What Are Two Main Features Found in Art From the New Kingdom?

Hypostyle Hall at the Luxor Temple
Built c.1370 BCE.

New Kingdom Compages: Introduction and Characteristics

The New Kingdom witnessed the appearance of the large Egyptian temples - the near impressive form of Ancient Egyptian compages after the Old Kingdom's pyramids. In that location are two types of sanctuary: a mortuary temple on the due west depository financial institution and a temple to the living god on the due east bank of the Nile. The largest group of temples is at modern Luxor (ancient Thebes). The bones temple plan was an approach avenue, often lined by sphinxes, leading to ii great archway pylons (ordinarily with two obelisks, emblems of the sunday, before them); side by side an open court, a hypostyle (columned) hall and last, the sanctuaries. This plan could be elaborated by the addition of further courts, halls or colonnades. Only high officials were allowed beyond the neat outer court. Two of the all-time preserved Egyptian temples, both of the Ptolemaic period (304-30 BCE), at Dendera and Edfu, are dedicated to the goddess Hathor and the god Horus respectively.

Thebes: Capital of a New Egyptian Empire

Following the collapse of gild at the end of the Middle Kingdom the "Hyksos," mercenary leaders from the Near East, established themselves in the east Delta and gradually extended their dominion to Memphis and Eye Egypt during the 2nd Intermediate Period (1650-1550). Upper Egypt remained nigh untouched by the invaders. It was again the princes of Thebes who had to expel the foreigners and institute a new united kingdom, thus preparing the way for the most brilliant era of Egyptian culture. By pursuing the Hyksos into their Palestinian homeland, and past other conquests in the due north and in the s, deep into the Sudan, in that location arose a powerful Egyptian empire that lasted, with Thebes as its capital and religious middle, for 2 hundred years.

One of the prerequisites of this renaissance was a renewal of the conception of kingship. According to the new official dogma the legitimate ruler was begotten by the god Amon-Ra and the sister-consort, at present exalted to "consort of the god," of the ruling rex. In decease the ruler entered into the being of his divine begetter Amon.

At the start of the New Kingdom Thebes was still a young city whose historical traditions did non extend beyond the local nomarchs, from whom Neb-hepet-ra Mentuhotep, founder of the Eye Kingdom, had stemmed. The new capital had to establish its visible supremacy through the superiority of its system of gods and a display of monumental sanctuaries. In the Centre Kingdom Thebes had become the adode of Amon, the creator god, who, past appropriating nearby cults such every bit that of the primeval fertility god Min of Coptos and finally the sun god Ra of Heliopolis, had adult into a universal divinity and "king of the gods." The armed forces victories had been won in Amon's name and into his sanctuaries streamed nigh of the haul, and the tributes of the conquered peoples. Amon-Ra became the national deity. He acquired the Theban goddess Mut equally his consort and the moon god Khonsu every bit their son. From now on this family of gods formed a triad, with coordinated sanctuaries at Karnak. Each member of the triad possessed almost his cult image a sacred barge, and in these the images could be taken to visit one another within Thebes.

Apart from these chief Theban gods, the cults of other important deities, such as Ptah of Memphis, had already found their manner to Thebes during the Middle Kingdom; these sanctuaries were as well expanded under the New Kingdom rulers.

The active construction of temples for the gods and of purple mortuary temples began immediately under the first kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and it aimed at giving awe-inspiring expression to the various theological systems newly fatigued together; their arrangement turned the unabridged area of Thebes into "Amon's metropolis."

The commune of the majuscule metropolis of Thebes extended along both banks of the Nile. On the e banking company stood the royal palaces, with the government buildings and residential quarters betwixt the boundaries of the primary sanctuary of Karnak on the north and the sanctuary of Luxor on the south, both dating from the Middle Kingdom. On the border of the west depository financial institution, confined by its cliffs, lay the necropolis, which had as its beginning monumental centre the tomb complex of the founder of the Middle Kingdom in the valley at Deir el Bahari. Here lie cached also the kings of the New Kingdom, but for reasons of security the royal tombs were tunneled into the rock in the lone Valley of the Kings in the western hills, physically separated from the temples for the worship of the dead. The royal mortuary temples were ranged at the foot of the cliffs that run in a line north and south, facing the fertile country and the sanctuaries on the eastward bank: they were memorial temples in the true sense of the word, serving not simply for the cult of the king and his followers but likewise for the worship of Amon-Ra and other gods. Also on the west banking company, further to the south and beyond the limits of the original urban center there has been found a "primeval colina" that was probably already extant in the Middle Kingdom.

