. Perhaps, however, deeper and more prolonged excavations might bring to light sufficient indications of the ordonnance and plans of the more important buildings to permit of some attempt at restoration being made.[376]

[376] We have omitted to speak of those little temples known
since the time of Champollion as _mammisi_ or places for
accouchement, because the existing examples all belong to the
Ptolemaic period. The best preserved is that of Denderah. It is
probable, however, that the custom of building these little
edifices by the side of those great temples where a triad of
gods was worshipped dated back as far as the Pharaonic period.
The mammisi symbolised the celestial dwelling in which the
goddess gave birth to the third person of the triad. The authors
of the _Description_ called them _Typhonia_, from the effigy of
a grimacing deity which figures in their decoration. This deity
has, however, nothing in common with Set-Typhon, the enemy of
Osiris. We now know that his name was Bes, that he was imported
into Egypt from the country of the Aromati, and that he presided
over the toilette of women. (EBERS, _L'Égypte_, etc., p. 255.)

§ 4. General Characteristics of the Egyptian Temple.

We have now conducted our history of the Egyptian temple from the most ancient monument to which that title can be given to the period when Greek art, introduced into the country by the Macedonian conquest, began to have an influence upon many of the important details, if not upon the general aspects of the national architecture. The reader will not be surprised to find that before we conclude our study we wish to give a _résumé_ of the leading ideas which seem to be embodied in the temple, and to define the latter as we see it in its finest and most complete expression, in the buildings of the great Theban Pharaohs. We cannot do better for our purpose than borrow the words of Mariette upon the subject. No one has become more thoroughly acquainted with the temples of the Nile valley. He visited them all at his leisure, he explored their ruins and sounded most of them down to their foundations, and he published circumstantial descriptions of Abydos, Karnak, Dayr-el-Bahari, and Denderah. In these monographs and in the _Itinéraire de la Haute-Égypte_, he returned to his definition again and again, in a continual attempt to improve it, to make it clear and precise. We shall freely extract from his pages all those expressions which seem to us to give the best rendering of their author's ideas, and to bring out most clearly the originality which belongs to the monuments of which he treats.[377]

[377] MARIETTE, _Itinérare_, pp. 13-16, 157-159; _Karnak_, p.
19; _Voyage dans la Haute-Égypte_, vol. i. pp. 15, 16.

"The Egyptian temple must not be confused with that of Greece, with the Christian church, or with the Mohammedan mosque. It was not a place for the meeting of the faithful, for the recital of common prayers; no public ritual was celebrated within it; no one was admitted to it except the priests and the king. The temple was a kind of royal oratory, a monument reared by the king in token of his own piety, and in order to purchase the favour of the gods.

"The elaborate decoration with which all the walls of the temples are covered is only to be explained by admitting this point of departure. The essential element of this decoration is the picture; many pictures are arranged symmetrically side by side, and tiers above tiers of pictures cover the walls from floor to ceiling. This arrangement never varies, and the same may be said of the general significance of the pictures: on the one hand, the king, on the other, one or more deities; these are the subjects of all the compositions. The king makes an offering (meats, fruits, flowers, emblems) to the god and asks for some favour at his hands; in his answer the deity grants the favour demanded. The whole decoration of a temple consisted therefore in an act of adoration on the part of the monarch repeated in various forms. The temple was therefore the exclusive personal monument of the prince by whom it was founded and decorated. This fact explains the presence of those precious representations of battles which adorn the external walls of certain temples.[378] The king ascribed all his successes in the field to the immediate protection of the gods. In combating the enemies of Egypt, in bringing them by thousands to the capital, in employing them upon the construction of their temples, he was performing an act as agreeable to the gods as when offering incense, flowers, and the limbs of the animals sacrificed. By such deeds he proved his piety and merited the continuation of those favours for which the erection of a temple was meant to be an acknowledgment."

[378] The canal figured in front of the Chariot of Rameses, in
Fig. 254 was, according to Ebers, the oldest of the Suez Canals,
the one dug by Seti I. This canal was defended by
fortifications, and is called in inscriptions _the Cutting_
(_L'Égypte_, etc.).

The piety and gratitude of the monarch also found expression in the splendour of the great festivals of which the temple was the scene several times in the course of the year. "The ceremonies consisted for the most part of great processions, issuing from the sanctuary to be marshalled in the hypostyle hall, and afterwards traversing the open courts which lay between the buildings of the temple and the great wall which incloses the whole. They perambulated the terraced roofs, they launched upon the lake the sacred barque with its many-coloured streamers. Upon a few rare occasions the priests, with the sacred images, sallied from the inclosure which ordinarily shielded their rites from profane eyes, and, at the head of a brilliant flotilla, directed their course to some other city, either by the Nile or by the waterway which they called 'the sacred canal.'"[379]

[379] To follow these processions was an act of piety. Upon a
Theban stele we find the following words addressed to Amen-Ra:
"I am one of those who follow thee when thou goest abroad." The
stele of Suti and Har, architects at Thebes, translated into
French by PAUL PIERRET, in _Recueil de Travaux_, p. 72.

