[Illustration:  Fig. 88.—­Plan of Speos, Kalaat Addah, Nubia.]

[Illustration:  Fig, 89.—­Plan of Speos, Gebel Silsileh.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 90.—­Plan of the Great Speos, Abu Simbel.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 91.—­Speos of Hathor, Abu Simbel.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 92.—­Plan of the upper portion of the temple of Deir el Bahari, showing the state of the excavations, the Speos of Hathor (A); the rock-cut sanctuary (B); the rock-cut funerary chapel of Thothmes I. (C); the Speos of Anubis (D); and the excavated niches of the northern colonnade.  Reproduced from Plate III. of the Archaeological Report of the Egypt Exploration Fund for 1893-4.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 93.—­Plan of temple of Seti I., at Abydos.]

The idea of the rock-cut temple must have occurred to the Egyptians at an early period.  They carved the houses of the dead in the mountain side; why, therefore, should they not in like manner carve the houses of the gods?  Yet the earliest known Speos-sanctuaries date from only the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty.  They are generally found in those parts of the valley where the cultivable land is narrowest, as near Beni Hasan, at Gebel Silsileh, and in Nubia.  All varieties of the constructed temple are found in the rock-cut temple, though more or less modified by local conditions.  The Speos Artemidos is approached by a pillared portico, but contains only a square chamber with a niche at the end for the statue of the goddess Pakhet.  At Kalaat Addah (fig. 88), a flat narrow facade (A) faces the river, and is reached by a steep flight of steps; next comes a hypostyle hall (B), flanked by two dark chambers (C), and lastly a sanctuary in two storeys, one above the other (D).  The chapel of Horemheb (fig. 89), at Gebel Silsileh, is formed of a gallery parallel to the river (A), supported by four massive pillars left in the rock.  From this gallery, the sanctuary chamber opens at right angles.  At Abu Simbel, the two temples are excavated entirely in the cliff.  The front of the great speos (fig. 90) imitates a sloping pylon crowned with a cornice, and guarded as usual by four seated colossi flanked by smaller statues.  These colossi are sixty-six feet high.  The doorway passed, there comes a first hall measuring 130 feet in length by 60 feet in width, which corresponds to the usual peristyle.  Eight Osiride statues backed by as many square pillars, seem to bear the mountain on their heads.  Beyond this come (1) a hypostyle hall; (2) a transverse gallery, isolating the sanctuary, and (3) the sanctuary itself, between two smaller chambers.  Eight crypts, sunk at a somewhat lower level than that of the main excavation, are unequally distributed to right and left of the peristyle.  The whole excavation measures 180 feet from the doorway to the end of the sanctuary.  The small speos of Hathor, about a hundred paces to the northward, is of smaller dimensions.  The facade is adorned with six standing colossi, four representing