§ 3. The Temple under the New Empire

Before we cross the threshold of the great Theban temples and attempt to evolve order out of their complexity of courts, halls, porticos and colonnades, it may be convenient to describe their approaches. Each temple had its external and accessory parts which had their share in the religious ceremonies of which it was the theatre, and it would be difficult to make its economy understood unless we began by noticing them in detail.

One of the first signs which denoted to visitors the proximity of an Egyptian temple was what the Greek travellers called a δρόμος, that is to say a paved causeway bordered on each side with rams or sphinxes, their heads being turned inwards to the road. These avenues vary in width, that at Karnak is 76 feet between the inner faces of the pedestals; within the precincts of the sacred edifice, between the first and second pylon, this width underwent a considerable increase. The space between one sphinx and another on the same side of the causeway was about 13 feet. The dromos which led from Luxor to Karnak was about 2,200 yards long; there must, therefore, have been five hundred sphinxes on each side of it. At the Serapeum of Memphis the sphinxes which Mariette found by digging 70 feet downwards into the sand were still nearer to one another; the dromos which they lined was found to be 50 feet wide and about 1,650 yards long.

Following our modern notions we should, perhaps, expect to find these causeways laid out upon an exactly rectilinear plan. They are not so, however. It has sometimes been said that one of the characteristic features of Egyptian architecture is its dislike, or rather hatred, of a rigorous symmetry. Traces of this hatred are to be found in these avenues. The very short ones, such as those which extend between one pylon and another, are straight, but those which are prolonged for some distance outside the buildings of the temple almost always make some abrupt turns. The Serapeum dromos undergoes several slight changes of direction, in order, no doubt, to avoid the tombs between which its course lay. We find the same thing at Karnak, where the architect must have had different motives for his abandonment of a straight line. At the point where the man-headed sphinxes of Horus succeed to those sphinxes without inscriptions the date of which Mariette found it impossible to determine, the axis of the avenue inclines gently to the left.

These avenues of sphinxes are always outside the actual walls of the temple, from which it has been inferred that they were merely ornamental, and without religious signification.

Some of the great temples have several of these avenues leading up to their different gates. It is within these gates only that the sacred inclosure called by the Greeks the τέμενος commences. The religious ceremonies were all performed within this space, which was inclosed by an encircling wall built at sufficient distance from the actual temple to allow of the marshalling of processions and other acts of ritual.

These outer walls are of crude brick. At Karnak they are about 33 feet thick, but as their upper parts have disappeared through the perishable nature of the material, it is impossible to say with certainty what their original height may have been. Their summits, with their crenellated parapets, must have afforded a continuous platform connected with the flat tops of the pylons by flights of steps.

"These inclosing walls served more than one purpose. They marked the external limits of the temple. They protected it against injury from without. When their height was considerable, as at Denderah, Sais, and other places, they acted as an impenetrable curtain between the profane curiosity of the external crowd and the mysteries performed within; and when they had to serve their last named purpose they were constructed in such a fashion that those without could neither hear nor see anything that passed.

"It is probable that the walls of Karnak served all three purposes. There are four of them, connected one with another by avenues of sphinxes, and all the sacred parts of the building, except a few chapels, are in one of the four inclosures.... Their height was at least sufficient to prevent any part of the inside from being overlooked from any quarter of the city, so that the ceremonies in the halls, under the colonnades, or upon the lakes could be proceeded with in strict isolation from the outer world. We may therefore perceive that, on certain occasions, these inclosures would afford a sanctuary which could not easily be violated, while they would keep all those who had not been completely initiated at a respectful distance from the holy places within."

These walls were pierced in places by stone doorways, embedded in the masses of crude brick, whose highest parts always rose more or less above the battlements of the wall (Fig. 206). At those points where the sphinx avenues terminated, generally at the principal entrance of the temple but sometimes at secondary gateways, these portals expanded into those towering masses which by their form as well as their size, so greatly impress the traveller who visits the ruins of ancient Egypt. These masses have by common consent been named pylons. They seem to have been in great favour with the architects of Egypt, who succeeded by their means in rendering their buildings still more original than they would have been without them.

The pylon is composed of three parts intimately allied one with another; a tall rectangular doorway is flanked on either hand by a pyramidal mass rising high above its crown. Both portal and towers terminate above in that hollow gorge which forms the cornice of nearly all Egyptian buildings. Each angle of the towers is accentuated by a cylindrical moulding, which adds to the firmness of its outlines. This moulding bounds all the flat surfaces of the pylon, which are, moreover, covered with bas-reliefs and paintings. It serves as a frame for all this decoration, which it cuts off from the cornice and from the uneven line which marks the junction of the sloping walls with the sandy soil. From the base of the pylon spring those vertical masts from whose summits many coloured streamers flutter in the sun. In consequence of the inclination of the walls, these masts, being themselves perpendicular, were some distance from the face of the pylon at its upper part. Brackets of wood were therefore contrived, through which the masts passed and by which their upright position was preserved; without some such support they would either have been liable to be blown down in a high wind, or would have had to follow the inclination of the wall to which they were attached, which would have been an unsightly arrangement. The interiors of the pylons were partly hollow; they inclosed small chambers to which access was obtained by narrow staircases winding round a central square newel. The object of these chambers seems to have been merely to facilitate the manœuvring of the masts and their floating banners, because when the latter were in place, the small openings which gave light to the chambers were entirely obscured.

If the pylons had been intended for defensive purposes, the doors in their centres would have been kept in rear of the flanking towers, as in more modern fortifications. But instead of that being the case they are slightly salient, which proves conclusively that their object was purely decorative.

The pylon which we have taken as a type of such erections, is one of those which inclose a doorway opening in the centre of one of the sides of the brick inclosure, it may be called an external pylon, or a pro-pylon, to make use of the word proposed by M. Ampère, but in all temples of any importance several pylons have to be passed before the sanctuary is reached. At Karnak, for instance, in approaching the great temple from the temple of Mouth, the visitor passes under four pylons, only one of which, the most southern, is connected with the inclosing wall. So, too, on the west. After passing the pylon in the outer wall, another has to be passed before the hypostyle hall is reached, and a third immediately afterwards. Then, behind the narrow court which seems to cut the great mass of buildings into two almost equal parts, there are three more at very slight intervals. Thus M. Mariette counts six pylons, progressively diminishing in size, which lie in the way of the visitor entering Karnak by the west and passing to the east. At Luxor there are three.

A glance at our general view of the buildings of Karnak will give a good idea of the various uses to which the Egyptian architect put the pylon. There is the pro-pylon; there are those pylons which, when connected with curtain walls, separate one courtyard from another; there are those again, which, placed immediately in front of the hypostyle halls, form the façades of the temples properly speaking. The temple is always concealed behind a pylon, whose summit rises above it while its two wings stretch beyond it laterally until they meet the rectangular wall which incloses the sanctuary.

The dimensions of pylons vary with those of the temples to which they belong. The largest still existing is the outer pylon of the great temple of Karnak. It was constructed in Ptolemaic times. Its two chief masses are 146 feet high, or about equal to the Vendôme column in Paris. This pylon is 376 feet wide at the widest part and 50 feet thick. The first pylon at Luxor, which was built by Rameses II., is less gigantic in its proportions than this; it is, however, 76 feet high, each of its two great masses is 100 feet wide, and the portal in the middle is 56 feet high (see Fig. 207).

In those temples which were really complete, obelisks were erected a few feet in front of the pylons, and immediately behind the obelisks, in contact with the pylons themselves, were placed those colossal statues by which every Egyptian monarch commemorated his connection with the structures which were reared in his time. The obelisks are generally two in number, the colossi vary from four to six for each pylon, according to the magnificence of the temple. The obelisks range in height from about 60 to 100 feet, and the statues from 20 to 45 feet. Obelisks and colossal statues seem to have been peculiarly necessary outside the first, or outer, pylon of a temple. This produced an effect upon the visitor at the earliest moment, before he had entered the sacred inclosure itself. But they are also to be found before the inner pylons, a repetition which is explained by the fact that such temples as those of Karnak and Luxor were not the result of a single effort of construction. Each of the successive pylons which met the visitor during the last centuries of Egyptian civilization had been at one time the front of the whole edifice.

To complete our description of the external parts of the temple we have yet to mention those small lakes or basins which have been found within the precincts of all the greater temples. Their position within the inclosing walls suggests that they were used for other purposes beyond such ablutions as those which are prescribed for all good Mohammedans. If nothing but washing was in view they might have been outside the inclosure, so that intending worshippers could discharge that part of their duty before crossing the sacred threshold; but their situation behind the impenetrable veil of such walls as those we have described, suggests that they had to play a part in those religious mysteries which could not be performed within sight of the profane. Upon certain festivals richly decorated boats, bearing the images or emblems of the gods, were set afloat upon these lakes. As the diurnal and nocturnal journeys of the sun were looked upon as voyages by navigation across the spaces of heaven and through the shadows of the regions below, it may easily be understood how a miniature voyage by water came to have a place in the worship of deities who were more or less solar in their character.

We have now arrived upon the threshold of the temple itself, and we must attempt to describe and define that edifice, distinguishing from each other its essential and accessory parts.

When we cast our eyes for the first time either upon the confused but imposing ruins of Karnak themselves, or upon one of the plans which represent them, it seems a hopeless task to evolve order from such a chaos of pylons, columns, colossal statues and obelisks, from such a tangled mass of halls and porticos, corridors and narrow chambers. If we begin, however, by studying some of the less complex structures we soon find that many of these numerous chambers, in spite of their curious differences, were repetitions of one another so far as their significance in the general plan is concerned. When a temple was complete in all its parts any monarch who desired that his name too should be connected with it in the eyes of posterity, had no resource but to add some new building to it, which, under the circumstances supposed, could be nothing but a mere replica of some part already in existence. They took some element of the general plan, such as the hypostyle hall at Karnak, and added to it over and over again, giving rise to interesting changes in the proportion, arrangement and decoration.

One of the most intelligent of the ancient travellers, namely, Strabo, attempted the work of discrimination which it is now our duty to undertake. He wrote for people accustomed to the clear and simple arrangements of the Greek temple, and he attempted to give them some idea of the Egyptian temple, such as he found it in that Heliopolis whose buildings made such an impression upon all the Greeks who saw them.

His description is, perhaps, rather superficial. It says nothing of some accessory parts which were by no means without their importance, and those details which most strongly attracted the author's attention are not mentioned in their natural order, which would seem to be that in which the visitor from without would meet them in his course from the main door to the sanctuary. But Strabo had one great advantage over a modern writer. He saw all these great buildings in their entirety, and could follow their arrangement with an easy certainty which is impossible in our day, when so many of them present nothing but a confused mass of ruins, and some indeed, such as the temple at Luxor, are partly hidden by modern ruins. We shall, then, take Strabo for our guide, but we shall endeavour to give our descriptions in better sequence than his, and to fill up some of the gaps in his account by the study of those remains which are in the best state of preservation. In our descriptions we shall advance from simple buildings to those which are more complex. We should soon lose the thread of our argument if we were to begin by attacking temples which are at once so complicated and so mutilated as those of Karnak and Luxor. The character of each of the elements of an Egyptian temple of this period will be readily perceived if we begin our researches with one which is at once well preserved, simple in its arrangements, and without those successive additions which do so much to complicate a plan.

Of all the ruins at Thebes the Temple of Khons, which stands to the south-west of the great temple at Karnak, is that which most completely fulfils these conditions. Time has not treated it very badly, and, although the painted decoration may be the work of several successive princes, we are inclined to believe from the simplicity of the plan that most of the architectural part of the work was begun and completed by Rameses III.

The advanced pylon, or propylon, which stands some forty metres in front of the whole building and was erected by Ptolemy Euergetes, may be omitted from our examination. The really ancient part of the structure begins with the rows of sphinxes which border the road behind the propylon. They lead up to a pylon of much more modest dimensions than that of Ptolemy. In front of this pylon there is no trace of either obelisks or colossal figures. As the whole temple is no more than about 233 feet long and 67 feet wide, it may not have been thought worthy of such ornaments, or perhaps their small size may have led to their removal. In any case, Strabo appears to have seen religious edifices in front of which there were neither obelisks nor the statues of royal founders.