The sanctuaries of the gods of Thebes were certainly independent buildings that were erected for specific reasons and peculiarly in connexion with jubilee festivals equally "memorials of the kings for their father Amon," but their planning played an important role for the neighboring cults.

The Temple of Amon-Ra at Karnak

The remains of the oldest sanctuary of Karnak, rebuilt in the 12th Dynasty, are so scanty that the footing programme can no longer be established with certainty. It formed the cadre of all later expansions. Its east-west orientation was determined by the Nile from which a canal probably led to the forecourt of the temple at an early on engagement. Considering the temple was expanded continually toward the due west the landing place, with its minor obelisks and an avenue of ram-sphinxes leading to the later main archway of the sanctuary, was likewise shifted due west, and its existing remains appointment merely from late in the New Kingdom.

The history of the sanctuary is complicated past repeated expansions and past razing old shrines and constructing new ones, in the primary east-west directions and toward neighbouring cults on due north and southward, a process that lasted from the commencement of the New Kingdom into the Tardily Period. Only traces are left of many of the buildings. Appropriately nosotros tin can but talk over the basic conception of the architectural layout with reference to the more than important elements of the temple, and draw the most notable sites.

So many cults gathered around the chief temple of Amon-Ra, the king of the gods, that Karnak had the name "Collector of Holy Places." The decisive influence on planning during the Eighteenth Dynasty was Amon'due south taking over of the essence of the sun god. The connectedness with the Heliopolitan place of worship of Ra, with its pylons, obelisks, and broad courts, was thus supplied past the essence of the national deity. Male monarch Tuthmosis I was responsible for a considerable widening of the boundaries of the Middle Kingdom sanctuary, which he enclosed with rock walls on due north, south, and eastward; on the west, toward the Nile, he built 2 monumental portals in shut succession, between gate towers. Inside the giant court, confronting the enclosure walls, he gear up up statues in the form of Osiris, symbolizing the perpetual renewal of the kingship within the dynastic order: here began the furnishing of buildings with a course of stone sculpture closely associated with the architecture. On either side of the gateway in the broader and taller front pylon (present pylon Iv) Tuthmosis I erected 60-five-foot obelisks of rose granite, of which the southern 1 however stands. Between the two pylons (IV and V) was inserted a splendid hall with papyrus bundle columns and jumbo standing figures of the king. The primal precinct of the temple was thus permanently fixed. Here, inside the zone of the Middle Kingdom sanctuary, Queen Hatshepsut built a scarlet quartzite chamber for the processional barge and the cult image of the national god. Open to eastward and w, it was flanked by subsidiary chambers for religious implements. In the narrow courtroom intervening between her male parent'southward pylons (IV and V) the queen raised two obelisks almost one hundred feet high, of which the northern 1 still stands.

At the same fourth dimension she took in manus the south axis, that led from the forecourt in front of pylon IV to the temple of Mut and thence to the sanctuary of Luxor, and built pylon VIII, placing before it enthroned statues of colossal size. Her successor, Tuthmosis III, replaced the queen's red quartzite shrine with a new 1 in rose granite and in front end of it he erected a pocket-sized pylon (Vi) as the entrance to his "hall of register"; the ceiling rested on two slender square pillars decorated in painted high relief with the heraldic plants of Lower and Upper Egypt, the papyrus on the northward pillar and the so-called lily on the south. In the hall of annals the conquistador recorded the details of his victorious campaigns confronting Palestine and Syria. Finally, Tuthmosis Iii erected ii larger obelisks in front of the pair built past Tuthmosis I, merely these have not survived.

The surface area enclosed by Tuthmosis I was extendend to the e by Tuthmosis 3 when he added a self-contained temple whose principal element was the slap-up "festival hall" for the celebration of the king'due south jubilee. It consists of a court laid out at right angles to the main axis of the temple and ringed beyond past archway halls supported on foursquare pillars. In the middle of the eastern wall of the hall of columns lies the archway to the holy of holies, which extends toward the due east. Into this hall the rex introduced two rows of tall columns, bearing a flat roof that is higher than the roofs of the surrounding halls; betwixt the necessary supports the zone remained open, then that the interior suggests in cross section the appearance of a "basilica" with a clerestory. The orientation of the building, the mode of construction, and the grade of the columns lining the central aisle, which resemble stone "tent poles," reveal that here two elements, a court with a festival tent erected in information technology, have been skillfully combined. Against the outside of the eastward wall of this jubilee hall the king built a pocket-size sanctuary facing e, and in front of it he erected a huge single obelisk, now continuing before the Lateran Palace in Rome.

