Inside an Ancient Egyptian Temple | Archaeology, Myth & Architecture

The Hermetic text the Asclepius claims that Egypt is the Temple of the Whole World, and this couldn't be more true in terms of its cities. The city in Egypt was the domain of a specific god, and the very concept of a city was determined by religion. To live in a city, meant to be in proximity to the god who resided there, not only in the cult statues, but in the stories and mythic landscape itself. The Egyptians glorified sedentarism to an unfathomable degree, largely because belonging to a city meant being born under the jurisdiction and provenance of the tutelary god.

The rank of an Egyptian city was proportionate to its holiness, and its sacred rank was determined by its antiquity. For the Egyptians, a city was an entire temple located on the primaeval mound, the home and domain of an autochthonous deity. This meant that every citizen in a way was a priest of their Temple. The temple was the centre of civil municipal administration in Egypt. City dwellers belonged to the temple as lay priests; they were the "hour-priests" who served in the temples in monthly rotation. These citizen hour-priests were under the authority of the full-time priests, who manned the core temple.

The religious notion of the city achieved full architectural form in the Temple. Let’s take a look for a second at a standard Egyptian city. Most cities didn’t have characteristic structures outside of the temple. The majority of the landscape was flat mudbrick houses, with a temple looming over them that could be seen for miles, sticking out of the landscape like the Primaeval Mound. If anything, the temple was not just the centre of the city, but it was what made it urban. By looking at city plans, we can see clear evidence of Theocratic Feudalism, almost reminiscent of European Castles. Imagine, deities living in their Temple Castles, looking out over the owned land around them.

Now imagine, every city does this, we can see what the Asclepius means when it claims Egypt is the temple of the whole world. Every square inch of the country is like a room owned by a god. 

In Egyptian, the language distinguishes two words when referring to “temple”. The first, “Pr” means “house”, and designated the totality of a deity's possessions in the Land, not only the magazines or extra rooms on temples, but also the landed property and the workshops that were the source of the provisions that filled them. According to the Great Papyrus Harris from the Ramisside Period, the Pr of Amun consisted of 590,000 acres and over 86,486 “heads”, meaning people who lived and worked there. 

The Pr is different from the hwt.ntr, which designated the temple proper. 

The official temples were almost always built of stone, to distinguish them in eternity from the Mudbrick houses and buildings around them, at least from the New Kingdom onwards. Just as the citizens were servants of the temple (city), the priests were hmw.ntr, servants of the god. The personnel of a normal temple consisted of about ten to twenty persons who dwelled in houses inside the temple enclosure. There were also the lay priests, the "hour-priests" comprising a group about ten times larger, who served in the temple only periodically and lived outside it.

The Symbolism & Meaning of Temples

By drawing on textual sources and architectural plans, we can understand the symbolism and meaning behind certain temples and the mindset and beliefs that went into constructing them. Let’s begin with Ptolemaic temples, since they have a clearly defined type and plan. From inscriptions we know that these late temples were designed and modelled off the First Temple, designed by the Creator God at the beginning of creation.

Let’s look at the temple of Horus at Edfu.

Two elements clearly stand out in the architecture. The temple is aligned on a north south axis, and at the entrance we have this HUGE pylon sticking out that acts as the gateway. On the other end, we have the holy of holies, which is a freestanding naos. Architecturally, the naos houses the Cult Statue, which is the physical Vessel of the God, brought alive through Theurgic animation. This naos is therefore the centre of the temple. It is surrounded by 5 “layers”, 

1) a corridor

2) a ring of thirteen rooms opening off three sides of this corridor

3) another corridor area with connecting doors and stairs leading to the roof

4) an outer corridor 

5) the exterior walls of the temple.

Moving down the temple, we again have 5 rooms and connecting doorways that create a kind of processual way. 