Immediately behind this pylon lay a rectangular court surrounded by a portico of two rows of columns standing in front of a solid wall. In this wall and in the columns in front of it we recognise the wings of which Strabo speaks; the two walls of the same height as those of the temple, which are prolonged in front of the pronaos. There is but one difficulty. Strabo says that the space between these walls diminishes as they approach the sanctuary. His court must therefore have been a trapezium with its smallest side opposite to the pylon, rather than a rectangle. We have searched in vain for such a form among the plans of those pharaonic temples which have been measured. In every instance the sides of the peristylar court form a rectangular parallelogram. It must, apparently, have been in a Ptolemaic temple that Strabo noticed these converging sides, and even then he was mistaken in supposing such an arrangement to be customary. The Ptolemaic temples which we know, those of Denderah, Edfou, Esneh, have all a court as preface to the sanctuary, but in every case those courts are rectangular. In the great temple of Philæ alone do we find the absence of parallelism of which Strabo speaks, the peristylar court which follows the second pylon is rather narrower at its further extremity than immediately behind the pylon. In presence of this example of the trapezium form we may allow that it is quite possible that in the temples of Lower and Middle Egypt, which have perished, the form in question was more frequently employed than in those of Upper Egypt, where, among the remains of so many buildings, we find it but once.

To return to the Temple of Khons. From the courtyard of which we have been speaking, a high portal opens into a hall of little depth but of a width equal to that of the whole temple. The roof of this hall is supported by eight columns, the central four being rather higher than the others. It is to this room that the name of hypostyle hall has been given. We can easily understand how Strabo saw in it the equivalent to the pronaos of the Greek temples. We know how in the great peripteral buildings of Greece and Italy, the pronaos prefaced the entrance to the cella with a double and sometimes a triple row of columns. Except that it is entirely inclosed by its walls, the Egyptian hypostyle had much the same appearance as the Greek proanos. Its name in those texts which treat of its construction is the large hall; but it is also called the Hall of Assembly and the Hall of the Appearance, terms which explain themselves. Only the kings and priests were allowed to penetrate into the sanctuary for the purpose of bringing forth the emblem or statue of the god from the tabernacle or other receptacle in which it was kept. This emblem or figure was placed either in a sacred boat or in one of those portable wooden tabernacles in which it was carried round the sacred inclosure to various resting places or altars. The crowd of priests and others who had been initiated but were of inferior rank awaited the appearance of the deity in the hypostyle hall, in which the cortége was marshalled before emerging into the courts.

The second division of the temple, for Strabo, was the sanctuary, or σηκός. In this Temple of Khons it was a rectangular chamber, separated by a wide corridor running round its four sides from two smaller chambers, which filled the spaces between the corridor and the external walls. In this hall fragments of a granite pedestal have been discovered, upon which either the bari or sacred boat, which is so often figured upon the bas-reliefs (Fig. 209), or some other receptacle containing the peculiar emblem of the local divinity, must have been placed. Strabo was no doubt correct in saying that the σηκός differed from the cella of the Greek temple in that it contained no statue of the divinity, but nevertheless it must have had something to distinguish it from the less sacred parts of the building. This something was a kind of little chapel, tabernacle, or shrine, closed by a folding door, and containing either an emblem or a statue of the divinity, before which prayers were recited and religious ceremonies performed on certain stated days. Sometimes this shrine was no more than an inclosed niche in the wall, sometimes it was a little edifice set up in the middle of the sanctuary. In those cases in which it was a structure of painted and gilded wood, like the ark of the Hebrews, it has generally disappeared and left no trace behind. The tabernacle in the Turin Museum (Fig. 210) is one of the few objects of the kind which have escaped complete destruction. In temples of any importance the shrine was hollowed out of a block of granite or basalt. A monolithic chapel of this kind is still in place in the Ptolemaic temple of Edfou; it bears the royal oval of Nectanebo I. Examples are to be found in all the important European museums. One of the finest belongs to the Louvre and bears the name of Amasis; it is of red granite and is entirely covered with inscriptions and sculpture (Fig. 211). It must resemble, on a smaller scale, the tabernacle prepared in the Elephantiné workshops, under Amasis, for the temple of Neith, at Sais, which so greatly excited the admiration of Herodotus.

The doors of the shrine were kept shut and even sealed up. The king and the chief priest alone had the right to open them and to pay their devotions before the image or symbol which they inclosed. This seems clearly proved by the following passage from the famous stele discovered by Mariette at Gebel-Barkal, upon which the Ethiopian conqueror Piankhi-Mer-Amen celebrates his victories and the occupation of Egypt from south to north. After noticing the capture of Memphis he tells us that he stopped at Heliopolis in order that he might sacrifice to the gods in the royal fashion: "He mounted the steps which led to the great sanctuary in order that he might see the god who resides in Ha-benben, face to face. Standing alone, he drew the bolt, and swung open the folding doors; he looked upon the face of his father Ra in Ha-benben, upon the boat Mad, of Ra, and the boat Seket, of Shou; then he closed the doors, he set sealing clay upon them and impressed it with the royal signet."

From the description of Strabo we should guess that the Egyptian temple ended with the sanctuary. Such was not the case however. Like most of the Greek temples, the Egyptian temple had its further chambers which served nearly the same purposes as the ὀπισθόδομοι of the Greeks. Thus in the Temple of Khons, the sanctuary opens, at the rear, into a second hypostyle hall which is smaller than the first and has its roof supported by only four columns instead of eight. Upon this hall open four small and separate chambers which fill up the whole space between it and the main walls.

Similar general arrangements to those of the Temple of Khons are to be found in even the largest temples. The second hypostyle hall is however much larger and the chambers to which it gives access much more numerous. It is not easy to determine the object of each of these small apartments; in the Pharaonic temples they are usually in very bad condition, but in some of the Ptolemaic buildings, such as the temples of Edfou and Denderah, they are comparatively well preserved. In the last named the question is complicated by the existence of numerous blind passages contrived in the thickness of the walls. The stone which stopped the opening into these passages seems to have been manipulated by some secret mechanism. Some of the sacred images and such emblems as were made of precious materials were kept in these hiding places. Their absolute darkness and the coolness which accompanied it, were both conducive to the preservation of delicately ornamented objects in such a climate as that of Egypt.

It was this part of the temple, then, that the Greeks called the treasure-house. It inclosed the material objects of worship. Some of its chambers, however, were consecrated to particular divinities and seem to have had somewhat of the same character as the apsidal chapels of a Roman Catholic Church. They are material witnesses to the piety of the princes who built them and who wished to associate the divinities in whose honour they were raised with the worship of the god to whom the temple as a whole had been dedicated. Whether store-rooms or chapels, these apartments might be multiplied to any extent and might present great varieties of aspect. At Karnak, therefore, where they communicate with long and wide galleries, they are very numerous. One of them was that small chamber which was dismantled thirty years ago by Prisse d'Avennes and transported to Paris. It is known as the Hall of Ancestors. In it Thothmes III. is, in fact, represented in the act of worshipping sixty kings chosen from among his predecessors on the Egyptian throne.

The last feature noticed by Strabo in the small temple taken by him as a type, was the sculpture with which its walls were lavishly covered. These works reminded him of Etruscan sculpture and of Greek productions of the archaic period, but we can divine from the expressions of which he makes use, that he perceived the principles which governed the Egyptian sculptor to be different from those of the Greeks. The Greek architect reserved certain strictly circumscribed places for sculpture, such as the friezes and pediments of the temples, while in Egypt it spreads itself indiscriminately over every surface. In the temple of Khons, as in every other building of the same kind at Thebes, we find this uninterrupted decoration. Mariette has shown the interesting nature of these representations and their value to the historian.

We have still to notice, always keeping the same edifice in view, two original points in the characteristic physiognomy of the Egyptian temple which seem to have escaped the attention of the Greek traveller.

In the Greek temple there is no space inclosed by a solid wall but that of the cella, which, by its purpose, answers to the σηκός of the Egyptian buildings. Both the peristyle and the pronaos are open to the air and to the view of all comers; the statues of the pediments, the reliefs of the friezes are all visible from outside, and the eye rejoices freely both in masterpieces of sculpture and in the long files of columns, which vary in effect as they are looked at from different points of view.

The appearance of the Egyptian temple is altogether dissimilar. The peristylar court, the hypostyle hall, the sanctuary and its adjuncts, in a word the whole combination of chambers and courts which form the temple proper, is surrounded by a curtain wall which is at least as high as the buildings which it incloses. Before any idea of the richness and architectural magnificence of the temple itself can be formed, this wall must be passed. From the outside nothing is to be seen but a great rectangular mass of building, the inclined faces of which seem to be endeavouring to meet at the top so as to give the greatest possible amount of privacy and security to the proceedings which take place within. The Egyptian temple may, in a word, be compared to a box (Fig. 61), and in such buildings as that dedicated to Khons, the box is a simple rectangular one. The partitions which separate its various halls and chambers are kept within the main wall. But in larger buildings the box is, partially at least, a double one. When we examine a plan of the great temple at Karnak, we see that all the back part of the vast pile, all that lies to the west of the open passage and the fourth pylon, is inclosed by a double wall. A sort of wide corridor, open to the sky, lies between the outer wall and that which immediately surrounds the various chambers. This outer wall is absent only on the side closed by the inner pylon. In some temples, especially in those of the Ptolemaic period, the hypostyle hall is withdrawn some distance behind the courtyard, and the sanctuary behind the hypostyle hall. This arrangement is repeated in the position of the two walls. The inner one embraces the chambers of the temple and follows their irregularities; the other describes three sides of a rectangle leaving a wider space at the back of the temple than at the sides. The pylon, as we have said, supplies the fourth side. This outer wall has no opening of any kind. It is true that at Karnak lateral openings exist in the hypostyle hall and in the courtyard, but those parts were less sacred in their character than the inner chambers to which they gave access. From the point where the wall becomes double, that is from the posterior wall of the hypostyle hall, there are no more external openings of any kind. To reach the presence of the deity the doors of the fourth and fifth pylons had to be passed. The high and thick wall, without opening of any kind, which inclosed the sanctuary and its dependencies like a cuirass, was no doubt intended to avert the possibility of clandestine visits to the holy place.

The evident desire of the architect to hide his porticos and saloons behind an impenetrable curtain of limestone or sandstone suffices to prove that shadow rather than sunshine was wanted in the inner parts of the temple. When the slabs which formed the roofs of the temple of Khons were all in place—they are now mostly on the ground—it must have been very dark indeed. The hypostyle hall communicated directly and by an ample doorway with the open courtyard, which was bathed in the constant sunlight of Egypt; besides which there were openings just under the cornice and above the capitals of the columns. When the door was open, therefore, there would be no want of light, although it would be softened to a certain extent. The sanctuary was much darker. The light which came through the door was borrowed from the hypostyle hall. The hall with the four supporting columns and the chambers which surrounded it were still worse provided than the sanctuary; the first named was feebly illuminated by small openings in the stone roof, the latter were in almost complete darkness. The only one which could have enjoyed a little light was that which lay on the central axis of the building. A few feeble rays may have found their way to this chamber when the doors of the temple were open, but, as a rule, they seem to have been closed. Marks of hinges have been found in the Egyptian temples, and it is certain that the sanctuary was permanently closed in some fashion against the unbidden visits of the curious.

We shall return elsewhere to the illumination of the Egyptian temples, and shall discuss the various methods made use of to ensure sufficient light for the enjoyment of the sumptuous decorations lavished upon them; here, however, it will be sufficient if we indicate their general character, which is the same in all the religious edifices in the country.

The largest and best lighted chambers are those nearest to the entrance. As we leave the last pylon behind and penetrate deeply into the temple, the light gradually becomes less and the chambers diminish in size, until the building comes to an end in a number of small apartments in which the darkness is unbroken. There are even some temples which become gradually narrower and lower from front to back; this is especially the case with those which have a double wall round their more sacred parts.