Tuthmosis Three as well developed the southward centrality of the temple, calculation some other pylon (VII) with colossal statues of the king on the south side. On the e side of the court formed between pylons VII and VIII he erected a small-scale repository chapel that likewise leads to the "sacred lake" of the Karnak area. Sacred lakes were permanent features of Egyptian temples. They were the source of the holy water used in the ritual and, on festival occasions, the scene of excursions of the sacred barge. Along the banks at that place were besides enclosures with birds flying about in them, afterward to be used in ritual sacrifice. The pylons further along the south axis (IX and X) were congenital at the stop of the Eighteenth Dynasty, pylon 10 serving also as the monumental southern entrance to the temple precinct. An artery of sphinxes led south from here to the nearby temple of the goddess Mut, partially surrounded by its own horseshoe-shaped sacred lake.

The main temple was also enlarged due west, in the management of the Nile, past the addition of further pylons. Sety I began the building of the smashing hypostyle hall at Karnak, in the courtyard between the pylons of Amenhotep III (3) and of Ramesses I (II); the enormous structure was completed by Ramesses Two. Information technology is of particular historical interest equally the beginning true example of a building of the "basilica" type, that is, a long multi-aisled hall with a tall central aisle and much lower side aisles. The key aisle supports a ceiling on two rows of papyrus columns nearly eighty feet high with open bell-shaped blossoms every bit capitals. The two lower side areas containing the aisles accept each sixty-one close-gear up papyrus-packet columns xl feet loftier, of the smooth unified type introduced in the historic period of the Ramessides. The important clerestory zone betwixt the roofs of nave and aisles consists of the supporting pillars and stone grilles betwixt, which could have only dimly lighted the central aisle. The bands of inscriptions on the wall surfaces of this hall bespeak that it served non as a existent place of worship but as an assembly place for the sacred barges of the Theban triad at the fourth dimension of processions. The barges were brought at that place from their sanctuaries "when Amon appeared at the festival to behold the beauty of the Theban region." Other "basilican" structures of this type, though on a much smaller scale, are found in the mortuary temple of Ramesses Two (Ramesseum) on the w bank at Thebes, and the gimmicky remains of the main temple of Ptah of Memphis.

At right angles to the main centrality of the temple were built repository chapels, big and small-scale, that served as resting places for the sacred clomp during the processions. Other individual temple buildings were on north or south co-ordinate to their relationship to the neighbouring sanctuaries. The virtually important of these is the temple of the moon god Khonsu, child of Amon and Mut. It faces south toward the temple of Luxor, with which it was connected past an artery of sphinxes well over a mile long. Its architect was Ramesses Three. It is historically of import for its good country of preservation and also for its systematic layout; in its succession of halls and their arrangements information technology continued to serve as a model until the temples of the Belatedly Period. Passing through a portal between gate towers, one enters a courtroom flanked past double porticoes. At the end of the court stands the temple porch at a slightly higher level. Next comes a broader hypostyle hall with a alpine cardinal alley and lateral windows. The columns of the fundamental aisle, like those of the great hypostyle hall at Karnak and the Ramesseum, have open papyrus blooms as capitals. Beyond this hall lies a square room with the barge chapel of the god in the middle. In the rear office of the temple is a wide low-pillared hall with chapels on three sides. These feature features, which were already prepared for in the Eighteenth Dynasty in the layout of the temple of Luxor, have been organized into a logical schema in the temple of Khonsu. From i bedroom to the next the floors are slightly raised, the ceilings get lower in the same rhythm and the passages narrower. Equally 1 advances through the first pillared hall into the interior of the building the light becomes steadily dimmer, offset admitted through lateral windows and and so through mere slits in the roof. The sanctuary lies in full darkness; it hides with its cult image the "surreptitious" of the temple.

The Temple of Luxor

One of the swell works of ancient art, the temple of Luxor, on the south side of Thebes similar the principal sanctuary of Karnak, also goes back to the Eye Kingdom. Under Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis 3 a granite chapel stood there with well-proportioned papyrus-packet columns, incorporated by Ramesses 2 with the great court he added on the north. The Luxor temple itself was the work of Amenhotep III and was built co-ordinate to a uniform plan and on a much larger calibration than the older sanctuary. It lies close to the Nile bank facing north and was the "southern harem" of Amon, who was worshipped here every bit the god of procreation. It thus had a particular significance for the king, whose divine conception and birth are represented in the "birth room" on the due east side.