1. An anteroom extending to the ends of the corridor surrounding the sanctuary, called the "hall of the Ennead" (because the deities who dwelled in the ring of chapels opening off this corridor were gathered there before the chief god)
2. The offering room
3. The inner hypostyle hall
4. The Great Hypostyle Hall, called the "Hall of Appearance
5. The colonnaded court. Looking in from the outside, this sequence of rooms presents the appearance of a series of nested passage ways, each surrounding the ones inside.

Now, there is an architectural feature here that facilitates a change of consciousness as you move through. From the exterior to the interior, the rooms become ever smaller, while the floor becomes higher and the ceiling lower. Corresponding to the diminution of space is an increasing darkness. The courtyard, which is flooded with light, is followed by the crepuscular Hall of Appearance. The inner rooms lie in deep darkness, with only isolated slits in the roof and the walls casting mysterious, spotlight-like beams of light.

In later periods, these layers were intended to protect the God inside from the Profane world outside, and had the effect of screening it off and creating a distinct boundary between mundane and sacred worlds.

Here’s the interesting part though, it doesn’t seem like these 5 corridor routes were ever intended for humans. No priest ever went through this succession of doorways from the outside to the inside except when carrying the divine image. Ordinarily, the outer doors remained shut, while the priests on duty, after purifying themselves in the sacred lake, entered through the side door. But when the temple doors were opened on festival days, it was the god who made his way through them as he left the temple in procession. The succession of rooms, halls, and courts gave architectural form to his route, not that of humans.

Let’s now look at an earlier New Kingdom Temple, the one of Khons at Karnak.

The first thing we see is that the idea of “centering” the deity in the naos is less pronounced. The Holy of holies is surrounded by chapels and secondary rooms, but not layers of corridors. This idea of shutting the deity off and screening it away behind layers of protection is a distinctly late idea in Egyptian theology. The religion of the later periods was dominated by fear of profaning, of not heeding the prescriptions, of polluting the sacred. The rituals of this era—Protection of the House, Protection of the Body, Protection of the Bed, Protection of the Neshmet-barque, or Felling Apophis, Warding Off Evil, Felling Seth and His Following, and so forth—had a pronounced protective and exorcistic character.

The Temple as the Cosmos

Especially in the later periods, there are a lot of writings that talk about the Temple being a representation of the cosmos. The floor of these later temples represented the earth, and the ceiling the sky. Columns took the form of plants rising from the earth, and the walls were decorated with marsh plants or with processions of figures that were personifications of fruitfulness that always faced the inner part of the temple, bearing offerings. 

As the sky, the ceilings were decorated with stars or with astronomical representations. Between the floor and the ceiling, between earth and sky, stretched the decorations on the walls with their endless cult scenes filling this stony cosmos in effigie with action and life. 

There is an interesting mirroring and contradiction here. When seen from the outside, Egyptian Temples were these kind of locked off sanctuaries where a divine presence dwelled, sheltered from the world. However, from the inside, with all of its symbolic associations, the Egyptian temple WAS the world itself. The temple represented the cosmos, and the priests within it were transported back to the Primeval Mound of creation and into Mythic Time. The cult image filled the temple with an emanation of divine presence, while at the same time, the god filled the entire cosmos with the radiance of his manifestation.

The naos in which the cult statue rests is the remotest part of the sky, where the gods and goddesses dwell. The doors of the shrine are the celestial gates through which the sun god passes in the morning. The remainder of the temple is the world that the sun god floods with light when he appears in the east. Here we see something characteristic of Egyptian Temples, No deity was the sole occupant of his or her temple. 

The temple recalled a mythical place, the primeval mound. It stood on the first soil that emerged from the primeval waters, on which the creator god stood to begin his work of creation.

Through a long chain of ongoing renewals, the present temple was the direct descendant of the original sanctuary that the creator god himself had erected on the primeval mound. An origin myth connecting the structure with creation is associated with each of the larger late temples.

Archaeologically this remains true, as temples were often re fashioned and reworked over the years, so much so that there is truth behind the myths of temples being descendants of the Primeval Mound. They were quite literally standing on the same spot of older, more ancient temples that were added to and eventually mythologised.