This progressive diminution is even more clearly marked in a vertical section than in one taken horizontally. The pylon is much higher than any other point in the building. After the pylon, in the temple of Khons, comes the portico which surrounds the courtyard. Next come in their order the columns of the hypostyle hall, the roof of the sanctuary, the roof of the chamber with four columns, and the roof of the last small apartment which rests upon the inclosing wall. Between the large hypostyle hall and the smaller one there is a difference in height amounting to a quarter of the whole height of the former.

In the most important temples, such as those of Karnak, Luxor, and the Ramesseum, the same law of constant diminution in height from front to rear holds good, with the exception that in their cases it is the hypostyle hall which is the highest point in the building after the pylons. In this hall their architects have raised the loftiest columns, and it is after these that the progressive diminution begins. The longitudinal section of the temple of Luxor (Fig. 213) and the general view of Karnak (plate v.) illustrate this statement.

As the roofs of the temple chambers are gradually lowered, their carefully paved floors are raised, but not to an equal degree. In the temple of Khons four steps lead up from the court to the hypostyle hall, and one step from the hall to the sanctuary. Similar arrangements are found elsewhere. At Karnak a considerable flight is interposed between the courtyard and the vestibule of the hypostyle hall. At Luxor the level of the second court is higher than that of the first. In the Ramesseum there are three flights of steps between the first and second hypostyle hall.

All these buildings are provided with staircases by which their flat roofs may be reached. These roofs seem to have been freely opened to the people. The interiors of the temples were only to be visited by the priests, except on a few stated days and in a fashion prescribed by the Egyptian ritual; but the general public were allowed to mount to the roofs, just as with us they are allowed to ascend domes and belfries for the sake of the view over the surrounding buildings and country. The numerous graffiti, some in the hieroglyphic, others in the demotic character, which are still to be seen upon the roof of the temple of Khons, attest this fact.

We thus find the characteristic features of Egyptian architecture united in a single building in this temple of Khons; but, even at Thebes, no such similarity between one building and another is to be found as in the great temples of Greece. In passing from the Parthenon to the temple of Theseus or to that of Jupiter Olympius, from a Doric to an Ionic, and from an Ionic to a Corinthian building, certain well marked variations, certain changes of style, proportion and decoration are seen. But the differences are never sufficient to embarrass the student of those buildings. The object of each part remains sufficiently well defined and immutable to be easily recognised by one who has mastered a single example. In Egypt the variations are much greater even among buildings erected during a single dynasty and by a single architect. After the attentive study of some simple and well marked building, like the temple of Khons, the visitor proceeds to inspect the ruins of Karnak, Luxor, the Ramesseum, Medinet-Abou or Gournah, and attempts to restore something like order in his mind while walking among their ruins. But in vain are the rules remembered which were thought to apply to all such buildings; they are of little help in unravelling the mazes of Karnak or Luxor, and at each new ruin explored the visitor's perplexities begin anew.

The variations are, in fact, very great, but they are not so great as they seem at the first glance. They are generally to be explained by those developments and repetitions of which Egyptian architects were so fond. We shall endeavour to demonstrate this by glancing rapidly at each of the more celebrated Theban buildings in turn. Our purpose does not require that we should describe any of them in detail, as we have already done in the case of the temple of Khons, and we shall be content with noticing their variations upon the type established by our study of the minor monument.

Let us take Karnak first. This, the most colossal assemblage of ruins which the world has to show, comprises no less than eleven separate temples within its four inclosing walls of crude brick. The longest axis of this collection of ruins is that from north to south; it measures about 1,560 yards; its transverse axis is 620 yards long. The whole circuit of the walls is nearly two English miles and a half.

The first thing that strikes us in looking at a general map of Karnak is that Egyptian temples were not oriented. The Great Temple is turned to the west, that of Khons to the south, that of Mouth to the north. There is some doubt as to the name which should be given to several of these buildings. Two of the most important are consecrated to those deities who, with Amen, form the Theban triad. The highest and largest of them all, that which is called the Great Temple, is dedicated to Amen-Ra.

We are here concerned with the latter building only. We reproduce, on a much larger scale and in two parts (Fig. 214 on page 363, and Fig. 215 on page 367), the plan given on page 358 (Fig. 212). A few figures will suffice to give an idea of the several dimensions. From the external doorway of the first western pylon to the eastern extremity of the building, the length, over all, is 1,215 feet. Its greatest width is that of the first pylon, namely 376 feet. The total circumference of the bounding wall is about 3,165 feet. The outside curtain wall of brick is from 2,500 to 2,700 yards in length, which corresponds closely to the 13 stadia said by Diodorus to be the circumference of the oldest of the four great Theban temples.

After passing the first pylon (No. 1 on the plan) we find ourselves in a peristylar court answering to that in the temple of Khons. On our right and left respectively we leave two smaller temples, one of which (C on plan) cuts through the outer wall and was built by Rameses III.; Seti II. was the author of the other (D). Those two buildings are older than the court and its colonnades. When the princes of the twenty-second dynasty added this peristyle to the already constructed parts of the great temple, they refrained from destroying those monuments to the piety of their ancestors. We also may regard these temples as mere accidents in the general arrangement. We may follow the path marked out down the centre of the court by the remains of an avenue of columns which dates from the times of the Ethiopian conquerors and of the Bubastide kings (E). After the second pylon (2) comes the hypostyle hall, the wonder of Karnak, and the largest room constructed by the Egyptians (F). It is 340 feet long by 170 wide. One hundred and thirty-four colossal columns support, or rather did once support, the roof, which, in the central portion, was not less than 76 feet above the floor; in this central portion, twelve pillars of larger proportions than the others form an avenue; these columns are 11 feet 10 inches in diameter and more than 33 feet in circumference, so that, in bulk, they are equal to the column of Trajan. They are, without a doubt, the most massive pillars ever employed within a building. From the ground to the summit of the cube which supports the architrave, they are 70 feet high. Right and left of the central avenue the remaining 122 columns form a forest of pillars supporting a flat roof, which is lower than that of the central part by 33 feet. The cathedral of Notre Dame, at Paris, would stand easily upon the surface covered by this hall (see Plate V.).

Its proportions are very different from those of the corresponding chamber in the little temple of Khons, but yet it fills the same office in the general conception, it is constructed on the same principle and lighted in the same fashion. To use the expression of Strabo, we have here a real pronaos or ante-temple, because a passage, open to the sky, intervenes between it and that part of the building which contains the sanctuary. The four doorways with which this vast hall is provided seem to indicate that it was more accessible than the parts beyond the passage just mentioned.

We cannot pretend to determine the uses of all those chambers which encumber with their ruins the further parts of the great building. It is certain however that between them they constitute the naos, or temple properly speaking. They are surrounded by a double wall and there is but one door by which they can be reached—precautions which suffice to prove the peculiarly sacred character of this part of the whole rectangle. In which of these chambers are we to find the σηκός? Was it, as the early observers thought, in those granite apartments which are marked H on the plan? This locality was suggested by the extra solicitude as to the strength and beauty of those chambers betrayed by the use of a more beautiful and costly material upon them than upon the rest of the temple. Moreover, the chamber (H) which is situated upon the major axis of the temple bears a strong resemblance in shape as well as position, to the sanctuary of the temple of Khons, in the case of which no doubt was possible. Or must we follow Mariette when he places the sanctuary in the middle of the eastern court (I in plan)? All traces of it have now almost vanished, but Mariette based his opinion upon the fact that in the ruins of this court alone are to be found any traces of the old temple dating back to the days of the Amenemhats and Ousourtesens of the twelfth dynasty. He does not attempt to account, however, for those carefully built granite apartments which seem to most visitors to be the real sanctuary, or, at least, the sanctuary of the temple as reconstructed and enlarged by the princes of the second Theban Empire.

In the actual state of the ruins the doubts on this point are, perhaps, irremovable. But the final determination of the question would be of no particular moment to our argument. For our purposes it is sufficient to note that in the Great Temple, as in the Temple of Khons, the sanctuary was surrounded and followed by a considerable number of small apartments. In the Great Temple these chambers are very numerous and some of them are large enough to require central supports for their ceilings in the form of one or more columns. In other respects they are similar to those in the Temple of Khons.

The resemblance between the two temples is completed by the existence in both of a minor hypostyle hall behind the sanctuary. The hall of four columns of the smaller building corresponds to the large saloon called the Hall of Thothmes, in the Great Temple (J). The roof of this saloon is supported by twenty columns disposed in two rows and by square piers standing free of the walls. It is 146 feet wide, and from 53 to 57 feet deep. Immediately before the granite apartments, and between the fifth and sixth pylons, another hall, also with two ranges of columns but not so deep as the last, is introduced. Its position shows it to be meant for a vestibule to the naos properly speaking. The fine Court of the Caryatides with its Osiride pillars, the first chamber entered by the visitors who penetrate into the temple proper, seems to have been designed for a similar purpose (G).

If we wish, then, to evolve some order out of the seeming chaos of Karnak; if we wish to find among its ruins the essential characteristics, the vital organs, if we may put it so, of the Egyptian temple, we have only to apply the method of analysis and reduction suggested by examination of simpler monuments, and to take account of the long series of additions which resulted in the finally stupendous dimensions of the whole mass. These additions may be distinguished from one another by their scale of proportions and by their methods of construction. When rightly examined the gigantic ruins of the great temple of Amen betray those simple lines and arrangements, which form, as we have shown, the original type.

The same remark may be applied to the other great building on the left bank of the river, the Temple of Luxor. There, too, the architecture is, to use the words of Champollion, the "architecture of giants." From the first pylon to the innermost recesses of the sanctuary the building measures about 850 feet. No traveller can avoid being deeply impressed by the first sight of its lofty colonnades, by its tall and finely proportioned pillars rearing their majestic capitals among the palms and above the huts of the modern village. These columns belong to the first hypostyle hall, and, were they not buried for two-thirds of their height, they would be, from the ground up to the base of their capitals, rather more than 50 feet high; the capitals and the cubes above them measure about 18 feet more.

The plan of Luxor is more simple than that of Karnak; it was built in two "heats" only, to borrow an expression from the athletes, under Amenophis III. and Rameses II. In later periods it underwent some insignificant retouches, and that is all. It is narrower than its great neighbour, and covers a very much less space of ground, neither has it so many chambers, and yet we are in some respects more at a loss in attempting to assign their proper uses to its apartments and in finding some equivalent for them in the elementary type from which we started, than we were in the larger temple.

It is true that the proper character of the naos is better marked at Luxor than elsewhere. The sanctuary may be determined at a glance. It consists of a rectangular chamber standing in the middle of a large square hall; it is the only chamber in the whole building for which granite has been used; it has two doors, one in each end, exactly upon the major axis of the building. The hall in which it is placed is preceded by a vestibule, and surrounded by those small chambers which are always found in this part of a temple. So far, then, there is nothing to embarrass us; everything is in conformity with the principles which have been laid down.

The real difficulty begins when we look round us for the pronaos, and examine the hypostyle halls. Here, as elsewhere, there is a hall of modest dimensions beyond the sanctuary. It is supported by twelve columns. There is another, much wider and deeper, in front of the naos; it has thirty-two of those lofty columns of which we have already spoken. By its design, situation, and the spacing of its columns, it reminds us of the hypostyle hall of Karnak. It differs from it in being open, without any external wall towards the court; so that it may be called a portico with four ranges of columns. Moreover, again unlike the Karnak hall, it is by no means the most imposing feature of the whole edifice. The greatest elevation and the most imposing proportions, so far as the interior of the building is concerned, are to be found in the great gallery which leads from the first to the second court, from the second to the third pylon. This gallery is in effect a hypostyle hall, but it differs profoundly from the superb edifice which bears that name at Karnak. It is long and narrow and looks more like a mere covered corridor than an ample hall in which the eager crowd could find elbow-room.

The place occupied by this hall in the whole composition is equally singular. It has been ascertained that the first pylon and the peristylar courtyard behind it date from the time of Rameses II., while all the rest of the building, from what is at present the second pylon inwards, was built by Amenophis III. The doorway in the second pylon leads immediately into the grand gallery, some 176 feet long, of which we have been speaking.

We can hardly tell, therefore, where to look for the true pronaos at Luxor. In that part of the ground plan where it is generally found there is nothing but an open portico, which is considerably lower than the highest parts of the building. The great colonnade, again, is separated from the naos by an open court, so that it ought, perhaps, to be classified as what the Greeks called a propylæum; but yet it is a hall, inclosed and covered, of great size and height, and richly decorated, like the hypostyle halls which we have already described and others which we have yet to notice.

