Volume I Part 35 (1/2)
-- 4 General Characteristics of the Egyptian Teyptian temple froiven to the period when Greek art, introduced into the country by the Macedonian conquest, began to have an influence upon eneral aspects of the national architecture The reader will not be surprised to find that before we conclude our study ish to give a _resu ideas which seem to be embodied in the temple, and to define the latter as we see it in its finest and reat Theban Pharaohs We cannot do better for our purpose than borrow the words of Mariette upon the subject No one has becohly acquainted with the temples of the Nile valley He visited them all at his leisure, he explored their ruins and sounded most of them down to their foundations, and he published circumstantial descriptions of Abydos, Karnak, Dayr-el-Bahari, and Denderah In these ypte_, he returned to his definition again and again, in a continual attempt to improve it, to make it clear and precise We shall freely extract froive the best rendering of their author's ideas, and to bring out s to the monuments of which he treats[377]
[377] MARIETTE, _Itinerare_, pp 13-16, 157-159; _Karnak_, p
19; _Voyage dans la Haute-egypte_, vol i pp 15, 16
”The Egyptian temple must not be confused with that of Greece, with the Christian church, or with the Moha of the faithful, for the recital of common prayers; no public ritual was celebrated within it; no one was ad The temple was a kind of royal oratory, ain token of his own piety, and in order to purchase the favour of the Gods
”The elaborate decoration hich all the walls of the te this point of departure
The essential element of this decoration is the picture; ed symmetrically side by side, and tiers above tiers of pictures cover the walls froenificance of the pictures: on the one hand, the king, on the other, one or more deities; these are the subjects of all the co (meats, fruits, flowers, emblems) to the God and asks for sorants the favour demanded The whole decoration of a temple consisted therefore in an act of adoration on the part of the monarch repeated in various forms The temple was therefore the exclusive personal monument of the prince by whom it was founded and decorated This fact explains the presence of those precious representations of battles which adorn the external walls of certain te ascribed all his successes in the field to the i the ene the the an act as agreeable to the Gods as when offering incense, flowers, and the limbs of the animals sacrificed By such deeds he proved his piety and merited the continuation of those favours for which the erection of a teured in front of the Chariot of Ra to Ebers, the oldest of the Suez Canals, the one dug by Seti I This canal was defended by fortifications, and is called in inscriptions _the Cutting_ (_L'egypte_, etc)
The piety and gratitude of the reat festivals of which the temple was the scene several times in the course of the year ”The cerereat processions, issuing from the sanctuary to bethe open courts which lay between the buildings of the tereat hich incloses the whole They perambulated the terraced roofs, they launched upon the lake the sacred barque with its many-coloured streamers Upon a few rare occasions the priests, with the sacred ies, sallied from the inclosure which ordinarily shi+elded their rites from profane eyes, and, at the head of a brilliant flotilla, directed their course to some other city, either by the Nile or by the hich they called 'the sacred canal'”[379]
[379] To follow these processions was an act of piety Upon a Theban stele we find the folloords addressed to Aoest abroad” The stele of Suti and Har, architects at Thebes, translated into French by PAUL PIERRET, in _Recueil de Travaux_, p 72
”The ensigns of the Gods, the coffers in which their effigies or symbolic representations were inclosed, their shrines and sacred barques were carried in these processions, of which the kings were the reputed conductors At other times all these objects were deposited in the naos Upon the occurrence of a festival, the priest to who entered the naos and brought out the mysterious emblem which was hidden from all other eyes; he covered it with a rich veil, and it was then carried under a canopy”
[Illustration: FIG 253--The battle against the Khetas, Luxor (From Champollion, pl 328)]
A ritual to which so much ”pomp and circureat scale The preservation of so much apparatus required extensive store-rooms, which, like the sanctuary itself, had to be kept in almost total darkness in order to preserve the sacred vest effects of sun, dust, heat, and the insects which they engender There is nothing in the texts which seems to hint at the celebration of any rites in the dark parts of the teht, and no trace of the discoloration caused by smoke has been found upon the walls There see beyond the ht within the chambers of the temple All the important part of the ritual was perforical acts in the naos were short and took place before a very restricted audience They consisted of a few prayers said by the king or by the chief priest, and in the presentation of the traditional offerings The cares of maintenance and of preparation for the periodical festivals had also to go on in that part of the teed by the practised and disciplined priests in the half light of the sanctuary, and even the aled behind it
[Illustration: FIG 254--Ra in triumph from Syria
On the external face of the northern wall of the Great Temple at Karnak (From Champollion, pl 292)]