Manual of Egyptian Archaeology and Guide to the Study of Antiquities in Egypt eBook

Gaston Maspero
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 305 pages of information about Manual of Egyptian Archaeology and Guide to the Study of Antiquities in Egypt.

Manual of Egyptian Archaeology and Guide to the Study of Antiquities in Egypt eBook

Gaston Maspero
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 305 pages of information about Manual of Egyptian Archaeology and Guide to the Study of Antiquities in Egypt.

Thus designed, the building sufficed for all the needs of worship.  If enlargement was needed, the sanctuary and surrounding chambers were generally left untouched, and only the ceremonial parts of the building, as the hypostyle halls, the courts, or pylons, were attacked.  The procedure of the Egyptians under these circumstances is best illustrated by the history of the great temple of Karnak.  Founded by Usertesen I., probably on the site of a still earlier temple, it was but a small building, constructed of limestone and sandstone, with granite doorways.  The inside was decorated with sixteen-sided pillars.  The second and third Amenemhats added some work to it, and the princes of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dynasties adorned it with statues and tables of offerings.  It was still unaltered when, in the eighteenth century B.C., Thothmes I., enriched with booty of war, resolved to enlarge it.  In advance of what already stood there, he erected two chambers, preceded by a court and flanked by two isolated chapels.  In advance of these again, he erected three successive pylons, one behind the other.  The whole presented the appearance of a vast rectangle placed crosswise at the end of another rectangle.  Thothmes II. and Hatshepsut[18] covered the walls erected by their father with bas-relief sculptures, but added no more buildings.  Hatshepsut, however, in order to bring in her obelisks between the pylons of Thothmes I., opened a breach in the south wall, and overthrew sixteen of the columns which stood in that spot.  Thothmes III., probably finding certain parts of the structure unworthy of the god, rebuilt the first pylon, and also the double sanctuary, which he renewed in the red granite of Syene.  To the eastward, he rebuilt some old chambers, the most important among them being the processional hall, used for the starting-point and halting-place of ceremonial processions, and these he surrounded with a stone wall.  He also made the lake whereon the sacred boats were launched on festival days; and, with a sharp change of axis, he built two pylons facing towards the south, thus violating the true relative proportion which had till then subsisted between the body and the front of the general mass of the building.  The outer enclosure was now too large for the earlier pylons, and did not properly accord with the later ones.  Amenhotep III. corrected this defect.  He erected a sixth and yet more massive pylon, which was, therefore, better suited for the facade.  As it now stood (fig. 84), the temple surpassed even the boldest architectural enterprises hitherto attempted; but the Pharaohs of the Nineteenth Dynasty succeeded in achieving still more.  They added only a hypostyle hall (fig. 85) and a pylon; but the hypostyle hall measured 170 feet in length by 329 feet in breadth.  Down the centre they carried a main avenue of twelve columns, with lotus-flower capitals, being the loftiest ever erected in the interior of a building; while in the aisles, ranged in seven

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Manual of Egyptian Archaeology and Guide to the Study of Antiquities in Egypt from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.