Unequalled in Egyptian architecture is the lofty elongated passage, with its two rows of fifty-human foot papyrus columns with open flowers for capitals, that leads into the great courtroom of the temple. No pylon towers emphasized the entrance to this huge hall; no side aisles expanded it, as in the great hypostyle hall at Karnak. It formed a awe-inspiring reception hall for the king and the sacred barges, which paused here earlier crossing the wide courtyard leading to the inner temple. The square open court with its double rows of well-proportioned papyrus-bundle columns merges on the due south into the main archway hall having columns of the same form. Crossing the "hall of offerings" one enters the barge sanctuary which, built inside an convalescent, is distinguished equally an independent construction by fillets at the corners and crowning concave cornices. The rearmost chambers of the temple are attainable only from the sides through a transverse columned hall. They consist of a row of three chapels, the one in the centre existence the holy of holies where the cult image of the sacred triad stood on a pedestal.

In front of Amenhotep Iii's long entrance passage Ramesses 2 added the already mentioned spacious court; its archway, on the due north, is guarded by a pylon and obelisks, and the facade faces toward Karnak, linked by an artery of sphinxes with Amon'due south master sanctuary.

For the meaning of terms, see: Architecture Glossary.

The "Primeval Colina" at Medinet Habu

In addition to the temples of Karnak and Luxor on the east depository financial institution of the Nile at Thebes, there is on the westward bank a pocket-sized but important sanctuary at Medinet Habu, due south of the original urban center limits. As the "true centre of primordial creation" this little temple could claim to be one of the holiest places of the holiest places of Thebes. Hatshepsut began its structure, over an older sanctuary, and information technology was revised and completed by her successor Tuthmosis III. The elongated rectangular building, whose basis plan is also recognizable in sanctuaries elsewhere, has rounded moldings at the iv corners and is crowned in a higher place an upper encircling molding past a concave cornice. The whole stands on a moderately loftier podium reached by a small flight of steps on the east forepart. A canal branching from the Nile probably ended in forepart of the temple forecourt.

The building is divided into two different areas. In front of the customary sanctuary is a barge chapel of the "baldachin temple" type with pillars on three sides and waist-high walls between them; in the middle stands a long shrine for Amon's barge. Originally the ceiling of this shrine - apparently the archetypal sacred hut beneath an awning - was lower than the roof of the surrounding column structure. The rear role of the temple is enclosed past outer walls, and here the ceiling elevation is lower than in the front part. The structure contains several small-scale chambers: on the fundamental axis is a foursquare room, the primary chamber, for its ceiling is somewhat higher and has a low-cal-slit directing a feeble beam of light onto a statuary group representing the god Amon and the king, of which remains have been preserved. The rooms lying south and westward of the chief sleeping accommodation served the cult of Amon; the room on the north, attainable only from the barge chapel, served the cult of the king.

This sanctuary on the "primeval hill of Djeme" (Thebes) maintained close relations with the temple of Luxor on the eastward bank. At the get-go of each decade Amon was transported past barge, from his "southern harem," beyond to the temple on the west side of the river to brand offerings to the "primordial gods." In the Twentieth Dynasty Ramesses 3 chose the immediate vicinity of this hallowed place to build his huge mortuary temple. He enclosed the aboriginal sanctuary within the fortress-like walls of his own temple expanse. The cult was maintained into the Ptolemaic era and during all this fourth dimension the minor Eighteenth Dynasty temple remained essentially untouched. Tardily inscriptions refer to the sanctuary as the "tomb of the eight original gods and the primeval snake Kneph," and accordingly various additions were made in the Thirtieth Dynasty and under the Ptolemies: archway buildings, a hypostyle hall, pylons, and a small pillared archway hall where the processions were ceremonially received.

The Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut

For Thebes, the early on 18th Dynasty was a genuinely creative period in compages. The most of import building of this period - surpassing all others in originality and disrespect of conception, in the balance of its masses, in its climactic progress from archway to holy of holies, and in wealth of statuary and reliefs - is the terraced temple of Queen Hatshepsut on the cliff valley at Deir el Bahari (the place takes its name from the Christian monastery called "northern monastery" that once nestled among the ruins). Hatshepsut has already been mentioned as a builder of the temple of Karnak. The temple at Deir el Bahari served not merely for her own funerary cult and that of her father Tuthmosis I and of her husband Tuthmosis II, who died young, just was as well dedicated to the cults of Amon, her divine father, and of other gods. In choosing the site the queen acknowledged the first political rising of Thebes in the Eleventh Dynasty, the proximity of Mentuhotep'southward mortuary temple, and the neighboring sanctuary of the goddess Hathor, guardian of the necropolis. The huge temple complex is the work of the architect Senmut, the queen's favorite, and information technology shows a solution that takes over from the earlier model merely the outward-directed effect of its open up galleries and boosted influences from Twelfth Dynasty architecture of the Upper Egyptian nomarchs' tombs, with their numerous terraces clinging to the cliffs. All of those prototypes are wholly surpassed, and in the grandeur of the site, with its properties of majestic vertical cliffs, is proclaimed a totally new concept of the dignity of divine kingship.

The long sphinx-lined causeway leads from the rim of the cultivated land to the entrance portal, flanked past trees. The court extended, every bit with Mentuhotep's mortuary temple immediately to the south, in its total width of over 300 feet right upwards to the sanctuary, which rises in two behemothic steps and facing colonnades to the cliffs behind. These cliffs, soaring 350 almost vertical feet to a pyramidal peak, assumed the part of the missing pyramid. Into the other side of this mass of rock, from a spur of the Valley of the Kings, was tunneled the shaft leading to the tomb bedchamber of the queen, a altitude of several hundred yards.

The broad court was planted with palm copse and grapevines. In front of the chief structure ponds fringed with papyrus were laid out on either side of the eye axis. Fundamental ramps lead to the starting time and second terraces, and the buttressing walls are faced with colonnades of foursquare pillars. Those of the lower colonnade, closing the court on the west, are decorated with the "Horus name" of the queen; this motif is continued on a behemothic calibration along the outside of the niched buttressing wall that supports the second terrace on the due south. The lower pillar terminates at due north and south in huge Osiris statues of the queen. The architectural decoration of the lower-story structures proclaims the majestic name; on the side by side level the holiness of the precinct correspondingly rises, and on the outside faces of the pillars of the second pillar the queen is shown before Amon. The sphere of the gods has begun; the second colonnade ends at the south in the chapel of the goddess Hathor, at the north in that of Anubis, god of the dead.

The Hathor chapel could also be reached by way of a split ramp along the southward buttressing wall. Its facade is formed by a row of square pillars between short terminate walls, identified every bit an independent building past its crowning cornice and rounded corner moldings. Inside, circular columns with Hathor-head capitals divide the foyer of the chapel into several aisles, and through the aisle betwixt the primal row of columns was accessible the holy of holies, carved out of the rock at the end. Fifty-fifty this rock-cut sanctuary of the goddess Hathor is identified as a separate building by the relief ornament on its entrance portal, in this case a tentlike Upper Egyptian shrine. The slender fluted supports with small Hathor-caput capitals and apotropaic horns, which comport a flattened vaulted roof, and the decorative loops of the matting walls of a tent structure, call up a type similar to the dummy buildings in Male monarch Zoser's burial precinct. The Anubis chapel at the north end of the upper colonnade is as well treated as an independent building. On the facade of the anteroom and within, the sixteen-sided fluted columns on low round bases stand out from the foursquare pillars of the main colonnade. In this chapel, too, the holy of holies is carved out of the same cliffs; the walls and vaulted ceiling, equally in all the rock-cut chambers, are faced with stone slabs and richly busy with painted relief sculpture. The vault is painted with gold stars in a night-bluish heaven. See likewise: Egyptian Colour Palette.

The curve of the vaulted ceilings, employed in Egyptian stone architecture since the 5th Dynasty pyramids, was obtained by cutting off the projecting edges of layers of stone, and these ceilings seem to have signified the crossing over from this earth to the next. Brick barrel vaults and domes over small foursquare chambers were already familiar to the builders of the 4th Dynasty, who used them in the annexes to rock mastabas. The segmental arch first appears in stone architecture in the 8th century BCE. But autonomously from its employ in the inner chambers of sanctuaries in the specified Former Kingdom pyramid temples, and in the stone-cut chapels and a few other rare instances, the vault played no function in Egyptian sacred architecture; where information technology was used it could never be discerned from the outward advent of a sacred building.

At the northeast corner of the Anubis chapel the cliff makes a sharp plough forrard and forms the northern boundary of the terrace. Hither too a shallow pillar makes a facing for the cliff wall.