Another peculiarity of Luxor is its change of axis. The first pylon, that of Rameses, is not parallel with the two built by Amenophis; the angle at which they stand is a very perceptible one. Neither is the doorway of this pylon in alignment with the other doorways on the major axis of the building. No justification or even explanation of this irregularity, which is unique among the Theban temples, has been discovered.

If we cross the Nile and land upon the plain which stretches between the river and the Libyan hills, we find ourselves in the presence of those temples, the Ramesseum, Medinet-Abou, and Gournah, whose funerary destination we have already noticed. These are royal chapels erected in connection with the royal tombs in their neighbourhood, they are cenotaphs filled with the memories of the great Theban princes, and with representations of their exploits. Consequently we do not find in them those complications which, in the great temples of the right bank, mark the successive dynasties to which their final form was due. But yet the difference in general appearance is not great; there is however, one distinction which, as it goes far to prove the peculiar character of these buildings, should be carefully noticed. In no one of them, if we may judge from plans which have been made, has any chamber or structure been found which corresponds to the sanctuary or σηκός, of the temples of Amen or Khons. The absence of such a chamber might easily be explained by our supposition that these buildings were funerary chapels; as such they would require no depository for those mysterious symbols of this or that deity which the temples proper contained: they were the lineal descendants of the upper chambers in the mastabas, in which no rudiment of such a thing is to be found. On the other hand, we have reason to believe that the great Theban divinities were associated in the worship paid to deceased kings. If that were so these funerary temples might well have been arranged like those of the right bank. The inner portions of the Ramesseum and of Medinet-Abou are so ruinous that the question cannot be settled by the examination of their remains.

The Ramesseum certainly appears to have been the monument described by Diodorus as the Tomb of Osymandias, a name which has never been satisfactorily explained. It is also called by the Institut d'Égypte, the Palace of Memnon and the Memnonium, upon the faith of Strabo's identification of Ismandes and Memnon. It is to Champollion that this building owes the restoration of its true title, under which it is now generally known.

Without being so colossal as Karnak, the size of the Ramesseum would astonish us anywhere but in Egypt. When it was complete, it must have been as large as Luxor before the additions of Rameses II. were made, if not larger. The first pylon was 226 feet wide; the whole of its upper part is destroyed. Immediately behind this pylon comes a vast peristylar court, almost square on plan (186 feet by 173). On the left the remains of a double colonnade exist, which must at one time have extended along at least two sides of the quadrangle. At the further end of this court and directly facing the back of the pylon, was a colossal statue of Rameses. Although seated, this statue was more than 56 feet high; its fragments now cover a considerable amount of the courtyard. A grand doorway, pierced through the centre of the wall upon which the defeat of the Khetas is painted, leads to a second court, a little less extensive than the first. Right and left there are porticos, each with a double range of columns. On the side of the entrance and on that opposite to it there are single ranges of Osiride figures. Many of these figures are still standing; they are 31 feet high.

Three flights of steps lead up from this court into a vestibule ornamented with two colossal busts of Rameses and with a row of columns. From this vestibule the hypostyle hall is reached by three doorways of black granite. It measures 136 feet wide and 103 deep. Its roof is supported by forty-eight columns, in eight ranges of six each, counting from front to rear. Five of these eight ranges are still standing and still afford support to a part of the ceiling. This latter is painted with golden stars upon a blue ground, in imitation of the vault of heaven. The side walls have entirely disappeared.

This hall resembles that at Karnak, both in its plan and in its general appearance. The mode of lighting is the same; the arrangement is the same; there is in both a wide passage down the centre, supported by columns thicker and higher than the rest, from which they are also distinguished by the nobility of their bell-shaped capitals. At Karnak the hall was begun by Rameses I. and Seti; Rameses II. did no more than carry on the work of his predecessors. He heard the chorus of admiration with which the completion of such a superb building must have been hailed, and we can easily understand that he was thereby incited to reproduce its happy arrangement and majestic proportions in the great temple which he was erecting in his own honour on the left bank of the river.

Ambitious though he was, Rameses II. could not attempt to give the colossal dimensions of the great temple of Amen to what was, after all, no more than the chapel of his own tomb. The great hall at Karnak required three reigns, two of them very long ones, for its completion. In the Ramesseum an attempt was made to compensate for inferior size by extra care in the details and by the beauty of the workmanship. The tall columns of the central nave were no more than thirty-six feet high, including base and capital, the others were only twenty-five feet; but they surpassed the pillars at Karnak by the elegance of their proportions.

The admiration excited in us by the ruins of Karnak is mingled with astonishment, almost with stupefaction, but at the Ramesseum we are more charmed although we are less surprised. We see that, when complete, it must have had a larger share than its rival of that beauty into which merely colossal dimensions do not enter.

Beyond the hall there are wide chambers, situated upon the major axis of the building, and each with its roof supported by eight columns. Beyond them again there is a fourth and smaller chamber which has only four columns. Round these rooms a number of smaller ones are gathered; they are all in a very fragmentary state, and among them no vestige of anything like a secos has been found. On the other hand, the bas-reliefs in one of the larger rooms seem to confirm the assertion of Diodorus, in his description of the Tomb of Osymandias, that the library was placed in this part of the building.

The Ramesseum was formerly surrounded by brick structures of a peculiar character, some of which are yet to be found in good preservation at about 50 metres from the north face of the building. They consist of a double range of vaults closely abutting on each other, numbering from ten to twelve in each range, and surmounted by a platform. If it be true that a library was included in the building, these curious structures, which are situated within the outer bounding wall of the temple, may have contained rooms for lodging and instructing students, as well as chambers for the priests. In that case Rameses would deserve the credit of having founded, like the Mussulman sovereigns, a médressé, or sort of university, by the side of his turbeh and mosque. Additional probability is given to this conjecture both by certain discoveries which have been made in tombs near the Ramesseum and by the evidence of several papyri. But for these texts we should be inclined to believe that these remains are the ruins of storehouses.

Fig. 221.—General plan
of the buildings
at Medinet-Abou.

About a thousand yards south-west of the Ramesseum rises the group of buildings which is known by the name of the modern village of Medinet-Abou. It was not until the second half of the present century had commenced that they were cleared from the débris and modern huts which concealed many of their parts. The group is composed of three distinct buildings in one enclosure. The oldest is a temple built by Thothmes II. and Thothmes III. and afterwards enlarged by the Ptolemies and the Roman Emperors (A on plan). The other two date from the time of Rameses III., the founder of the twentieth dynasty. They both lie upon the same axis, they are connected by a sphinx avenue, and they must certainly be considered as two parts of one whole. The first of the three which we encounter in approaching the group from the river is known as the Royal Pavilion or Pavilion of Rameses III. (B). Ninety yards farther to the north we come upon the great temple, the funerary character of which we have already explained (C). It is a second Ramesseum, and to avoid confusion it is generally known as the Great Temple of Medinet-Abou. We shall return to the Royal Pavilion presently, and, as for the Temple of Thothmes, which was consecrated to Amen, its really ancient portion is of too little importance to detain us long. It consists merely of an isolated secos surrounded on three sides by an open gallery upheld by square piers and, upon the fourth, by a block containing six small chambers (Fig. 222).

The great temple, however, whose picturesque ruins attract every visitor to Thebes, deserves to be carefully considered even in our summary review. It bears a striking resemblance to the Ramesseum. Their dimensions are nearly the same. The first pylon at Medinet-Abou is 210 feet wide. The two courts which follow and isolate the second pylon are severally 113 feet by 140, and 126 feet by 136. The plan of Medinet-Abou does not differ in any very important points from that of the Ramesseum. Upon two of its sides only, those which are at right angles to the face of the pylon, the first quadrangle has colonnades. One of these colonnades, that on the right of a visitor entering the temple, consists of a row of pillars faced with caryatides of Osiris. These Osiride piers are repeated in the second court, where a double colonnade, five steps above the pavement, leads to the pronaos. The latter seems too small for the two peristyles. It has only twenty-four supporting columns, in four rows of six each, counting from front to back of the building. These columns are smaller in section than those of the peristyles, and the eight which constitute the central nave do not differ from their companions. This hypostyle hall lacks, therefore, some of the distinguishing characteristics of its rivals elsewhere. Its unambitious appearance is all the more surprising after the noble proportions and rich decorations of the two external courts. The effect of the hall is still farther lessened by the fact that it does not occupy the whole width of the building. Ranges of apartments are introduced between it and the external walls of the temple.

Fig. 222.—Plan of the Temple of Thothmes. (Champollion, Notices descriptives, p. 314.)

Was there a sanctuary behind this hypostyle hall? It would seem rather, according to the recent investigations of Mariette, that upon the major axis of the temple there were two small halls, each supported by eight columns, like those in the Ramesseum; around these many small chambers would be grouped in the fashion which is almost universal in this part of an Egyptian religious building. The little that can be discovered as to this point has its importance in establishing a comparison between the temple of Rameses II. and that of Rameses III., because it might prove that the similarity, which we have mentioned as existing between the more public parts of the two edifices, extended to the sanctuary and its dependencies in the rear. The last of the great Theban Pharaohs certainly drew much of his inspiration from the work of his illustrious predecessors. In their present state of mutilation it is impossible to decide which was the finer of the two in their complete state. To the fine hypostyle hall of the Ramesseum, Medinet-Abou could oppose the Royal Pavilion which rose in front of the temple and grouped itself so happily with the first pylon, affording one of the most effective compositions in the whole range of Egyptian architecture.

The rest of the temples in this neighbourhood and within the enclosures at Karnak are all more or less intimately allied to the type we have established, and need not be noticed in detail.

We have good reason to believe that the type of temple which we have described was a common one in other parts of Egypt than Thebes. The temples of Memphis, of Heliopolis and of the Delta cities, have perished and, practically, left no trace behind; but the great buildings constructed by the Theban conquerors outside the limits of Egypt proper, in Nubia, are in comparatively good preservation. One of these, the Temple of Soleb, built by Thothmes III. and reconstructed by Amenophis III., must have borne a strong resemblance to the Ramesseum, so far as can be judged through the discrepancies in the available plans of the first-named building. Cailliaud only allows it one peristylar court, while Hoskins and Lepsius give it two. According to Cailliaud, its hypostyle hall, which must have been a very beautiful one, contained forty-eight columns. After it came another hall, with a roof supported by twelve columns. This was surrounded by small chambers, the remains of which are very confused. In the plan given by Lepsius there are two hypostyle halls with a wall between them, an arrangement which is also found at Abydos. The outer one must have had twenty-four columns, the largest in the building, and the second forty, of rather less diameter; the remainder of the temple has disappeared.

We find analogous arrangements in the great temple of Napata (Gebel-Barkal). Built by Amenophis III. when Napata was the seat of an Egyptian pro-consul, and repaired by Tahraka when Ethiopia became supreme over Egypt, this temple resembles the Theban buildings in its plan. From a peristylar court enclosed between two pylons, we pass into a hypostylar hall containing forty-six columns; behind this hall comes the sanctuary, in its usual position, with its entourage of small chambers. We may call this the classic type of Egypt.

The temples which we have hitherto examined are chiefly remarkable for the simplicity of their plan. A single sanctuary forms the centre and, so to speak, the heart of the whole composition. Pylons, peristylar courts and hypostylar halls, are but anterooms and vestibules to this all important chamber; while the small apartments which surround it afford the necessary accommodation for the material adjuncts of Egyptian worship. In the great temple at Karnak, the anterior and posterior dependencies are developed to an extraordinary extent, but this development is always in the direction of the length, or to speak more accurately, of the depth of the building. The smaller faces of the whole rectangle are continually carried farther from each other by the additions of fresh chambers and architectural features, which are distributed, with more or less regular alternation, on the right and left of the major axis which always passes through the centre of the secos. The building, therefore, in spite of many successive additions always contrives to preserve the unity of its organic constitution.

