Egyptian temple

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Egyptian temples were not museums or monuments. They were, in the belief of those who built and maintained them, the actual homes of gods. The Egyptians called the temple building ḥwt-nṯr, meaning "mansion of a god," and everything inside one was organized around that idea. A god did not merely receive visitors there. A god lived there, ate there, was bathed and clothed there, and from that house reached out to sustain the order of the cosmos.

  What drew pharaohs to pour the spoils of empire into stone buildings? Why were ordinary Egyptians barred from most of what happened inside, yet still came to the temple to pray? How did institutions meant to honor gods become some of the most powerful economic and political forces in the ancient world? And how did a tradition that stretched from small reed shrines in the late fourth millennium BC eventually produce the 69-foot columns of the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak? Those questions pull at the heart of what Egyptian temples actually were, and the answers reach into every corner of the civilization that built them.

• 2. Houses of the Gods

  ›

  At the center of every Egyptian temple lay a sanctuary, and at the center of every sanctuary lay a cult image. A statue of the god, often made of or decorated with gold and lapis lazuli, was believed to be inhabited by the god's ba, a word usually translated as spirit or personality. Each morning a priest entered the sanctuary by candlelight, opened the doors of the shrine housing the statue, prostrated himself before it, and recited hymns. He then removed the god from the shrine, changed its clothing, anointed it with oil and paint, and presented it with a meal of meats, fruits, vegetables, and bread.

  The god was believed to consume only the spiritual essence of this food. What was left, an act the Egyptians called the "reversion of offerings," passed first to other statues throughout the temple, then to funerary chapels for the sustenance of the dead, and finally to the priests who ate it. The quantities prepared for even a daily meal were so large that most of it bypassed the offering table entirely and went straight to these secondary recipients.

  The sanctuary's darkness was not accidental. As one moved from the entrance toward the sanctuary, outside light decreased and restrictions on who could enter increased. The elevated, enclosed sanctuary was equated with the sacred hill where the world was created in Egyptian myth and with the burial chamber of a tomb. This crucial place had to be insulated from the impure outside world. Laypeople could not approach the cult image, but they were not without recourse: large niches in the exterior wall at the back of the temple served as what might be called chapels of the hearing ear, where ordinary Egyptians could speak their prayers as close as they could come to the god's dwelling.

• 3. A Temple's Economic Weight

  ›

  The largest temples employed tens of thousands of priests, craftsmen, and laborers. The Egyptian term for temple lands and their administration was pr, meaning "house" or "estate," and that domestic analogy was apt: the temple's economic workings ran like a large Egyptian household, with servants dedicated to serving the temple god as they might serve a master.

  Income came from multiple directions. Kings donated spoils from military campaigns and tribute from client states, particularly during the New Kingdom when Egypt was an imperial power. Private individuals offered land, slaves, or goods to temples in exchange for priestly services that would sustain their spirits after death. But a great portion of a temple's wealth came from its own holdings. These included tracts of farmland sometimes located in entirely different regions of Egypt, producing grain, fruit, wine, and livestock. Some temples launched expeditions into the desert to collect salt, honey, or wild game, or to mine precious minerals. Others owned fleets of ships for trade within Egypt and beyond its borders. As the scholar Richard H. Wilkinson observed, the temple estate often represented no less than a slice of Egypt itself.

  All this economic power was ultimately subject to the pharaoh's authority. Temple employees, including priests, were subject to the state corvée system, which could conscript labor for royal projects. A trading expedition led by Harkhuf in the Sixth Dynasty, roughly 2255 to 2246 BC, was permitted to procure supplies from any temple it wished. Yet the king could also exempt temples from taxation and conscription, and by redirecting resources between institutions he shaped the relative power of different cults. A large temple administration could accumulate enough independence to challenge a weak pharaoh, though historians are uncertain how often that tension became open conflict.

• 4. Stone, Symbolism, and Scale

  ›

  The earliest known shrines appeared in late prehistoric Egypt at sites such as Saïs and Buto in Lower Egypt and Nekhen and Coptos in Upper Egypt. Most were built of wood, reed matting, and mudbrick, materials that rarely survived. Yet later Egyptian builders kept returning to the forms of these early structures: cavetto cornices at the tops of walls were made to imitate rows of palm fronds placed atop archaic walls, and the slight outward lean of exterior walls was a holdover from archaic building methods.

  The shift to stone reflected a theological argument. Stone was eternal; mudbrick was not. Building the god's house of stone declared that the god's presence would endure. Limestone and sandstone were the primary materials, common in Egypt and suitable for carving. Harder stones such as granite appeared in smaller quantities for specific elements like obelisks. Walls were built of large blocks laid in courses without mortar, each stone dressed to fit its neighbors, with rougher, poorer stone often used in the interiors of thick walls.

  The standard plan took shape fully in the New Kingdom. A procession path served as the central axis, lined with sphinx statues and punctuated by barque stations where priests could rest the divine barque during festivals. Towering entrance pylons, pairs of trapezoidal towers flanking the main gateway, marked the threshold. The pylon may have been meant to resemble Akhet, the hieroglyph for "horizon," underscoring a solar symbolism that ran through the whole complex. Inside were hypostyle halls, covered rooms filled with columns often shaped to imitate lotus or papyrus plants, and open peristyle courts where the public gathered during festivals. At the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, the largest columns rose 69 feet. Beyond the building proper, an outer wall enclosed secondary structures, a sacred precinct that Egyptologists call the temenos. Sacred lakes within many enclosures served as reservoirs for ritual water, as bathing places for priests, and as representations of the primordial waters from which the world emerged.

