Temples were perhaps the most prominent features of the Egyptian landscape. Even today when people visit Egypt it is usually the temples - Karnak and Luxor, Medinet Habu and the Ramesseum - that make the greatest impression on the visitors. Thousands of years after they were built, these structures still have the power and grandeur to astound the viewer.
The temples are enormous. The Temple of Amun at Karnak (see Plan 1) is a complex of stone buildings that sprawls over 100 hectares of the town of Luxor. The Hypostyle Hall is a veritable forest of ten-meter-wide sandstone columns that soar twenty-three meters into the air, like great reeds in a primordial swamp. Pylon after pylon demark different sections of the temple. The visitor is surrounded by innumerable scenes of the deities and the king - everywhere one looks, the gods are present (Fig. 16). Today, most of the walls are a soothing near monochrome of gray and tan, punctuated by a doorjamb or statue of red granite or a shrine of alabaster. Apart from the visitors who are craning their necks to look upward following the prompts of their guide, or are looking downward into their guidebooks, the only sign of life is the scuttle of a beetle or a tiny gecko across the path, or the stirring of the waters in the sacred lake.
The thousands of years have not stripped the temples of their grandeur, but the structures have lost much of their humanity and color. Missing are signs of activity. In ancient days, the temples were places of humans in
Figure 16. Wall at Karnak covered with scenes of King Ramesses II making offerings to various deities. To step into the temple was to enter the realm of the gods.
Dynasty 19. Photo: Emily Teeter.
Motion. Hundreds of priests passed through the halls, and porters carried heaps of offerings - incense, sacks of grain, bolts of cloth, and other objects needed for temple rituals. Groups of priests gathered to wash and prepare for duty. Doorkeepers lolled near their posts. The temples were always in a state of architectural flux, and so there would have been teams of workmen hauling blocks and the sound of workmen's chisels against the stone.
The smells of the ancient temples are also lost. Today, the temples are clean and sterile, but in ancient days, they would have been fragrant, and at times pungent. The odor of incense would have filled the air. But other smells were prevalent as well. One would have been aware of the cows that were kept nearby for sacrifice to the god, and of the hundreds of birds kept in the pens on the south side of the sacred lake. The Egyptians were never very good trash managers, and the houses of the priests within the Karnak Temple walls would have added their own scent to the atmosphere.
Light is also missing from the temples today. The light levels within the temples were carefully and dramatically controlled. Brightly lit open
Inside the Temple
Courtyards alternated with dim spaces. The Hypostyle Hall at Karnak was originally dim, but its great sandstone roofing slabs have collapsed, leaving it brightly illuminated. The original darkness of the space would have been broken by shafts of light from the grilled stone clerestory windows. These were positioned along the center of the hall, at the transition between the taller columns of the central row and the field of shorter columns that filled the rest of the hall. As one approached the sanctuary, the most sacred part of the temple, the light levels diminished. This is particularly noticeable in the Greco-Roman temples of Dendera and Edfu. There, the sanctuary is in almost total darkness; the only sources of light are small square window shafts, carefully positioned to allow slivers of sun into the ambulatory and chapels (Fig. 17).
The temples have also lost much of their color, for the carved scenes on the walls were once brightly painted with white, red, green, blue, and yellow pigments. Brightly colored pennants flapped from the top of the cedar masts that stood against the pylon faces (Plate IV). The temples, with all their exterior color, were surrounded and shrouded by tall, plaster-covered mud-brick walls. This somber outer face would have been a striking contrast to the brightly painted pylons visible on entering the temple grounds, a vivid reminder that one had entered another, very sacred, realm.
World History
