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Ancient Egypt Magazine

Issue Two - July / August 2000

Ancient Temples

Part 1: Cult and Funerary Temples

Modern visitors to Egypt can still admire the beautiful and awe-inspiring temples built in ancient times. Although they are vast and complex structures, at heart they are designed round a domestic theme: they are houses for the gods to live in, including guest bedrooms for visiting deities.
A three-part series by Dr Barbara Watterson begins.

 Large stone temples are today amongst the most impressive remains of the civilisation of ancient Egypt, each one immediately recognizable, distinctively Egyptian. There were two main categories: the cult temple, dedicated to the worship of one or more deities; and the funerary temple, in which rituals were celebrated to ensure the well-being in the after­life of a dead king.

Funerary Temples

 The practice of building funerary temples arose from the custom of making provision at the royal tomb for offerings of food, drink and other items deemed necessary for the enjoyment of the afterlife. By the end of the Third Dynasty (about 2600 BC), the royal tomb had taken the form of a pyramid, and funerary offerings were placed in a small chapel attached to its eastern side.

The Fourth-Dynasty Pyramids at Giza (c.2589-c.2488 BC), the best known of the pyramids of Egypt, were the first to be equipped with stone funerary temples on their eastern sides. They set the pattern for generations to come: columned entrance halls leading to an open court beyond which were five niches – thought to be for statues of the king – backed by five storage chambers which were in turn backed by a sanctuary. On the eastern wall of the sanctuary was a statue-niche before which offerings were made to enable the ka or spirit of the dead king to exist in the afterlife. A causeway led from the funerary temple down to the bank of the Nile where a smaller building – usually known today as a valley temple – had been erected for the preparation of the king’s body for burial.

The custom of attaching a funerary temple to the eastern side of a royal tomb lasted until the begin­ning of the Eighteenth Dynasty (1550 BC) when kings elected to be interred in rock-cut tombs in a valley on the edge of the Western Desert at Waset (Luxor). Lack of space in this, the Valley of the Kings, necessitated that funerary temples be sited elsewhere, and so they were erected on the plain between the Valley and the Nile.

Funerary temples were built for most of the kings of the New Kingdom (1550-1085 BC), the majority of which were modelled on the cult temples of the time. There were variants, however, such as the funerary temple of the female king, Hatshepsut (1479-1425 BC), at Deir el-Bahri, which is largely a series of colonnaded terraces built against a backdrop of cliffs. Reliefs depicting the warlike exploits of a king adorn the walls of most of the contemporary funerary temples; but at Deir el-Bahri it is the peaceful events of Hatsh­epsut’s life that are commemorated – her divine birth, the transportation of the obelisks she commissioned for the Temple of Amun at Karnak, the trading expedition she des­patched to Punt (northern Eritrea).

The chief purpose of a New Kingdom funerary temple remained the same as that of the earlier temples: it was a place in which offerings were made to a dead king. It could also be dedicated to the chief god of the locality; and it sometimes functioned as a temple during a king’s lifetime – Deir el-Bahri, for instance, did so. In the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties funerary temples were given new purposes: they became admin­istrative centres; and small palaces were built alongside the main temple. These palaces were probably used when the king, normally resident in the north, paid a state visit to Waset.

Secondary funerary temples were sometimes built, not at Waset, but about 160km to the north at Abydos, chief cult centre of the god, Osiris, King of the Underworld, who was thought to be buried there. At Abydos, a king was able to associate himself with Osiris by erecting a temple which, because it was built in honour of someone buried elsewhere, is today called a “cenotaph-temple”. The earliest such temple seems to have belonged to the Twelfth-Dynasty king, Senwosret III (1862 – 1843 BC); but the most famous is the cenotaph-temple of Sety I (1294-1279 BC). The walls of Sety’s temple are decorated with painted raised reliefs that are masterpieces of Egyptian art, making it the most beautiful of Egyptian temples.

