Aside from the rituals and hymns, it was also important for the temple decoration to create inventories (accounts) and lists of the possessions of the temple as well as the possessions of the king and Egypt. Thutmose III seems to have emphasized this desire to use the temple as a virtual storehouse of what he owned. The surviving reliefs from his reign at Karnak record his temple inventory, including the vessels, ritual objects (including obelisks) that he had given to the temple. In addition, the foreign lands that he had encountered were inventoried in his celebrated Festival Hall showing all the plants and animals from the world known to the Egyptians, and the Akh-Menu design contained also an inventory of time, showing the background of Thutmose as a legitimate ruler, by listing his ancestor kings in a special ancestor cult. The annals inscribed on the wall are a collation of his military campaigns, originally complete with images of the captured cities and people he had conquered. Such an undertaking is within the decorative schema of the temple as a reflection of the universe. In the case of Thutmose III, it was a universe that he seems to have seen at first hand. He was by no means the first to use the temple to record his possessions throughout the known world. The fragments surviving from the mortuary temple of Sahure at Abusir also allude to a gazetteer attitude behind the decorative scheme of the temple. In the case of this temple, built to sustain the ka of the king in the afterlife, there is also a desire to show him as victorious over conquered people, as bringing back unusual vessels and items including a bear from Syria, and as the heir of the gods in scenes showing him in their company and being suckled by goddesses.
The archiving mentality continues to be evident in the Ptolemaic Period with ‘‘geographical texts.’’ They list the cult centers of Egypt and in each place there is a record of the name of the chief priest, the chantress of the god, the sacred mounds and groves, the sacred boat, the guardian serpent, the canal and waterways and the lands of the temple. It is reflected in the Delta Papyrus (P. Brooklyn 47.218.84), which contains a similar list for the north of Egypt (Meeks 2006) and reminds us of the primary source of the texts, that is, papyrus documents. In many ways, the layouts of the walls can directly be related to the layout of a papyrus scroll, with its segments of information and long linear sequences.
In Edfu temple the ‘‘Treasury’’ contains lists with depictions of offering beings carrying trays holding the ritual impedimenta of the temple and precious objects; the ‘‘Library’’ has a list of books contained in the temple; and the ‘‘Workshop’’ has a series of recipes for making unguents and incenses to be used in the temple. On the one hand, these texts and any accompanying rituals may be stone records of papyri documents which have not survived, as hinted at by the inventories of the Abusir temples; on the other hand, the way in which they are confined to specific places in the temple and the fact that they are written in hieroglyphs gives them a dual function as decoration and permanent record of the information which they contain.
World History
