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.[302]
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.[303]
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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.[304] 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."[305]
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
341
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.[306]
Fig. 206.—Gateway and boundary wall of a temple; restored by
Ch. Chipiez.
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.[307] 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
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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.[308] 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 con
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cealed 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.[309] 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.
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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.[310] They took some element of the general plan, such 347
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.
Fig. 207.—Principal façade of the temple of Luxor; restored by
Ch. Chipiez.
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.[311]
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
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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.[312] 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.[313] 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
351
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,[314] 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.
Fig. 208.—The temple of Khons; horizontal and vertical section
showing the general arrangements of the temple.
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.[315] 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
352
inferior rank awaited the appearance of the deity in the hypostyle hall,
in which the cortége was marshalled before emerging into the courts.
Fig. 209.—The bari, or sacred boat; from the temple of
Elephantiné.
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
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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.[316] 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