But all the great buildings in Egypt which were constructed for the service of religion were not so simply designed. A good instance of a more complex arrangement is to be found in the great temple at Abydos (Fig. 224). It was begun by Seti I. and finished by Rameses II. Mariette freed it from the débris and modern hovels which encumbered it, and, thanks to his efforts, there are now few monuments in Egypt whose inner arrangements can be more clearly and certainly perceived.

Its general shape is singular. The courts and the pronaos compose a narrow and elongated rectangle, with which the parts corresponding to the sanctuary and its dependent chambers form a right angle (see Fig. 224). This salient wing has no corresponding excrescence on the other side. We might consider the building unfinished, but that there is no sign whatever that the architect meant to complete it with another wing at the opposite angle. The Egyptians were never greatly enamoured of that exact symmetry which has become one of the first artistic necessities of our time.

Still more surprising than the eccentricity of its plan, are the peculiar arrangements which are to be found in the interior of this temple. As at Medinet-Abou and the Ramesseum, there are two courts, each preceded by a pylon. After these comes the pronaos. The courts differ from those at Thebes in having no peristyles or colonnades. The only thing of the kind is a row of square pillars standing before the inner wall of the second court (see plan). This is a poor equivalent for the majestic colonnades and files of caryatides which we have hitherto encountered.

The suppression of the portico has a great effect upon the appearance of these two courts. It deprives them of the rich shadows cast by the long colonnades and their roofs of the Theban temples, and the long walls must have seemed rather cold and monotonous in spite of the bas-reliefs and paintings which covered them. Their absence, however, is not allowed to affect the general lines of the plan.

We have given neither an elevation nor a section of the temple at Abydos, because neither the one nor the other was to be had. The building was hardly known until Mariette freed it from the débris with which it was engulphed. He, too, studied rather as an egyptologist than as an architect, and was content with making known its internal arrangements by a plan. This plan does not appear to be minutely exact. A little farther on we shall have to speak of a peculiarity which exists at Abydos, but which is not hinted at in the adjoining plan; some of the columns are coupled in the first hypostyle hall. We take this fact from the Description, where the measurements are given in a fashion which forbids all doubt of their fidelity.

It is when we arrive at the pronaos that we fail to recognize the disposition to which we have grown accustomed. There is no central nave, with its columns of extra size and more careful design, leading to the closed door of the sanctuary. There are two hypostyle halls, the first supported by twenty-four, the second by thirty-six columns. They are separated by a wall pierced with seven doorways, each doorway corresponding to one of the aisles between the columns. In the farther wall of the second of these halls, there are seven more doorways, corresponding to the last named, and opening upon seven oblong vaulted saloons, all of one size and completely isolated one from another.

By their situation on the plan, by their form, and by the decoration of their walls, these vaulted chambers declare themselves to be so many sanctuaries. Each one of them is dedicated to some particular deity, whose name and image appear in the decorations of the chamber itself and also upon the lintel of the door outside. These names and images are again repeated upon all the surfaces presented by the aisle which leads up to the door.

The seven deities thus honoured, beginning at the right, are Horus, Isis, Osiris, Amen, Harmachis, Ptah, and Seti himself, whom we thus find assimilated with the greatest of the Egyptian gods. Each chamber contains a collection of thirty-six pictures, which are repeated from one to another with no changes beyond those rendered necessary by the substitution of one god for another. These pictures deal with the rites which would be celebrated by the king in each of the seven sanctuaries.

Behind this septuple sanctuary there is a secondary hypostyle hall, just as we find it behind the single secos of the ordinary temple. Its roof was supported by ten columns, and access to it was obtained through the third sanctuary, that of Osiris. This part of the temple is in a very fragmentary condition. Very little is left of the bounding walls, but it has been ascertained that several of these chambers were dedicated to one or other of the deities between whom the naos was apportioned. Thus one of the chambers referred to was placed under the protection of Osiris, another under that of Horus, and a third under that of Isis.

The decoration of the southern wing of the temple seems never to have been completed. It contains a long corridor, a rectangular court with an unfinished peristyle, several small chambers with columns, and a flight of steps leading up on to the flat roof. A dark apartment or crypt, divided into two stories by a floor of large stone slabs, may have been used as a storehouse.

These farthest apartments seem to have been arranged in no sort of order. We shall not here enter into such matters as the construction of the seven parallel vaults in the naos; for that a future opportunity will be found; at present our business is to make the differences between the temple at Abydos and that of Khons and its congeners, clearly understood. The distinction lies in the seven longitudinal subdivisions, beginning with the seven doors in the façade of the hypostyle hall, and ending in the vaulted chambers which form the same number of sanctuaries. Seen from outside, the temple would not betray its want of unity; it was surrounded by a single wall, the complex naos was prefaced by courts and pylons in the same fashion as in the temples of Thebes which we have already noticed, and it would not be until the building was entered and explored that the fact would become evident that it was seven shrines in one, seven independent temples under one roof.

At Thebes also we find a temple which, by its internal arrangements, resembles that of Abydos. It is called sometimes the Palace and sometimes the Temple of Gournah; in the inscriptions it is called the House of Seti. Two propylons, one about fifty yards in front of the other, form an outwork to the main building, with which they are connected by an avenue of sphinxes. It is probable that they were originally the doorways through brick walls, now demolished, which formed successive enclosures round the temple. The dromos led up to the pronaos, which was reached by a few steps. The front of the naos is a portico of simple design, consisting of ten columns between two square pilasters, the whole being 166 feet long by 10 feet deep. Eight of these line columns are still erect. The wall at the back of the portico is pierced by three doorways, to which three distinct compartments or divisions of the interior correspond (see plan, Fig. 226).

The only feature in which these compartments resemble one another is their independence. They are isolated from one another by walls which run from front to back of the naos. The most important and elaborate of the three compartments is the middle one. Its entrance doorway opens directly upon a hall which is the largest in the whole temple. It is eighteen metres long, its roof is supported by six columns similar to those of the portico already mentioned, and ranged around it are nine small chambers, the pictures in which illustrate the apotheosis of Seti, who, often indued with the attributes of Osiris, is sometimes shown doing homage to the Theban triad of gods, and more especially to Amen-Ra, sometimes as himself the object of worship. The central one of these chambers opens upon a hall where the roof is supported by four square pillars, and upon this hall again four small apartments open. These can hardly be mere storehouses, but they have suffered so greatly that no certain opinion can be formed as to their real purposes.

The right-hand compartment is in a very bad state, but enough of it remains to show that its arrangements were quite different from those of its neighbour and much less complex. So far as we can judge, the larger part of it was taken up with a peristylar court or hall seventy-six feet long and forty-six wide. Behind this the site of three rectangular chambers may be distinguished. Every wall which is still standing bears representations of Rameses II. paying his devotions to the Theban gods.

The left compartment is in better preservation than the right, and its arrangements are more like those of the central part of the naos. It is not so large, however, and it contains no hypostyle hall. It has six chambers placed in two sets of three, the one set behind the other. Here we find Rameses I., the founder of the dynasty, honoured by his son Seti I. and his grandson Rameses II.

The great temples of Abydos and Gournah were built by the same sovereigns, Seti I. and Rameses II. Perhaps, too, their plans were traced by the same architect. The resemblance between them is so great that they may be looked upon as variants of one type, of a type which is distinguished by the juxtaposition of similar parts grouped laterally one by the side of the other. Each of the chapels which we have described was self-contained, the subsidiary chambers which were required for the routine of worship were grouped round it, either on one side, as at Abydos, or in the angles of the sanctuary itself, as at Gournah. With such slight differences of detail as this, the two buildings were built upon the same principle. At Gournah the division is tripartite, and the three compartments vary in their arrangements; at Abydos they are seven in number, and exactly similar in design. A temple thus cut into three parts, or seven, reminds us of the seed-pods of certain plants, in which the fertilizing grain is divided between several cells. But whether these are numerous or few, the naos never has any great depth. It seems as if the absence of a true organic centre arrested the development of the building; we find no signs of an edifice which, like the temple of Amen at Karnak, might be developed almost to infinity without losing its unity.

On the other hand, there were a few temples in which a severe and extreme unity was the distinguishing characteristic. In Upper Egypt and Nubia a few examples of the class are still to be seen. As a rule they date from the eighteenth dynasty, but there were a few temples of the same kind erected under the Ptolemies. It seems probable, therefore, that they were common to all the periods of Egyptian history, and to the conquered provinces, as well as to Egypt proper. They were erected within, and in the neighbourhood of, those cities whose importance was not sufficient to demand such great monumental works as the temples of Thebes or Abydos, of Memphis or Sais. We might call them chapels, raised either to the honour of the local deities, or for the purpose of commemorating the passage of some conquering prince and the homage paid by him to the deity to whom he looked for protection and victory.

In these chapels there are neither internal peristyles nor hypostyles; there are none of those subsidiary chambers among which it is sometimes so easy to lose our way. There is, in fact, nothing but a rectangular chamber and a portico about it, and, in most cases, it would appear that a short dromos, consisting of a few pairs of sphinxes, lent dignity to the approach.

The best proportioned and perhaps the most interesting building of this class is the little sandstone temple built by Amenophis III. at Elephantiné, upon the southern frontier of Egypt. It was discovered at the end of the last century by the draughtsmen of the French Expedition, and named by them the Temple of the South. This little building no longer exists. It was destroyed in 1822 by the Turkish Governor of Assouan, who had a mania for building. Happily the plans and drawings, which we reproduce, seem to have been made with great care.

Fig. 229.—Plan of the Temple of Elephantiné.
(Description de l'Égypte, i. 35.)

The total area of the temple, at the floor level of the cella, was 40 feet by 31. It was raised upon a well-built rectangular base of almost the same lateral dimensions, and 7 feet 6 inches high to the pavement of the portico. From the earth level to the top of the cornice the temple was 21 feet 6 inches in height. A flight of steps, enclosed between two walls of the same height as the stylobate, led up to the portico. The portico itself was composed of square piers and round columns. Two of the latter were introduced in the centre of each of the smaller faces of the building, while the side galleries were enclosed by seven square piers, inclusive of those at the angles. A dwarf wall about three feet in height bounded the gallery on the outside, and afforded a base for the piers; the circular columns on each side of the entrance alone stood directly upon the pavement of the gallery, and were thus higher by about three feet than either the piers or the columns in the corresponding façade at the rear. The oblong chamber enclosed by this portico had two entrances, one at the top of the steps, the other at the back. The first named was indicated as the true entrance to the building by the slight salience of its jambs and lintel, by the increased size of the columns in front of it, and by its position with regard to the steps.

One more peculiarity must be noticed. Neither in piers nor in walls do we find that inward slope which is almost universal in Egyptian exteriors. The lines are vertical and horizontal. This is not the effect of caprice; the architect had a good reason for neglecting the traditions of his profession. By avoiding the usual inclination towards the centre, he gave to his small creation a dignity which it would otherwise have missed, and, in some degree, concealed its diminutive size.

In spite of its modest dimensions, this temple was without neither beauty nor grandeur. Its stylobate raised it well above the plain, while the steps in front gave meaning and accent to its elevation. The wide spacing of the columns in front allowed the richly decorated doorway to be seen in effective grouping with the long perspectives of the side galleries. The piers on the flanks were more closely spaced than the columns of the façade, and the contrast was heightened by the simplicity of their form. The dignity of the entablature and the bold projection of the cornice added to the effect of the whole, and emphasized the well-balanced nature of the composition. The Egyptian architects never produced a building better calculated to please modern tastes. Its symmetry and just proportion appeal directly to those whose artistic ideas are founded upon the creations of the Greeks and Romans.

This sympathy was conspicuously felt by those who discovered the little monument. "The arrangement," says Jomard, "is a model of simplicity and purity.... The Temple of Elephantiné is pleasing as a whole, and commands our attention." But the purity and harmony of its lines are not its only claims to our admiration. The pleasure which it causes us to feel is partly the result of its resemblance to a well-known and much admired type, that of the Greek temple. In all essentials the arrangements are the same, a cella raised upon an important base and surrounded by a colonnade.