The second ramp leads to the uppermost terrace, the culmination of the sanctuary. A long solemn row of identical Osiris statues of the queen forms the facade fronting the square pillars of the main hall. In the middle of the facade a granite portal leads into a narrow open court that is ringed by deep colonnaded halls. Recent examinations of this structure, which is in an avant-garde state of ruin, indicate that the row of pillars bordering the court was somewhat raised in a higher place the others. Immediately to the north of this courtyard area is a pocket-sized open court where the sunday god was worshipped at a corking open-air altar that faced the ascent lord's day; across from this sun sanctuary, to the south, is a group of vaulted chambers for the funerary cult of the queen and her ancestors. The holy of holies, dedicated to the god Amon, was carved out of the western cliff, exactly on the master centrality of the temple and reached from the cardinal court. Originally in that location were ii chambers, one behind the other, merely under the Ptolemies a third was added for the worship of ii peachy mortals: Imhotep, 1 of King Zoser's greatest architects, inventor of stone architecture and author of a treatise on the planning of temples; and Amenhotep, son of Hapu, the architect of Amehotep III. For their wisdom, these architects were worshipped as gods: Senmut, architect of the terraced temple and favourite of Queen Hatshepsut, was long forgotten.

The terraced temple of Deir el Bahri is a remarkable example of the aesthetic accommodation of a edifice to its natural setting. Compages, however, is always the product of a shaping intelligence and must assert its forms against the cluttered formlessness of nature. Small every bit compared with the towering crags against which it is built, Hatshepsut's temple occupies only the lower zone of the wall of cliffs. Nevertheless the crisp horizontals of its terraces and the strict verticals of its colonnades differentiate it sharply from the rugged terrain, with which it is nonetheless intimately, though not visibly, connected by the sanctuaries hewn out of the living rock. The natural grandeur of the landscape has been incorporated with the temple'southward thematic function equally the eternal seat of the godhead and equally the burial place of the queen deep within the mountain. For building works in Ancient Greece, see: Greek Compages (900-27 BCE).

The Amarna Catamenia

The principle for the planning of the national sanctuary of the universal god Amon-Ra at Karnak, at the commencement of the Eighteenth Dynasty, was based on the worship of the sun god in open courts guarded at front and dorsum by pylons and obelisks, as exemplified by the scant remains of the temple at Heliopolis. This principle tin be recognized in the aboriginal core of the Karnak temple complex, as well as in the afterwards additions on the southward and west. The perpetual renewal of the kingship through the jubilee festival had a close association with the sun god - already confirmed in the Fifth Dynasty sun sanctuary, in the rich relief cycles of a "jubilee chamber" south of the nifty obelisk; and the idea of legitimate dynastic continuity, in the sense of the renewed formulation of kingship, provided the stimulus for continual expansion through developing, enlarging, and improving the efficacy of the national shrine.

Thus, information technology was not in itself surprising that Amenhotep 4, successor of Amenhotep 3, should accept built, still under his original proper noun, two separate temples for Ra-Harakhte, the sun god of Heliopolis, one east of Karnak, the other near Luxor. To estimate from the partially cleared remains at Karnak - those at Luxor have not yet been excavated - these temples, too, appear to have consisted of large courts for the open-air worship of the day star. Amenhotep 4 resided for near five years in the upper-case letter metropolis of Thebes, before his personally propagated theology of the sun every bit "Aten" (the solar disk) took a plough and so one-sided and so hostile to Amon that the king changed his ain proper noun from Amenhotep ("Amon is satisfied") to Akhenaten ("In the service of Aten"). He deserted Thebes, and banned and persecuted the cult of Amon. On virgin land in Middle Egypt, untrammeled by religious traditions of any kind - including any traditions of religious art - he founded his new capital, Akhetaten ("The horizon of Aten"), on the east banking company of the Nile opposite the ancient site of Hermopolis. After a mere twelve years this purple residence and exclusive cult centre of the sole god proclaimed by the male monarch fell into decay, following the collapse of the new belief and the king's death, and shortly information technology was razed with all its buildings and sanctuaries to obliterate all retentivity of the "heretic." Excavations at the site thus reveal little more than the foundations of the palaces, temples, and living quarters, whose original buildings have been to some extent reconstructed with the aid of gimmicky reliefs discovered in the tombs nearby.

