Temples

Since non-elite individuals had restricted access to the gods, and ‘could rarely hope to penetrate further than the enclosure wall or the first courtyard of a temple’,716 717 718 719 720 721 intermediaries were necessary for them to participate in state religion other than during festivals.722 Indirect access could be afforded by colossal statues of kings at temple gateways, some of which bore the epithet ‘He who listens to prayers’,723 or by intermediary statues of officials.724 By the New Kingdom it seems that people desired a closer relationship with gods,725 as evidenced by the increased salience of ‘personal piety’,726 which in turn was presumably the catalyst for the production of objects associated with ancestral cults for use within the home.

The discovery of anthropoid busts and an akh iqer stela in the Sety I temples of Hathor and Amun at Deir el-Medina suggests that ancestors and deities were worshipped simultaneously in these buildings.727 Busts were also found in a temple at Gurob and in a temple drain at

Kamak.728 The Gurob bust was discovered with a dish, possibly for offerings, buried about fifteen centimetres below the surface near the central column of the temple: the head and its support, broken apart in antiquity, were placed together on a sherd and covered with an inverted saucer.729 The breakage may have led to the deposition of the bust in a sacred place; the fact that the sculpture was buried rather than discarded suggests that the person represented by the bust may still have been within living memory.

In the private statue cult in temples, a reciprocal agreement between officials, the king and the gods was clearly assumed. The steward of Memphis, Amenhotep-Huy, for example, contributed towards the cult statue of Amenhotep III in the temple of Ptah; in return he was rewarded with a statue of himself set up within the same temple and entitled to share in offerings made to the statue of his king, thus perpetuating his own statue cult.730 Although the donation was made to the intermediary statue (twt) of the king, reversion offerings were to be provided by the cult/processional statue (hnty) already set up within the temple. By establishing a statue cult with his son as its mortuary priest, Amenhotep-Huy was also ensuring that revenue from the associated estate would remain within his family.731

Naophorous statues erected in temples represent elite men embracing and thus protecting cult images of the gods, and by so doing ensuring their own protection and renewal.732 The same reciprocity extends to ‘intermediary statues’,733 through which petitioners could address the gods in return for offerings made on behalf of the statue owner (see Chapter 2). Except for these statues of officials, New Kingdom temples were the least common location for interaction between the living and the dead, indeed, they were barely places of interaction between people and deities.734 The deceased worshipping Hathor, and less frequently, Taweret, is often depicted in tomb scenes and Book of the Dead Papyri vignettes.735 It may be that the scenes showing Hathor emerging both from the western mountain and a papyrus clump, sometimes with a diminutive statue of a king in front of her, represent variations of the sculpture in the chapel in the temple of Thutmose III at Deir el-Bahri.736 The sculpture was apparently adapted for the tomb of Netjerumose at Saqqara,737 which indicates the importance this aspect of the goddess in the cult of the dead. It may be significant that in the Book of the Dead of Ani, the tomb738 is illustrated on the opposite side of the mountain from both Hathor and Ipet/Taweret (who stands on a low plinth, perhaps representing her chapel at Deir el-Medina; Figure 34).

Figure 34: Deities representing chapels on the West Bank of Thebes at Deir el-Medina and Deir el-Bahri? Book of the Dead of Ani, Spells 185 and 186, 19th Dynasty. British Museum, EA 10470, 37. © Trustees of the British Museum.

These scenes may depict the desire of the deceased to visit local temples and chapels as they had done during their lifetimes. This would fit with Assmann’s739 assessment of the desire of the dead to return to earth for the purpose of following the gods in festival and worshipping them.