The general arrangement of the Elephantiné structure has even its name in the technical language of the Greek architects, they would call it a peripteral temple, because the colonnade goes completely round it. Nowhere else do we find such a striking resemblance between Greece and Egypt. But for the mouldings, the sculptured decorations, and the inscribed texts, we should be tempted to see in it a building of the Ptolemaic period, Greek in conception and plan, but decorated in the Egyptian taste. Such a mistake would, however, be impossible in these days, and even at the end of the last century. The French savants knew enough to prevent them falling into such an error. They were unable to read the hieroglyphics, but the general physiognomy of the building told them that it could boast of a venerable antiquity. In coming to this conclusion they were right, but they should have stopped there instead of attempting to establish a direct connection, as cause and effect, between the Egyptian building and the temples of Greece. We shall not here discuss the delicate question of the indebtedness of Greek artists to those of Egypt, but we may allow ourselves to make two observations. In the first place, the temples built upon this plan were very small, and must have attracted very little notice indeed from strangers dazzled by the wonders of Sais, Memphis, and Thebes; and the buildings in those great cities did not offer the peculiar characteristics which, we are asked to believe, inspired the early Greek architects. In the second place, if there had been any direct imitation of an Egyptian model, we should have found in the copy at least some passing trace of those square piers which were so continually and successfully used by the Egyptian architects; but in the Greek peripteral temples the external colonnades are always made up exclusively of circular columns. The Greek architect hardly ever made use of the square pier, except in the form of a pilaster, to give strength to the extremities of a wall.

Would it not be much simpler to admit that we have here one of those coincidences which are so frequent in the history of the arts? Human nature is pretty much the same all over the world. When human skill has been employed at different times and in different countries, in supplying similar wants and solving almost identical problems, it has been led to results which vary only in the minor details. These variations are more or less marked according to race characteristics or material surroundings. When examined closely the circumstances of mankind are never found unchanged from one period or one race to another, but a superficial resemblance is enough to ensure that their artistic creations shall have many important points in common. In no pursuit does the human mind turn in a narrower circle than in architecture. The purpose of the building on the one hand, and the qualities of the material on the other, exercise a great influence upon form. But the purposes for which important buildings are erected are very few, neither are the materials at the command of the architect very many. The possible combinations are therefore far from numerous. Take two races placed in conditions of climate and civilization which may fairly be called analogous; put the same materials in the hands of their architects and give them the same programme to carry out; is it not almost certain that they would produce works with many features in common, and that without any knowledge of each other's work? From this point of view only, as it seems to us, should the type of building just described be regarded. If the temple at Elephantiné had possessed no other interest but that belonging to it as an example of Egyptian temple building, we might have omitted all mention of it, or at least devoted but a few words to it. And yet such types are scarce. The French explorers found a second temple of the same class not far from the first; now, however, it exists only in their drawings. A third has been discovered in Nubia, which must resemble the two at Elephantiné very strongly; we mean the temple constructed by Thothmes III. on the left bank of the river, at Semneh. Although it has suffered greatly, traces of a portico are to be found about the cella, and it has been ascertained that this portico consisted both of square piers and columns. Finally, at El-kab (Eilithya), in Upper Egypt, there is a temple constructed upon the same plan; it differs from that at Elephantiné in having only two circular columns, those upon the façade; all the rest of the peristyle consists of square piers. The oldest part of the temple built by Thothmes II. and Thothmes III. at Medinet-Abou presents an analogous arrangement. The sanctuary is there surrounded on three sides by a portico of square piers (Fig. 222).

There is nothing to forbid the supposition that these temples were once much more numerous in the valley of the Nile, but it appears certain that they were always of small dimensions. If like those of Sais and Memphis, the temples of Thebes had vanished and left no trace behind, we might have been led to believe that some of the great religious buildings of the Egyptians had been in this form; but we have Luxor and Karnak, Medinet-Abou and the Ramesseum, Gournah and Abydos; we have several important temples built in Ethiopia by Egyptian conquerors, and others erected by the Ethiopian sovereigns in imitation of Egyptian architecture. When we compare these remains with one another and call to mind the words of Strabo and of other ancient travellers as to the monuments which have been destroyed, we are forced to this general conclusion, that it was within the high external walls of their buildings, around courts open to the sky or as supports for wide and lofty halls, that the Egyptians loved to group their mighty piers and columns. When the portico was outside it was so placed because there was no room for it within. When the temple was reduced to a single narrow chamber, so small that there was no room for columns and that the walls could support the roof without help, the colonnade was relegated to the exterior, where it served to give importance to the cella, and to clothe and beautify it.

Fig. 232.—Temple of Amenophis III.
at Eilithyia; from Lepsius.

The peripteral arrangement, which is a constant principle in Greek architecture, is no more than a rare accident in that of Egypt. But in spite of this difference the similarity, which might be called a chance likeness, if the word chance had any place in history, is full of interest for the historian of art.

The following facts are sufficient to prove that it was the small size of these peripteral temples that first suggested the external situation of their colonnades. As long as the cella was large enough to admit supports of the ordinary diameter without encumbering the space or destroying its proportions, we find the columns inside. Of this the temple of Amenophis III. at Eilithyia, a plan and section of which we take from Lepsius (Figs. 232 and ), is an instance. It is prefaced by a chamber, very ruinous, and wider than it is deep. It is now difficult to say whether this was an uncovered court or a hypostyle hall. Immediately abutting upon it comes the naos, a rectangular chamber measuring internally 28 feet by 22 feet 6 inches. The roof might very possibly have been supported by the four columns, as their bases were 4 feet in diameter. A niche contrived in the further wall of the naos acted the part of a secos.

Here too we find a very simple form of temple, but the naos being large enough to admit, and even to demand, the use of internal columns, it never entered the architect's head to surround it with a portico externally. Thus arranged, the chapel, as we have called these buildings, was nothing more than an epitome of the temple, and there is no need for insistance upon the variations which it presents upon a single theme, upon a first principle which sometimes was developed into a colossal structure like that at Karnak, sometimes reduced until it resulted in buildings where a few paces carry the visitor from one extremity to the other.

We may say the same of those subterranean temples which are called speos or hemi-speos, grotto, or half-grotto, according to whether they are entirely rock cut, or prefaced by architectural constructions. They are chiefly found in Lower Nubia, a fact which has sometimes been explained by the natural configuration of the soil. In that portion of the Nile Valley the river is embraced so closely by the rocks between which it flows that it would, we are told, have been difficult to find a site for a constructed temple. In this, however, there is some exaggeration. If we examine a map of Nubia we shall find many places where either one or the other of the two chains of hills fall back from the river far enough to allow a considerable intervening fringe of level ground. This is cropped and tilled by little groups of natives, who live, as a rule, at the mouth of those wadis, or dry torrent beds, which intersect the mountains. These strips of arable land are always either level or of a very gentle slope. It would, therefore, not be very difficult to obtain a site for such little oratories as were required for the scanty population, for the soldiers in the nearest military post, for the engineers and workmen in some neighbouring quarry. Even supposing that it pleased the king to choose some deserted site in a conquered province for the erection of some durable memorial of his prowess, no very large building would be required. Great temples were reserved for populous cities, in which the king, the military commanders, and the priest resided, in which the popular ceremonies of religion were performed.

The Egyptian architect did not hesitate to cut away part of the side of a mountain when it was the only means open to him of obtaining a level site for building. In this fashion Seti obtained a site for his great temple at Abydos. The same thing might have been done, at much less cost, for these little Nubian temples. It would always have been easy with pick and chisel to adapt some ridge or cornice of the cliffs for their reception, or to cut a sort of courtyard in the slope of the hill, in which a small temple might have been erected. We must not seek, then, for a reason for the multiplication of these rock temples in the Nubian section of the Nile Valley either in natural conditions or in the want of architectural resource. Even in Egypt proper there are chapels cut in the flanks of the hills; near Beni-Hassan there is the Speos Artemidos, and near Assouan, close to the quarries of Gebel Silsilis, there is another. Below the first cataract, however, these grottos are as rare as they are numerous on the other side of the frontier, where, indeed, they sometimes rise to a magnificence of which nothing else in Egypt, unless it be the finest of the sepulchral excavations at Thebes, can give an idea. How are we to account for this difference, or rather contrast?

This question is more easily asked than answered. The following explanation seems to us, however, the most probable.

Ethiopia was not Egypt. Although they were closely connected as early as the sixth dynasty, the former never lost its character of a conquered province. In Ethiopia men did not feel so sure of the morrow as in Egypt proper. Between the sixth and the eleventh dynasty the hold of Egypt upon Ethiopia had been lost at least once. Reconquered by the kings of the first Theban period, it regained its independence during the domination of the Hyksos; the eighteenth dynasty had, therefore, to begin the work of subjugation all over again, and it did its work more thoroughly than any of its predecessors. Then, when the Egyptian sceptre ruled as far south as Napata and the great bend of the Nile, the governors of the southern provinces must have been continually employed in repelling the incursions of the negroes from Upper Ethiopia, and in suppressing the warlike tribes who lived within the conquered frontier. At such times the king himself must often have been compelled to take the field and lead his armies in person. A constructed temple, especially when of small size, would be in great risk of destruction in a country exposed to the repeated incursions of savage tribes; columns and piers would soon be overturned by their ruthless arms. But chambers cut in the living rock would offer a much stouter resistance; the decorations might be scraped down or daubed over, but the time and patience required for any serious attack upon the limestone or granite sides and piers would not be forthcoming. Such damage as could be done in a short time and by the weapons of the invaders could readily be repaired when the raid was over.

We think it probable, therefore, that subterranean architecture was preferred throughout this region because the political condition of the province was always more or less precarious, rather than because the configuration of the country required it. Where security was assured by the presence of a strong and permanent garrison, as at Semneh and Kumneh, we find constructed temples just as we do in Egypt. They are found, too, in those localities—Soleb and Napata for instance—where there was a large urban population, and therefore fortifications and troops for their defence. Everywhere else it was found more convenient to confide the temple to the guardianship of its own materials, the living rock, and to bury it in faces of the cliffs. This kind of work, moreover, was perfectly easy to Egyptian workmen. For many centuries they had been accustomed, as we have seen, to hollow out the flanks of their mountains, and to decorate the chambers thus obtained, for the last resting-places of their dead. In the execution of such works they must have arrived at a degree of practised skill which made it as easy for them to cut a speos like the great temple at Ipsamboul, as to build one of the same size. This fact probably had its weight in leading the conquerors of Nubia to fill it with underground temples. Such a method of construction was at once expeditious and durable, a double advantage, which would be greatly appreciated in the early years of the occupation of the province. When security was established, the same process continued to be used from love for the art itself. When Rameses II. cut those two caves in the rock at Ipsamboul, whose façades, with their gigantic figures, have such an effect upon the travellers of to-day, it was neither because he was pressed for time, nor because he was doubtful of the tenure of his power. The military supremacy of Egypt and the security of her conquests seemed to be assured. The Egyptian monarch carved the cliffs of Ipsamboul into gigantic images of himself because he wished to astonish his contemporaries and their posterity with the boldness and novelty of the enterprise. At Thebes he had built, on the right hand of the river, the hall of Karnak and the pylons of Luxor; on the left bank, the Temple of Seti and the Ramesseum. For these he could have imagined no pendant more original or more imposing than the great temple carved from a natural hill, in front of which statues of the sovereign, higher than any of those which adorned the courtyards at Thebes, would see countless generations of Egyptians pass before their feet in their journeys up and down the Nile. The hypostyle hall at Karnak was a marvel of constructed architecture, the great temple at Ipsamboul was the masterpiece of that art which had been so popular with the Egyptians from the earliest periods of their civilization, the art which imitated the forms of a stone building by excavations in the living rock.