"The ensigns of the gods, the coffers in which their effigies or symbolic representations were inclosed, their shrines and sacred barques were carried in these processions, of which the kings were the reputed conductors. At other times all these objects were deposited in the naos. Upon the occurrence of a festival, the priest to whom the duty was delegated by the king entered the naos and brought out the mysterious emblem which was hidden from all other eyes; he covered it with a rich veil, and it was then carried under a canopy."

A ritual to which so much "pomp and circumstance" was attached required material appliances on a great scale. The preservation of so much apparatus required extensive store-rooms, which, like the sanctuary itself, had to be kept in almost total darkness in order to preserve the sacred vestments and other objects from the deteriorating effects of sun, dust, heat, and the insects which they engender. There is nothing in the texts which seems to hint at the celebration of any rites in the dark parts of the temple by artificial light, and no trace of the discoloration caused by smoke has been found upon the walls. There seems to have been no necessity for anything beyond the most subdued daylight within the chambers of the temple. All the important part of the ritual was performed in the open air, and the few liturgical acts in the naos were short and took place before a very restricted audience. They consisted of a few prayers said by the king or by the chief priest, and in the presentation of the traditional offerings. The cares of maintenance and of preparation for the periodical festivals had also to go on in that part of the temple. Such duties, however, could be readily discharged by the practised and disciplined priests in the half light of the sanctuary, and even the almost total darkness of the apartments which were ranged behind it.

"The temples show no trace of dwelling-places for the priests, nor of places for initiation, nor of any contrivance for divination or the giving of oracles. There is nothing to lead us to suppose that, except the king and the priests, any of the public were admitted into the building," at least beyond the hypostyle hall. Certain privileged individuals or classes were admitted into the latter on the occasion of a festival; others, less fortunate, were compelled to wait in the courtyards. It was their right to be the first to see the god as he emerged from the sanctuary on the shoulders of the priests. But in spite of their vast dimensions, these halls would have been ill fitted for the uses to which the spacious naves of a church or mosque are put. The huge and closely spaced columns would embarras the movements and intercept the view of those who crowded about their bases. It was only in the central aisle that sufficient space was left for the easy passage of a procession. The hypostyle hall was lofty and wide in order that it might be a vestibule worthy of the god who dwelt in the sanctuary beyond it, and in order that it might bear witness by its magnificence to the piety, wealth, and power of the king who constructed it. It offered no place in which the faithful could assemble to listen to religious discourses, to unite in the expression of their faith and hope, to sing and pray in common.

In virtue of the sanctuary which was its nucleus, the temple was the dwelling of the god, the terrestrial resting-place to which the king, his son and the nursling of the goddesses, came to offer him thanks and to do homage in return for the protection and support which he received. The temple was also, in virtue of those numerous chambers which surrounded the sanctuary, a place for the preparation, consecration, and preservation of holy objects; a huge sacristy to which access was forbidden to all but those who were specially attached to the service of the god and charged with the custody of the sacred furniture.

Such being the origin and purpose of the temple, we need feel no surprise at the triple fortification behind which it was entrenched. This fortification consisted, in the first place, of the brick wall which formed the outermost inclosure; secondly, of the wall of masonry which embraced the temple proper, leaving a narrow passage only wide enough for the walk of a sentry; thirdly, of the wall which divided the really secret parts of the building from the pronaos. Now that the line of the external wall is only indicated by a gentle swell of the ground, now that the best preserved of the inner walls are broken down in many places, and now that all the roofs and ceilings have fallen and encumbered the floors, it is difficult enough to form a true idea of the former appearance of the Egyptian temples. Could we see them as they left their architects' hands, we should be struck by the jealous severity of their isolation, by the austere monotony of the screen of stone which was interposed between the eyes of the people and the internal splendours of the building. In this we should find the chief point of distinction between the temples of Egypt and those great religious edifices of our own times with which we half involuntarily compare all other works of the kind.