• 5. Priests, Power, and Politics

  ›

  In Egyptian religious ideology, all ceremonies were acts performed by the king. Priests merely stood in his place. This fiction ran deep: temple decoration consistently showed the king performing rituals, while priests appeared only as secondary figures. In reality, the king could not be present at the dozens of temples spread across Egypt, so he delegated most ritual duties to an elaborate clergy.

  In the Old and Middle Kingdoms, most priests were government officials who served the temple in rotating shifts, leaving their secular duties for part of the year. As the priesthood became more professional, the king used his power over appointments mainly at the highest levels, rewarding favored officials or intervening in politically important cults. Lower appointments were often delegated to the temple's own clergy, which meant that priestly offices could pass from father to son. These positions were highly lucrative, and in the Greco-Roman period, some priests fought over them in lengthy court cases.

  Women's roles in the priesthood varied by era. In the Old Kingdom, many women served as priests. Their numbers dropped sharply in the Middle Kingdom, then rose again in the Third Intermediate Period. Lesser positions, such as that of a musician during ceremonies, remained open to women even in the most restrictive periods. The most influential female role was that of the God's Wife of Amun, a ceremonial consort of the god whose authority eventually surpassed that of the High Priest of Amun during the Late Period.

  At the head of the hierarchy stood the high priest, who oversaw both the religious and economic functions of the institution. In the reign of Thutmose III, administrative authority over all temples and clergies passed from the royal viziers to the High Priests of Amun. By the eleventh century BC, a military leader named Herihor had made himself High Priest of Amun and the de facto ruler of Upper Egypt, beginning the political fragmentation known as the Third Intermediate Period. The priesthood's control of temple oracles, which the public consulted for everything from locating lost objects to deciding government appointments, gave the clergy a channel of popular influence that no king could entirely control.

• 6. Festivals, Oracles, and Popular Faith

  ›

  Festival days replaced the daily rituals with ceremonies of a different character entirely. In the Opet Festival, one of the most important ceremonies of the New Kingdom, the image of Amun from Karnak traveled to visit the form of Amun worshipped at Luxor Temple, with both images acting to reaffirm the king's divine rule. In the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, Amun of Karnak visited the mortuary temples of the Theban Necropolis while ordinary people visited the funerary chapels of their own deceased relatives. A prominent annual event carried an image of Hathor from the Dendera Temple complex to visit the Temple of Edfu, the temple of her mythological consort Horus.

  Festival processions were also moments for oracles. The motions of the god's barque as it was carried on the bearers' shoulders, making gestures or tipping toward tablets with possible answers, were read as the god's reply to questions from the crowd. Their subjects ranged from the location of a lost object to the best candidate for a government post. By the Greco-Roman period, oracles had expanded well beyond festival occasions, allowing people to consult them frequently at dedicated spaces.

  For laypeople who could not approach the cult image, the temple provided other means of contact. Some left votive offerings: small clay or wooden models whose form sometimes indicated why they were given. Figurines of women are among the most common types, and some carry inscriptions praying for a woman to conceive a child. By the Ptolemaic period, many temples provided buildings for ritual incubation, where people slept in hopes of receiving dreams sent by the god, often seeking relief from sickness or infertility.

  Anthony Spalinger has questioned whether festival processions inspired genuine religious feeling or were simply occasions for revelry. Whatever the answer, the evidence from the New Kingdom and later periods shows that official temples with their sequestered gods remained a major focus for popular veneration even though ordinary Egyptians were excluded from the ceremonies within.

• 7. Survival, Loss, and Recovery

  ›

  The last temple cults died out somewhere between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, as Christian emperors issued increasingly hostile decrees against pagan worship. Some Christians attacked temples directly, as in the plundering of the Serapeum and other temples in Alexandria in AD 391 or 392. What the authorities did not destroy, time and circumstance eroded. Locals dismantled temples for building material; limestone temples were especially vulnerable because the stone could be burned to produce lime. Temples built of sandstone, concentrated mostly in Upper Egypt, survived in greater numbers. The last ancient hieroglyphic inscription known is graffiti left at Philae, dated to AD 394. The last inscription in Demotic script there dates to AD 452.

  The transformation that eventually brought these ruins back to scholarly attention began with the French campaign in Egypt and Syria in 1798, which included a corps of scholars to document surviving ancient monuments. Their work sparked a fascination with ancient Egypt across Europe. Growing numbers of Europeans traveled to see the ruins, and many removed objects, from small artifacts to enormous obelisks, with little care for preservation. Yet this wave of interest also led to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the founding of Egyptology as a discipline.

  The most severe modern threat came in the 1960s with the construction of the Aswan Dam, which threatened to submerge the temples of Lower Nubia beneath Lake Nasser. A major United Nations effort disassembled some of these monuments and rebuilt them on higher ground. The Egyptian government gave several others as diplomatic gifts to nations that had contributed to the rescue effort, including the Temple of Dendur, Temple of Taffeh, and Temple of Debod. Some temples nonetheless vanished beneath the lake.

  Today, sites such as Karnak, Luxor, and Abu Simbel are major contributors to the Egyptian tourist industry, which is itself a significant sector of the national economy. Three temple complexes have been designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites: Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis, Memphis and its Necropolis, and the Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae. Even the temples of Akhenaten, deliberately dismantled after his death when his religious reforms were reversed, are now being partially reconstructed.