Subterranean architecture had, of course, to go through a regular course of development before it was capable of such works as the tomb of Seti, at Thebes, and the temples of Ipsamboul. In the necropolis of Memphis, and in that of the First Theban Empire, its ambition was more easily satisfied. So, too, the first rock-cut temples were of very modest dimensions. They date from the eighteenth dynasty. Two of them are to be found in the neighbourhood of Ipsamboul but on the other side of the river, one near the castle of Addeh, the other at Feraïg. The latter was cut by the king Harmhabi (or Armaïs). It is composed—as also is that of Addeh—of a hall supported by four columns, two lateral chambers, and a sanctuary. There is an equally small speos in Egypt which dates from the same period; it is the grotto at Beni-Hassan, which, ever since antique times, has been known as the Speos Artemidos. The goddess Sekhet, to which it was consecrated, had been identified with the Greek Artemis. It was begun by Thothmes III., carried on by Seti I., and seems never to have been finished. The temple proper is prefaced by a kind of portico of square pillars cut, with the roof which they support, from the limestone rock. A narrow passage about nine feet deep leads to the naos, which is a quadrangular chamber about thirteen feet square, with a niche in the further wall in which an image of the lion-headed goddess probably stood. The most important of the rock-cut chapels of Silsilis was also inaugurated by Harmhabi and restored and embellished by Rameses II. The hemispeos at Redesieh, in the same district, is a work of Seti I.

Fig. 236.—Plan of speos
at Beit-el-Wali;
from Prisse.

Only one subterranean temple later than the nineteenth dynasty is known to us, namely, that which is cut in the flanks of the Gebel-Barkal at Napata. It is called the Typhonium, on account of the grimacing figures which stand before the piers. It dates from the time of Tahrak, and was one of the works with which the famous Ethiopian decorated his capital in the hope that it might become a formidable rival to those great Egyptian cities which he had taken and occupied. All the other rock-cut temples were the work of Rameses II.; they are, as we ascend the Nile, Beit-el-Wali, near Kalabcheh (Figs. 236 and ); Gherf-Hossein, or Gircheh, Wadi-Seboua, Dayr, and Ipsamboul.

We may give Gherf-Hossein as a good example of the hemispeos (Figs. 238 and 239). It was approached from the river by a broad flight of steps, decorated with statues and sphinxes, of which but a few fragments now remain. A pylon gave access to a rectangular court, on the right and left sides of which stood five piers faced with colossal statues of Rameses II. These statues were about twenty-six feet high. Next, and at a slightly higher level, came a hypostyle hall; its roof was supported by twelve square piers, those forming the central avenue being of caryatid form and higher than the others. The subterranean part of the temple begins with a passage cut in the rock on the further side of this hall. This passage leads to a long transverse vestibule, from which open two lateral chambers, and three from its further side. The furthest chamber on the major axis of the whole building was the sanctuary. This is proved by its position, its shape, and the niche which is cut in its further wall. Four deities are sculptured in this niche, and in spite of the ill-usage to which they have been subjected, one of them can still be identified as Ptah, the chief god of the temple.

We find almost the same arrangements in the hemispeos of Wadi-Asseboua. That of Derri (Figs. 240 and 241) is more simple. There are neither dromos nor pylon, properly speaking, and only four caryatid pillars; but there is an open court with a hypostyle hall and a sanctuary cut in the rock. At the back of the sanctuary there is a stone bench upon which three statues were seated.

The two temples of Ipsamboul are so well known and have been so often illustrated and described, that they need not detain us long. The chief thing to be noticed here is that they are without any external and constructed part, and that from their position, high above the river and close to it, it was impossible that they could have any dromos; and yet between the doorway of the speos and the river bank there were steps which are now either worn away by the action of the floods or hidden by the débris from the cliffs. The façades of these temples were, however, as richly decorated and as monumental in their way as those of the most sumptuous buildings in Thebes.

The prototype of these façades is the Theban pylon. They have the same trapeziform surfaces covered with figures and inscriptions, circumscribed by a moulding and crowned by a cornice in bold relief; they are inclined from the perpendicular, and they afford a background to the statues of the king who caused them to be made. The chief difference is in the situation of these statues. In the case of a built temple they are monoliths, brought from a distance and erected in front of the pylon. But space was wanting for such an arrangement at Ipsamboul; besides which it was better, for many reasons, that the whole edifice should be homogeneous, and that the statues should be carved in the rock from which its chambers were to be cut. The way to do this was obvious. The colossi had but to recede a pace or two so as to be incorporated in the substance of the pylon itself.

At Ipsamboul there are, as we have seen, two temples close to one another. Their façades, though conceived in the same spirit, executed by the same processes, and having a good deal in common in their design, are yet by no means similar. That of the temple of Hathor, generally called the Smaller Temple, is on a smaller scale than the Great Temple, but perhaps its design is the happier and more skilful of the two. The front is 90 feet wide and nearly 40 high. It is ornamented by six colossal upright statues, four of them Rameses himself, the other two his wife Nefert-Ari. These statues, which are about 34 feet high, are separated one from another by eight buttresses, two of them acting as jambs for the door, above which they unite and become a wide band of flat carving marking the centre of the façade. The gentle salience of these buttresses forms a framework for the statues (see Fig. 242), which are chiselled with great care and skill in the fine yellow sandstone of which the mountain consists.

The façade of the Great Temple is much larger. It is about 130 feet wide by 92 high. It is not divided by buttresses like the other, but it has a bold cornice made up of twenty-two cynocephalic figures seated with their hands upon their knees. Each of these animals is sculptured in the round, and is only connected with the face of the rock by a small part of its posterior surface. They are not less than seven feet high. A frieze, consisting of a dedicatory inscription carved in deep and firmly drawn hieroglyphs runs below the cornice. Above the doorway a colossal figure of Ra is carved in the rock, and on each side of him Rameses is depicted in low relief, in the act of adoration. This group occupies the middle of the façade. But the most striking feature of the building is supplied by the four colossi of Rameses placed two and two on either side of the door. They are the largest in Egypt. From the sole of the feet to the apex of the pschent which the king bears on his head, they are about sixty-five feet in height. Rameses is seated, his hands upon his thighs, in the pose ordinarily made use of for the royal statues at the entrances of the temples. In spite of these enormous dimensions the workmanship is very fine. The countenance, especially, is remarkable for its combination of force and sweetness, an expression which has been noticed by all the travellers who have written upon Ipsamboul.

The interiors of the two temples are still more different than the exteriors, and, in this instance, the variations are entirely in favour of the greater monument. The total depth of the smaller edifice is about ninety feet. A single hall, supported by six square Hathor-headed pillars, precedes the sanctuary. The latter is nothing but a narrow gallery, in the middle of which a small chamber or niche is cut, in which the rock-carved cow of Hathor may be seen with a statue between its legs. The other temple is a great deal larger. Its total length is about 180 feet. The first hall is 60 feet long and 53 wide; the roof is supported by eight pillars, against each of which a colossal figure 33 feet high is placed. A doorway in the middle of the further side leads to a second chamber not quite so large as the first, and supported by four thick square pillars. Three openings in its furthest side lead to a third chamber, as wide as the second, but only 10 feet deep. Through this the innermost parts of the speos are reached; they consist of three small chambers, those on the left and right being very small indeed, while that in the centre, the adytum, is about 13 feet by 23. In the middle of this chamber was an altar, or table for offerings; at the back of it a bench with four seated statues. The walls of both temples are covered with pictures like those of Luxor, Karnak, and the Ramesseum. They represent the battles and triumphs of Rameses, and the king seated upon the laps of goddesses, who act as the tenderest of nurses.

Besides the halls which form the main body of the temple, the plan shows eight lateral chambers, some perpendicular to the major axis of the building, others falling upon it obliquely. Several of these do not seem to have been finished. There are indications that they were utilized as depositories for the objects worshipped in the temple.

We have now briefly noticed the principal rock-cut temples in Egypt and Nubia. Neither in plan nor in decoration do they materially differ from the temples of wrought masonry. The elements of the building are the same, and they are arranged in the same order—an avenue of sphinxes when there is room for it, colossi before the entrance, a colonnaded court, a hypostyle hall acting as a pronaos, a naos with its secos, or sanctuary; but sometimes one, sometimes many of these divisions are excavated in the living rock. Sometimes only the sanctuary is subterranean, sometimes the hypostyle hall is included, and at Ipsamboul the whole temple is in the mountain, from the secos to those colossal statues which generally form the preface to the pylon of the constructed temple.

Except in the case of the peristylar court, the interior of the rock-cut temple did not differ so much in appearance from that of the constructed edifice as might at first be imagined. We have already explained how scantily lighted was the interior of the Egyptian temple; its innermost chambers were plunged in almost complete darkness, so that the absolute night which was involved in their being excavated in the heart of a mountain was no very great change from the obscurity caused by the thick walls and heavy roofs of the edifices in the plain. In the case of a hemi-speos the internal effect must have been almost identical with that of any other religious building. In the great temple of Ipsamboul the daylight does not penetrate beyond the second hall; from that point onwards artificial light is necessary to distinguish objects, but the Egyptians were so thoroughly accustomed to a mysterious solemnity of shadow, to a "dim religious light," in their temples, that the darkness of the speos would seem no drawback in their eyes.

The column occurs very seldom in these subterranean temples. Even those chambers which correspond to the hypostyle hall by their places in the excavation and the general characteristics of their form, are hardly ever supported by anything but the rectangular piers in use in the early ages of the monarchy; but these piers are often clothed with an elaborate decoration which is unknown in the works of the primitive architects. This preference for the pier is easily to be explained by the necessity for having supports of sufficient strength and solidity to bear the weight of the superincumbent mountain.

Another and more constant peculiarity of the underground temples, is the existence in them of one or more seated statues carved from masses of rock expressly left in the furthest recesses of the excavation. These statues, which represent the presiding deity of the place and his acolytes, do not occur in the constructed temples. In the latter the tabernacle which stood in the secos was too small to hold anything larger than a statuette or emblem. We think that the cause of this difference may be guessed. At the time these rock temples were cut, the Pharaohs to whom they owed their existence no doubt assigned a priest or priests to each. But their position, sometimes in desert solitudes, as in the case of the Speos Artemidos, sometimes in places only inhabited for an intermittent period, in the quarries at Silsilis for instance, or in provinces which had been conquered by Egypt and might be lost to her again, rendered it impossible that they could be served and guarded in the ample fashion which was easy enough in the temples of Memphis, Abydos and Thebes. All these considerations suggested that, instead of a shrine containing some small figure or emblem, statues of a considerable size, from six to eight or ten feet high, should be employed, and that they should be actually chiselled in the living rock itself and left attached to it by the whole of their posterior surfaces. By their size and by their incorporation with the rock out of which both they and their surroundings were cut, such statues would defend themselves efficiently against all attempts on the part of enemies. In spite of their age several of these statues came down to us in a sufficiently good state of preservation to allow Champollion and his predecessors to recognize with certainty the divine personages whom they represented. During the last fifty years they have suffered as much at the hands of ignorant and stupid tourists as they did in the whole of the many centuries during which they were exposed to all the vicissitudes of Egyptian history.

Our study of the Egyptian temple would not be complete without a few words upon the buildings called Dayr-el-Bahari. By their extent, their picturesqueness, and the peculiar nature of their situation, these ruins have always had a great effect upon foreign visitors. Those who know Thebes will, perhaps, be surprised at our having said so little about them hitherto, especially as they are older than most of the buildings over which we have been occupied. We have not yet described them because they do not belong to any of the categories which we have been treating; they form a class by themselves; their general arrangement has no parallel in Egypt, and therefore we have reserved them to the last.

The building in question is situated at the foot of the Libyan chain, in a deep amphitheatre hollowed out by nature in the yellow limestone rocks which rise on the north-west of the necropolis. On two sides, on the right and at the back, it rests against perpendicular walls of rock cut by the pickaxe and dominating over the built part of the temple. On the left this natural wall is absent and is replaced by an inclosure of bricks (Figs. 250 and ).

Under such conditions we need feel no surprise at finding part of the temple subterranean. In backing his work against the mountains in this fashion the architect must have been partly impelled by a desire to make use of the facilities which it afforded. The mausoleum of Hatasu, unlike the other funerary chapels at Thebes, is, then, a triple hemispeos. At a point immediately opposite to the door in the external pylon, but at the other extremity of the building, a chamber about sixty-five feet deep was excavated in the rock. This must have acted the part of a sanctuary. Right and left of it, and at a shorter distance from the entrance, there are two more groups of rock-cut apartments. The whole arrangement may be compared to the system of three apsidal chapels which is so common at the east end of European cathedrals.

