Introduction

Temples were the houses and center of the estates of gods. As such, they provided a protective environment on earth for the divine beings in their spiritual form. The temple and its decoration, therefore, reflected the role of a ‘‘house,’’ the resources it controlled and a place of entrance into the divine world. It was part of the duty of the king both to build and to maintain the physical houses of the gods and to provide nourishment for them through offerings, as well as maintain their well-being through rituals. Any service, which was done for any earthly lord and owner of estates in his villa or house, was done on a cosmological scale for the gods inside their temples. The form and decoration of these divine houses had to reflect both the status of the owner and the precise function of such a special place and had also to take into consideration the requirement of the king to show himself as the earthly heir and servant of the gods. Architecture and decorative schemes, including movable monuments such as statues, stelae, and altars and the texts and scenes inscribed or painted on temple walls, therefore, responded to all of these requirements.

There were two main types of temple in Egypt: the cult place of a god (cult temple) and the cult place of a dead, godly king (mortuary temple). The two types have many common characteristics, with the main differences being the location of the mortuary temple near the burial place of the king and the fact that the central focus of much of the inscribed decoration is the dead king, although this does not prevent the presence of many gods, especially Osiris, the god of the dead with whom the dead king was identified. As the gift of the king, cult temples had huge political and economic significance, controlling administrative areas of Egypt, enabling the king to place his monuments at the heart of the major cities, especially from the Middle Kingdom onwards, and to impose ‘‘new’’ state gods at the heart of the ‘‘capital’’ cities, such as the Amun cult at Thebes in the Eleventh and Eighteenth Dynasties or the Aten cult at Amarna in the Eighteenth.

It is likely that many hundreds of temples and shrines were in use at any one time, located in every town and village throughout Egypt, serving local and state gods and more or less patronized by the king or local officials. The indications from papyrus documents, such as Papyrus Wilbour (O’Connor 1972: 690-6), or the rich evidence from the Ptolemaic-Roman Period (Bowman 1986: 171-2) are that we have only a small surviving proportion of original buildings, and we lack evidence for local practices. The study of the development of the temple buildings is constrained further by two other factors. The first concerns early temple structures. Many of these were made from mud or organic materials, which have not survived. The organic aspect of temple structures, however, continued to be of great importance in the stone buildings, almost to the point that the stone temples can be regarded as permanent versions of an ideal organic building, designed to endure for ever. The second factor is that temples were built and rebuilt in the same place by kings over many centuries, so that most surviving stone buildings mask several phases of construction under different rulers.

There are further difficulties in the study of temple development and function because, after the Pharaonic period, some temples were converted into churches or fortifications, and others were buried under sprawling towns. The temples that are available for study, therefore, are usually excavated, in the broadest sense of the word, and present a modern-day appearance divorced from past eras. It is a difficult challenge to define the intended form of any one temple under any one ruler and, generally, the buildings are treated as monolithic structures. As a result, developments in temple architecture look as if they were linear ‘‘progressions’’ over time, with each previous era’s ideas being included in the next one in an accumulative, ‘‘syncretistic’’ ideology. This approach can also mask the dynamics of each period and of particular groups of rulers. The continued publication and study of temples is making clearer how they relate to one another, often in geographical groups, but also where there are distinctive, individual flavors of design choice. There are good examples of the kind of decorative programmes that can help us to understand that, although often individual temples must have resembled incomplete building sites, they give the impression that they were designed according to a well-defined programme for specific purposes established by theological as well as royal motives. Nothing in a temple is there by chance - everything can be read and has meaning and purpose.