Temple building

Because the temples were dwellings of the gods, they were ‘‘houses of eternity’’ and were built in stone, not in mud brick. Sandstone was used in Upper Egypt and limestone in Middle and Lower Egypt. Ptolemaic temples were copied from their New Kingdom predecessors, with some minor innovations, e. g. carefully prefabricated stones were now placed in regular courses of equal (isodomic) heights (Arnold 1999: 144); human and divine figures are all of the same height and cut at the same places by the horizontal joins of the stones. The house in which the god lived symbolically represented the world: it was directed towards the east (its front gate oriented towards the Nile), and the sun came up between its two pylons; the columns were enormous plants (lotus, papyrus, and all kinds of composite leaves) supporting a roof decorated with stars symbolising the sky.

The temple was centered around the divine statue, often gilded, set up in a stone shrine (naos). In this statue the god was present. This statue was not the god but a sacred spot where he came to rest on earth, not unlike the presence of Christ in the tabernacle of a Catholic church. The naos stood in a chapel at the very end of the building, preceded by a room in which the divine barque was kept. In the larger temples the holy of holies was surrounded by a series of chapels and by an ambulatory (the couloir myst'erieux). In the Graeco-Roman Period one of these chapels, the wabet, had an open air court in which the New Year festival was celebrated (Holbl 2000: 56). Temple building started from this inner sanctuary towards the front, and over the years new constructions might be added: a hypostyle hall with heavy columns, an open courtyard, one or more gate towers (pylons), colossal statues, obelisks and a sphinx alley (dromos). Finally a separate birth house (mammisi) could be constructed for the divine child god, since the god usually lived with his divine wife. The separate mammisi is a typical feature of Graeco-Roman temples. The birth of the divine child from a divine and human father legitimated the reigning king. Guidelines for the building of an ideal temple, given in the so-called Book of the Temple, were taken into account where possible (Quack 2000).

Walking along the alley the visitor entered the temple through a monumental gate with two pylons, often decorated with a scene depicting the king smiting his enemies. Though these enemies are identified as barbarian peoples, the scene also shows how the forces of chaos were kept out of the sacred space. The temple was constructed as a fortress to keep all chaos out. The floor gradually rises, the ceilings become lower and the interior darker, so that no unclean intruders can pollute the god in the holy-of-holies. Demons with knives inside the gate also keep evil forces out, and the king is depicted as being purified with live-giving water by Horus and Thoth before he enters the gate. Only clean-shaven priests were allowed beyond the open courtyard.

Typically the walls of the temple are full of hieroglyphs and reliefs (the figures are in fact enlarged hieroglyphs), which were brightly colored. This horror vacui is still very much the style of the Ptolemaic Period but tends to disappear later (though in Esna, for instance, it is kept up to the end). The hieroglyphic script, written in the classical language of two thousand years before, becomes ever more complicated: new signs are added, word plays and rebus techniques suggest hidden meanings.

Table 15.1 The spread of temple decoration during the Graeco-Roman Period

Recent studies (Arnold 1999; Holbl 2000-5) and the Wurzburg database on ritual scenes in Egyptian temples allow us to map how temple decoration was spread over time and place. Though the decoration was sometimes added many years after the building was completed, the names and titles of the kings on the reliefs are our surest way of dating the buildings (see table 15.1).

These are rough figures because the periods are uneven in length and decoration is not always contemporaneous with the building of the temple. Moreover in Upper Egypt and in the desert the chance of survival is far better than in the towns of the Delta, where the stones were reused as building material. However, differences between individual rulers are surprisingly great: Ptolemy VIII (1214 scenes) and Augustus (1177) appear far more often in offering scenes than Ptolemy II (438) or Ptolemy III (only 174). The very low figure for Ptolemy V (91) can be explained by the great revolt in the south during most of his reign, but the drop under Ptolemy I (70) after the reign of Alexander and his successors (227) is unexpected, since the temples carrying the names of Philip Arrhidaios (124) and Alexander IV (26) were, in fact, built by the later Ptolemy I in his role as satrap. Under the Flavii Domitian is far better represented than Vespasian and Titus (186 vs. 36 and 23 respectively), and there seems to be a last revival under Antoninus Pius (95 vs. only 78 for Hadrian, who visited Egypt). The distribution over the country is also very uneven: whereas Lower Egypt is well represented from Alexander to Ptolemy I, and Middle Egypt sporadically occurs until Ptolemy VI, Upper Egypt becomes predominant from Ptolemy III onwards. The new temples built in the Roman Period are all in Upper Egypt (El-Qala, Shenhur, Aswan, Philae) or in far away Nubia and the oases.