But the Greek temple was no more a church than its Egyptian rival. It was not a place of assembly for public praise or religious teaching. Its cella was an inclosed chamber, illuminated only by the door and by a few openings contrived in the roof, and reserved for the god who inhabited it. The two architects in fact, Egyptian and Greek, had the same points of departure; the problems which they had to solve strongly resembled each other, and yet they created types which differed very greatly. The Greek temple was not isolated and hidden behind a stone curtain; it could be seen from all sides in its commanding position; its encircling bands of porticos seemed to invite all comers to the shelter of their galleries, while they charmed all eyes with the play of light and shadow afforded by their alternate voids and solids. The colonnades reserved by the Egyptian for the decoration of courts and halls were placed by the Greek upon the external faces of his temples, and although the task of both architects was to fulfil almost identical requirements, this transposition of the elements employed was sufficient to cause a profound difference in the outward expression, in the physiognomy, of their several works.

Another and perhaps still more characteristic difference is to be found in the fact that the Greek temple is not susceptible, like that of Egypt, of almost infinite extension. Greece never produced anything like Karnak or Luxor; even in the centuries when the taste for the colossal eclipsed the love for the great, she never dreamed or imagined anything of the kind. The Greek temple had the unity of a living organism. Given the main dimensions, the elements of which it was to be composed could only vary within very narrow limits. In accordance with the degree of luxury desired, the cella would be either surrounded by a simple wall or would be encircled by a portico, but this portico would only be a kind of adornment, a vesture which would be more or less rich and ample according to circumstances. Behind the long files of columns on either side, behind the double or triple rows which veiled the two façades, the body of the temple could always be discerned, just as the modelling of the human form may be distinguished under the drapery of a statue, in spite of the folds which cover it. The cella was proportioned to the sacred figure which was to be its inhabitant, which, again, afforded a standard by which the proportions and subjects of the groups which filled the pediments, and of the bas-reliefs of the frieze, as well as the height of the columns and the projection of the entablature, were determined. Between all these parts there was an intimate and clearly defined connection.

When a plant is seen bursting from the seed, we are able, if we know the species to which it belongs, to say beforehand what its leaves, its flower, and its fruit will be like, and to foretell the limits of its height. It is the same, to a great extent, with the Greek temple. The trench dug to receive the footing stones of the cella walls is the hole into which the seed is thrown from which the whole temple is to spring. These walls rise above the level of the ground, the building progresses to completion, but from the day upon which the seed was sown, from the day upon which the foundation was laid, the temple had been virtually complete. Like an organic body, the Greek temple inclosed within itself the principle of its own growth, the law which governed its development, and forbade it in advance to exceed certain definite limits.

Such was not the case with the Egyptian temple. In those of small or moderate dimensions this unity and simplicity of plan exists to a certain extent. The peripteral temple of Elephantiné and even the temple of Khons may be given as instances of this; in them there is much with which the most exclusive philo-Greek can sympathize. The impression received from the ruins of Abydos or Gournah, still more from those of Karnak or Luxor, is very different. There we find several sanctuaries closely wedged together, all of the same size and decorated in the same fashion, in one place the architect has built seven in a row, and there was nothing to prevent him doubling the number if he had chosen to do so. In another we find a succession of courts, of hypostyle halls and chambers, of forests of columns. Sometimes it requires considerable search to pitch upon the sanctuary, which, again, is not the loftiest part of the building, being dominated by hypostyle hall and pylons.

When Egypt had arrived at the summit of her greatness and wished to erect temples to her gods which should be worthy both of herself and of them, she found herself obliged either to sacrifice the unity of the temple by dividing it up into distinct naves and sanctuaries, or to hide the main parts by the accessories in such a fashion that the sanctuary seems to be lost among the annexes which envelop it in front and rear. The vestibule and other subsidiary parts mask the real dwelling of the god. We are sometimes at a loss to decide the uses of all the chambers of so vast and complex a structure, because our knowledge of the circumstances of ancient Egyptian worship is still far from complete. It is significant that even among such an imposing pile of buildings as those of Karnak, egyptologists have found it impossible to agree as to the situation of the heart and organic centre of the whole. That centre exists; it existed before all those sumptuous additions of which it was the cause. But it would seem that its influence failed to make itself felt beyond a certain distance. The temple was enlarged by additions made at its two extremities, in the manner of an inorganic body, so that no limit could be logically assigned to its development. Karnak, as it was left by the Pharaohs and their successors, is the most colossal work of architecture which has come down to us from antiquity, and yet our imagination can give to it even greater dimensions than it actually possessed without injury to its artistic expression. If the worship of which it was the scene had endured a few centuries longer, it would have been easy to add new pylons, new courts, and new hypostyle halls to those already existing; but had the worship of Athene endured through as many ages as that of Ptah or Amen, it would have been impossible to make additions to the Parthenon as it left the hands of Ictinus and Phidias.

END OF VOL. I.

LONDON: R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.

Transcriber's Note:

Archaic and inconsistent spelling and punctuation retained.

Some of the figure and plate references appear to be incorrect.

Fig. 460 referenced in Fig. 56 does not exist. It is possibly Figure 205 in Volume II.