Like the visage of the new god, the planning of his temples at Akhetaten tin exist linked with the Heliopolitan model. The mutual theme was an axial succession of pylon-fronted courts, where on innumerable altars in the open air the male monarch and his family offered sacrifices to the lord's day. Statues of the rex placed against pillars, as in the open areas of the temple of Karnak, stood around the courts equally witnesses to his presence and to the perpetual renewal of his claim to kingship. The architects of the Amarna period consistently translated the religious ideas propounded by the king himself into a succession of new types of Egyptian sculpture also equally architectural forms. These include many appurtenances of the temples (whose thematic significance is still not conspicuously understood), the erection of columns in front of pylons to class vestibules flanking the entrances, and especially the temple gates to the sanctuaries. In the theology of the new sun cult, the display of the gloom of the Underworld had no longer a place, and now even shadow was to be shunned. The temple gates had lintels broken back in the middle and cropped on either side, then that the king could laissez passer through in unbroken sunlight. Temple approaches connected to be treated in this style to the very end of Egyptian architecture; they fabricated it possible to carry the emblems of the gods in procession into the interior of the temples without lowering them at the entrance.

Afterward the collapse of Amenhotep Iv s religious reformation, Thebes ceased to be country's political capital; still, it remained the religious centre of the restored cult of Amon and, until the end of the New Kingdom, the burial place of the kings. The royal mortuary temples, the kings' "houses for millions of years," were ranged at the pes of the western hills, just the corking experiment of Hatshepsut's terraced temple was nowhere adopted. Of the mortuary temples of the queen'due south firsthand successors but that of Tuthmosis III has been thoroughly explored; although it is on a more modest scale, the two share certain features, for example, a Hathor chapel on the south side. From Amenhotep III'southward huge mortuary complex, all that remains are the enthroned colossi, lx-v feet high and made of quartzite that the king's architect, Amenhotep, son of Hapu, ordered from the quarries near Heliopolis, some 300 miles north of Thebes. At one time they flanked the monumental archway with its massive pylon towers. The subsequently mortuary temples (insofar as they still stand) - of Sety I in the northern section of the necropolis, of Ramesses II (Ramesseum), and of Ramesses Iii at Medinet Habu - announced to have been planned according to the principle of successive spaces at the temple of Luxor. The temple is usually approached through two sets of pylons, each leading into a broad court. A foyer on the west side of the second court leads to the hypostyle hall, which may exist followed by various smaller pillared halls, and finally to the sanctuary. A separate chapel is reserved for the royal ancestors. The main sanctuary is solely for the cult of Amon and the male monarch. The dominicus god besides has a private chapel within the temple. Along the primary axis the sequence of rooms is fixed; the side rooms and the arrangements at the rear of the temple follow the cult requirements imposed by the royal builder.

In the back expanse of the Ramesseum huge brick-built store-rooms and offices for the administration of the temple have been preserved. Each chamber is covered by a butt vault. After the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, when Thebes was no longer a majestic residence, a small palace was built on the south side of the first court of the ruler's mortuary temple for his occasional visits at the time of the great festivals. See also: Mesopotamian Art (c.4500-539 BCE).

Every bit cult places for the king and the gods, the mortuary temples were enclosed by high walls similar the sanctuaries of the gods, with pylons forming the monumental forepart entrance. Ramesses 3, developing the idea of the temple as a "fortress of the god" but certainly also mindful of the internal political difficulties of the Twentieth Dynasty, enclosed his funerary temple within double battlemented walls with massive tower-like fortress gates on eastward and west. In forepart of the e gate was a landing place for a canal leading from the Nile. Despite its fortified attribute, emphasized by the triumphal reliefs decorating the exterior, the upper chambers of the towers served every bit a "pleasure pavilion" for the king and his daughters, who are represented on the walls in reliefs of intimate scenes.

For a comparison with contemporary funerary architecture from northern Europe, meet: Newgrange Megalithic Tomb (c.3000 BCE) and its sister site Knowth Megalithic Tomb (c.2500 BCE).

The Temple and Cenotaph of Sety I at Abydos

Egyptian architecture was chiefly preoccupied with the expression of eternal verities in textile course, and the unusual temple of Sety I at Abydos illustrates this business concern impressively. Abydos, the Upper Egyptian burying place of the early kings, had become in the Sometime Kingdom the dwelling and sanctuary of the god Osiris. As vegetation god and divine ruler of the mythical past, Osiris was closely associated with the question of legitimate succession. In death the rex suffered the fate of the god, to be summoned like him to dominion over the world of the expressionless; the rex's son and heir, identified with Osiris' son Horus, was the earthly ruler. Osiris, who came originally from the Delta (Busiris), had since the Former Kingdom taken over the seat of the god of the dead and the cult identify of the "Foremost of the Westerners." His burial place was believed to have been found at Abydos in what was, in fact, the tomb of a Start Dynasty king, and his death and return to life were dramatically celebrated in mystery plays enacted along the path that stretched from the city temple to the ancient royal necropolis. Abydos became a centre of pilgrimage; kings and private individuals built cenotaphs along the processional route of the mystery plays to ensure themselves a share in the blessings of this holy identify.