Cult Temples

 Of the surviving cult temples, the greatest date from either the New Kingdom or the Ptolemaic Period (304-30 BC); but most of these temples were undoubtedly constructed over the sites of earlier buildings. It was not the ambition of Egyptian temple-builders to use virgin sites, but rather to erect their new structures on holy ground that had been in use “since the time of the gods”. In the earliest, prehistoric, times, the Egyptians housed fetishes and statuettes that represented their deities in simple shrines made of reed and mud, not unlike their own houses. Gradually, mud-brick became the building material of choice in both domestic and temple architecture; and by the New Kingdom, most temples were constructed largely of sandstone.

The domestic nature of temples, first seen in the predynastic reed shrines, continued in the stone structures. The ancient Egyptian terms for temple, hwt ntr (Mansion of the God), and pr, (the House), is confirmation of the fact that such buildings were applications and developments of the fundamental theme of ancient Egyptian architecture, the house. A typical large house of the dynastic period, which had a square ground plan with rooms grouped round a central living area, consisted basically of a courtyard, a portico, a living room and one or more bedrooms. This fundamental house plan was modified to meet the needs of the temple. Large processions of priests, for example, were features of temple ritual: thus the rooms of a temple had to be arranged along an axis in order to produce a processional way down the centre of the building. Never­theless, room for room, a temple was an elaboration of a house.

From about 1500 BC, the front entrance to a temple took the form of a monumental gateway that consisted of a great wooden door flanked by tall towers, each broader at the base than at the top. These gateways developed from the towers of reed matting strengthened by cores of mud which were placed in front of primitive shrines, and are known today by the Greek term, pylon. Tall flagstaffs were attached to the façade of a pylon, and obelisks were set up before it. Beyond the pylon lay a courtyard – in larger temples, more than one court – open to the sky and sometimes colonnaded, the columns representing the plants found in the gardens of domestic houses.

The courtyard, or forecourt, led to a large roofed hall that corresponded to the living room of a house. The roof was made of stone slabs supported by columns, the spaces between which varied according to the type of stone used for the roofing; lime­stone, for example, could only be used to span spaces of up to about 2.75m. This type of hall, known as a hypostyle, was not supplied by windows or light shafts in the roof. However, the height of the central two rows of columns was some­times higher than the outer columns thus providing space for the building of a wall into which clerestory windows could be inserted.

The hypostyle hall gave access, sometimes through a smaller col­umned hall, to the sanctuary area. The domestic master bedroom became, in a temple, the Holy of Holies where the statue of the chief deity of the temple was kept. It was the focal point of the temple and was always situated on the main axis of the building. Around the innermost sanctuary were subsidiary rooms, either representing “guest bedrooms” for visiting deities or “cupboards” in which the god’s regalia and sacred objects were kept.

The four main sections of a temple – the pylon, the forecourt, the hypostyle hall and the sanctuary – made up the rectangular shape of the main nucleus of the building. This nucleus, and the area immediately surrounding it, was enclosed by a high wall made of sun-dried mud brick, the temenos. Within the temenos wall were various buildings in which the busi­ness of the temple was con­ducted; and a sacred lake from which much of the water used within the temple was obtained.

Both funerary and cult temples owned property and estates, often in different parts of Egypt, and some­times abroad, which not only rendered temples self-supporting but also produced extra revenue so that they became owners of great wealth. Much of a temple’s land was rented to tenant farmers, thereby bringing in yet more revenue. Cult temples ran schools for the education and training of bureaucrats, scribes, artists and doctors. Doctor-priests were trained and based in temples, some of which even had rudimentary hospitals within their precincts where the sick could receive treatment.

Since most Egyptians were illiterate, temple scribes were available for hire to write letters and other documents on their behalf. They also registered births and drew up legal documents such as property and marriage contracts, copies of which were kept in temple repositaries. Thus, although a temple was not intended to be a place of worship for the population as a whole, for no public ritual was celebrated in it and, apart from a few privileged individuals, no-one was admitted into it except the priesthood, cult temples played an important part in the life of the community.     

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