In approaching this temple from the river bank, a dromos of sphinxes had to be traversed of which very scanty traces are now to be found, but in the time of the Institut d'Égypte there were still two hundred of them to be distinguished, a few of the last being shown in the restoration figured upon the opposite page (Fig. 251). At the end of the dromos, upon the spot where a few traces of the bounding walls still remain, we have placed a pylon with a couple of obelisks in front of it. We have done so not only because nearly all the important temples had such a preface, but also because Sir Gardner Wilkinson says that he saw the foundations of two obelisks and of a doorway. After passing the pylon, a first courtyard was entered, which communicated with a second by an inclined plane stretching almost across its width. Here the arrangements which constituted the real originality of Dayr-el-Bahari began. The whole interior of the temple, between the pylon and the commencement of the speos, consisted of four courtyards, rising in terraces one above another like the steps of a gigantic staircase. The walls upon which these inclined planes and terraces were constructed are still to be traced in places. In order to furnish the vast courts, we have supposed them to contain seated statues at regular intervals along the inner faces of their walls; in such matters of decorative detail a little conjecture may perhaps be allowed. As for the portico which ornamented the further side of the second court, its remains were visible even before the excavations of Mariette.

Those excavations have since 1858 led to the discovery of the porticos of the third court. There seems to have been only a plain wall on the left of this court, while on the right there was a long colonnade which masked a number of chambers cut in the rock which rose immediately behind it. Facing the entrance to the court there was also a colonnade which was cut in two by the steps leading to the fourth and highest terrace. In the middle of this terrace a line doorway leading to the principal speos was raised. While all the rest of the temple was of limestone, this doorway was built of fine red granite, a distinction which is to be explained by its central situation, facing the gateway in the pylon though far above it, and forming the culminating point of the long succession of terraces and inclined planes. The attention of the visitor to the temple would be instantly seized by the beauty and commanding position of this doorway, which, moreover, by its broad and mysterious shadows, suggested the secos hidden in the flanks of the mountains, to which all the courts were but the prelude.

These terraced courts have surprised all visitors to the cenotaph of Hatasu. "No one will deny," says Mariette, "that the temple of Dayr-el-Bahari is a strange construction, and that it resembles an Egyptian temple as little as possible!" Some have thought foreign influence was to be traced in its arrangements. "Are we to consider it an accident, asks Ebers, that the stepped building at Dayr-el-Bahari was built shortly after an Egyptian army had, under Thothmes, trodden the soil of Mesopotamia for the first time, and found monumental buildings constructed in terraces in its great cities? Why did the Egyptians, who as a rule were so fond of repeating themselves that they became almost incapable of inventing new forms, never imitate the arrangements of this imposing building elsewhere, unless it was because its forms reminded them of their foreign enemies and therefore seemed to be worthy of condemnation?"

We are content with asking the question and with calling attention to its interest. The materials are wanting for a definite answer but the suggestion of Professor Ebers is probable enough. Twelve or thirteen centuries later the Persians, after their conquest of Egypt, carried back with them the notion of those hypostyle halls which gave to the buildings of Persepolis so different an aspect from those of Assyria, although the decorative details were all borrowed from the latter country. So too the Egyptians, in spite of the pride which they felt in their ancient civilization, may have been unable to control their admiration when they found themselves, in the wide plains of Persia, before those lofty towers with their successive terraces, to which access was obtained by majestic flights of steps. It seems by no means unlikely that one of their architects should have attempted to acclimatize an artistic conception which was so well calculated to impress the imaginations of the people; and none of the sovereigns of Egypt was better fitted to preside over such an attempt than the high spirited and enterprising Hatasu, the queen who reared two obelisks in the temple of Karnak, one of them being the highest that has remained erect; who made the first recorded attempt at acclimatization; and who was the first to launch a fleet upon the waters of the Red Sea.

Whether Hatasu's architect was inspired by those artistic creations of the Chaldees which, as time went on, were multiplied over the whole basin of the Euphrates and even spread as far as northern Syria, or whether he drew his ideas entirely from his own brain, his work was, in either case, deserving of high praise. In most parts of the Nile Valley sites are to be found which lend themselves readily to such a building. The soil has a gentle slope, upon which the erection of successive terraces would involve no architectural difficulties, and there is no lack of rocky walls against which porticoes could be erected, and in which subterranean chambers could be excavated. Upon a series of wide platforms and easy gradients like these, the pompous processions, which played such an important part in the Egyptian ritual, could defile with great effect, while under every portico and upon every landing place they could find resting places and the necessary shelter from the sun. Why did such a model find no imitators? Must we seek for the reason in the apparent reaction against her memory which followed the death of Hatasu? "The Egyptian people chose to look upon her as an usurper; they defaced the inscriptions which celebrated her campaigns; they effaced her cartouches and replaced her titles with those of her brothers."

It is certain that nowhere in Egypt has any building of considerable dimensions been discovered in which the peculiar arrangements of Dayr-el-Bahari are repeated. At most it may be said that something of the same kind is to be found in those rock-cut temples of Nubia which are connected with the river bank by a dromos and flights of steps. When the princes of the nineteenth dynasty wished to raise funerary temples to their memory in their own capital, it would have been easy, had they chosen, to find sites upon the slopes of the western chain similar to that which Hatasu had employed with such happy results; but they preferred a different combination. They erected their cenotaphs in the plain, at some distance from the hills, and they chose a form which did not essentially differ from that of the great temples on the opposite bank of the Nile.

The religious architecture of Egypt, in all its richness and variety, is known to us only through the monuments of the second Theban Empire, through the great works of the kings belonging to the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. We are tempted, however, to believe that the architects of the Sait period must have introduced fresh beauties into the plans, proportions, and decorations of those temples which the princes of the twenty-sixth dynasty, in their desire that their capital and the other cities of the Delta should rival or excel the magnificence of Memphis and Thebes, confided to their skill. Both the statues and the royal tombs of the Sait period have characteristics which distinguish them from those of earlier epochs. In all that we possess from this last period of artistic activity in Egypt, there is a new desire for elegance, for grace, carried sometimes to an extreme which is not free from weakness and affectation. It is probable that the same qualities existed in the religious architecture of Sais.

Unhappily all the buildings constructed in Memphis and Lower Egypt during the Sait supremacy have disappeared leaving hardly a trace behind, and the Greek writers have left us nothing but vague accounts to supply their place. Herodotus goes into ecstasies over the propylæa, that is, the pylons and outer courts, which Amasis added to the temple of Neith at Sais, and over the enormous size of the stones employed. He describes in great detail a chapel carved out of a single block of Syene granite, which Amasis transported from the quarries at great cost in order that it might be erected in the sanctuary of the said temple; unhappily it was so much injured on the journey that his intention had to be abandoned.

All that we learn from the historian is that the Sait princes made use of colossal stones in their buildings without much regard to their appropriateness, but simply to impress their contemporaries with an exaggerated idea of their wealth and power. The contractors of an earlier age were also in the habit of employing blocks which seem astonishing to us from their length and size, but they were never used except when they were required, to cover a void or some other purpose; the earlier architects never made the mistake of seeking for difficulties merely to show how cleverly they could overcome them.

It is to be regretted that we know so little of the monument attributed by Herodotus to Psemethek, and described by him in the following terms:—"Having become master of the whole of Egypt, Psammitichos constructed those propylæa of the temple of Hephaistos which lie to the south of that building. In front of these propylæa he also caused to be constructed an edifice in which Apis was nourished as soon as he had manifested himself. It was a peristyle ornamented with figures. Colossal statues, twelve cubits high, were employed as supports, instead of columns." We may assume that these colossi were, as in other Egyptian buildings, placed immediately in front of the real supports, and did not themselves uphold an entablature. Herodotus was not an architect, and, in taking account merely of the general effect, he doubtless used an expression which is not quite accurate.

The most important point to be noticed in this short extract from the Greek historian is the hint it contains of the attempts at originality made by the later generations of Egyptians, by "men born too late in too old a century," and of the means by which they hoped to rival their predecessors. The architect of Psemethek borrowed a motive which had long been disused, of which, however, there are many examples at Thebes, and employed it under novel conditions.

The caryatid form of pier is generally found, in temples, in the peristyles of the fore-courts or the hypostyles of the pronaos. Psemethek made use of it for the decoration of what was no more than a cattle stable. The stable in question had, it must be confessed, a god for its inhabitant, and so far it might be called a temple; but it was a temple of a very peculiar kind, in which the arrangements must have been very different from those required in the abode of an inanimate deity. In it the god was present in flesh and blood, and special arrangements were necessary in order to provide for his wants, and to exhibit him to the crowd or conceal him, as the ritual demanded. The problem was solved, apparently, in a method satisfactory to the Egyptians, as the guide who attended Herodotus called his attention to the building with an insistance which led the historian to pay it special attention.

Herodotus does not tell us what form the caryatides took in this instance. It is unlikely that they were Osiride figures of the king, as in the Theban temples, but as Apis was the incarnation of Ptah, the great deity of Memphis, they may very possibly have been carved in the image of that god.

Between the days of Cambyses and those of Alexander, Egypt temporarily recovered her independence more than once. The art of that period—during which numerous works were carried out and many others restored—was a prolongation of the art of the Sait princes. Its aims, methods, and taste were entirely similar. We may, therefore, in spite of the limits which we have imposed upon ourselves, mention a work carried out no more than fifty years before the Greek conquest, in the reign of Nectanebo I. We mean the small building which is sometimes called the southern temple, in the island of Philæ. It is the oldest building upon the island, all the rest being Ptolemaic or Roman.

Its arrangements are different to anything we have hitherto encountered in religious architecture. There are no internal subdivisions of any kind, nothing which resembles a secos. According to all the plans which have been published, it contained only one hall, or rather rectangular court, inclosed by fourteen graceful columns and a low, richly-decorated wall, which forms a kind of screen between the lower part of the columns. This screen does not extend quite half-way up the columns; these latter support an entablature, but there has never been a roof of any kind. There can be no doubt that the building was consecrated to Isis, whose image is carved all over it; but could an edifice thus open to the outward air and to every prying eye be a temple? Ebers is disposed to look upon it as a waiting-room. Close to it the remains of a wide staircase are to be traced, against which boats were moored, and upon which they discharged their loads. Thus the faithful who came to be present at the rites of Isis would assemble in the waiting-hall, whence they would be conducted by the priests to that sanctuary which became the object of so many pilgrimages in the later years of the Egyptian monarchy.

Certain peculiarities in the management of the column, which grew into frequent use in the Ptolemaic epoch, are here encountered for the first time. This is not the place for its detailed consideration, but one must point it out as a second result of the desire shown by the architects of the period to achieve new developments without breaking the continuity of the national traditions. Here, as in the monumental cattle-shed at Memphis, there is no invention of new forms; all the architectural elements introduced are to be found in earlier buildings. It is the general aspect and physiognomy of the building that is new. Whatever we may call it, the edifice erected by Nectanebo at the southern point of the island is certainly novel in form; we have found nothing like it either in Egypt or in Nubia, but the repetition of its forms in a much later generation proves that it answered to a real change in the national taste and to new aspirations in the national genius. Painting, engraving, and photography have given us countless reproductions of the picturesque building which rises on the eastern shore of the island, amid a bouquet of palm-trees. It has been variously called the bed of Pharaoh, the eastern temple, the great hypæthra, the summer-house of Tiberius, &c. It is nothing more than a replica of Nectanebo's creation; it is larger and its proportions are more lofty, but its plan is quite similar. In the sketch lent to us by M. Hector Leroux, the eastern temple is seen on the right, while the left of the drawing is filled up with the pylons of the great temple of Isis (Fig. 252).

If we knew it better, we should probably find that the architecture of the Sait period formed the transition between that of the second Theban empire and that of the Ptolemies. We should find in it at least hints and foreshadowings of those original features of which we shall have to speak when we arrive at the Græco-Egyptian temples. Unhappily, as none of the temples built by Psemethek, Amasis, and their successors have been recovered from the sands of Egypt, we shall be reduced to conjecture on this point. But must all hope of recovering something from the ruins of Sais be abandoned? Mariette himself made some excavations upon its site, and confessed that he was discouraged by their result, or rather by their want of result. Perhaps, however, deeper and more prolonged excavations might bring to light sufficient indications of the ordonnance and plans of the more important buildings to permit of some attempt at restoration being made.