Like all the kings of the New Kingdom, Sety I had his burying place at Thebes, in the Valley of the Kings, although for strategic reasons he had established his residence at Kantir in the eastern Delta. His mortuary temple, in part well preserved, is the northernmost of those on the Theban w banking company. In the Theban mortuary temples the worship of Amon-Ra as the universal god, and the dogma of his having fathered the king, had driven the older god Osiris into the groundwork. The Nineteenth Dynasty get-go brought back shrines dedicated to the god of the dead, of vegetation, and of the rulers.

Thus Sety I returned to before beliefs when at Abydos he congenital an important westward-oriented temple with two pylons, 2 courts, and an interior laid out co-ordinate to the Theban plan. The aisles through a rising sequence of pillared and columned halls lead to seven chapels; the central i, dedicated to the national god Amon-Ra, is flanked by those of Ra-Harakhte and Osiris. The south wing contains the chapels of the male monarch and the Memphite god Ptah, the n those of Isis and Horus, married woman and son of Osiris. These elongated chapels, except for that of Osiris, had vaulted ceilings. A faux door was represented in the westward-facing rear walls; false doors signified that backside them lay something involved in the cult. Only the Osiris chapel has a real door. This leads to chambers, dedicated to the cult of the god and his family, that course a narrow transept at the back of the seven chapels.

Relief sculpture on the temple walls depicts the shrine, barge, and cult images, and the rites performed by the king; they are invaluable for recreating the former appearance of the temple and determining the functions of its various parts. The unusual annex on the south side of the main edifice independent chapels for other gods and the shrine of Sety's ancestors, who are listed by name, from Menes (Narmer), the founder of the kingdom, to the builder of the temple himself.

The cairn of Sety I lies just to the southwest on the axis of the principal temple; information technology is important for the architectural history of this complex. A structure sunk deep in the footing, its roof lay beneath the floor level of the main temple and its core was built entirely of massive granite blocks. Originally it was an isolated building; there is a separate access at the northeast terminate which, however, is interrupted by a deep shaft. The core of this cenotaph forms a rectangular chamber with a platform occupying the middle, surrounded by a moat that was filled with water by the annual Nile floods. On the short sides there are steps leading downwardly to the level reached by the h2o.

In the heart of the "island" two recesses for the sarcophagus and the canopic shrine are still visible. Two rows of stout granite pillars on the long sides support giant longitudinal architraves on which rested the ceiling blocks of the roof; these were probably corbeled toward the centre, forming a barrel vault higher up the centre of the platform. The walls surrounding this entire space contain niches whose significance is still uncertain. The use of undecorated massive granite blocks recalls the architecture of the 4th Dynasty mortuary temples at Giza.

The location and organization of this edifice leave no doubt that it was a cenotaph of the builder at the identify nigh sacred to Osiris. The inner "island" symbolizes the "primeval hill" emerging from the waters of anarchy to indicate the commencement of self-perpetuating creation. Simultaneously the island tomb equates the king with the god Osiris; according to aboriginal conventionalities Osiris lay buried on an isle which, on the one paw, represented the "pure" and "unapproachable," and on the other, symbolically linked his death and resurrection with the cyclical ascent and fall of the Nile. Later representations prove a sacred grove planted over Sety's subterranean edifice and then that its shadow would envelop the soul of the dead rex while its plants simultaneously honored Osiris as the creator of vegetation.

See too: Greek fine art, a culture strongly influenced by Egyptian architecture and rock masonry and Roman Compages (400 BCE - 400 CE).

REFERENCES
We gratefully acknowledge the use of fabric from the important piece of work Ancient Compages (kickoff published 1972 by Electra, Milan): a fascinating study of building pattern in Ancient Egypt, not least due to its sensational photographs of the interior chambers and precinct hypostyles of famous Egyptian temples. Nosotros recommend this work to any pupil of the period.

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Source: http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/architecture/egyptian-new-kingdom.htm

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