Two materials, two worlds
Egyptian builders worked with two materials, and each had a meaning. Mudbrick, made from Nile mud, was used for houses, palaces, storerooms and city walls, buildings for this life. Stone was for the gods and the dead, for buildings meant to last forever: temples, tombs and the pyramids. That is why so much of what survives is sacred. The palaces have melted into the fields.
The turn to stone came suddenly. Around 2650 BCE, at Saqqara, the architect Imhotep built for King Djoser a funerary complex entirely in limestone: a step pyramid inside a great enclosure, with courts and chapels. It is the oldest large monument in cut stone in the world. Imhotep copied in stone the forms of earlier buildings in wood, reeds and mud: columns imitate bundles of reeds, ceilings imitate palm logs, doors are carved permanently half-open. Two thousand years later the Egyptians still remembered him, and worshipped him as a god of wisdom and medicine.
How a temple works
An Egyptian temple was the house of a god, whose statue lived in the sanctuary and was washed, dressed and fed every day by priests. The plan led from the outside world to that statue in a series of steps, each darker, lower and more restricted than the last.
- The pylon (from the Greek pylon, gateway): two sloping towers flanking the entrance, shaped like the hieroglyph for “horizon”.
- The open court, surrounded by columns, where people could gather on festival days.
- The hypostyle hall (from the Greek hypo, under, and stylos, column): a roofed hall crowded with columns, lit only by small high windows.
- The sanctuary, small and dark, with the shrine of the god, open only to the king and the high priests.
Floors rose and ceilings dropped as you went in. The temple was a model of the world at its creation: the columns were plants growing out of the primeval marsh, the ceilings were painted as the night sky, the sanctuary was the mound where life began. The temple of Edfu still shows the full sequence almost intact. The largest of all is the temple of Amun at Karnak, whose hypostyle hall has 134 columns; the twelve in the central aisle are about 21 metres high.
Columns before the Greeks
At Beni Hasan, in Middle Egypt, rock-cut tombs of provincial governors of the Middle Kingdom (around 1900 BCE) have porches with plain, fluted columns topped by a square slab. Nineteenth-century travellers were struck by how much they looked like Greek Doric columns, made some 1,300 years later, and called them “proto-Doric”. Did the Greeks copy them? Probably not directly. The Doric order grew out of Greek wooden temples, and most scholars today see the Beni Hasan columns as a distant relative rather than a parent. Columns with sixteen sides also appear in Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahari.
What the Greeks saw
In the seventh century BCE the pharaohs opened Egypt to Greek merchants and soldiers. Around 620 BCE Greeks settled at Naukratis, a trading town in the western Delta, and saw for the first time temples, statues and obelisks of enormous size in hard stone. The effect shows first in sculpture: the earliest Greek kouroi, standing statues of young men with the left foot forward and fists clenched, follow Egyptian models closely. In architecture the lesson was mainly technical. Within a few generations the Greeks were building their first large stone temples, quarrying and lifting heavy blocks with a confidence they had not had before. Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BCE, wrote that it had more wonders than any other country.
Egypt in Rome
After Augustus conquered Egypt in 30 BCE, Egyptian forms became fashionable in Rome. Emperors shipped obelisks across the Mediterranean on specially built ships and set them up in circuses and sanctuaries. Rome today has thirteen ancient obelisks, more than any other city, and eight of them are Egyptian. The tallest, at St John Lateran, was cut for Thutmose III at Karnak around 1450 BCE and brought to Rome in 357 CE: about 32 metres of red granite. Another, now in St Peter’s Square, was moved there in 1586 by the architect Domenico Fontana for Pope Sixtus V, an operation that took thirteen months of preparation.
Romans also built in the Egyptian style. Around 12 BCE the magistrate Gaius Cestius was buried in a pointed marble pyramid about 37 metres high, still standing by the Porta San Paolo. The cult of Isis spread across the empire, and her temples, like the one at Pompeii, mixed Roman buildings with Egyptian statues, sphinxes and inscriptions. Egyptian architecture, by then, was a symbol of age, wisdom and mystery.
Where to see it
In Egypt, the complex of Djoser at Saqqara and the temples of Karnak and Luxor show the beginning and the height of Egyptian architecture; the tombs of Beni Hasan are near Minya. In Rome you can see the obelisks of St John Lateran, Piazza del Popolo and St Peter’s Square in a single walk, and the Pyramid of Cestius by the Protestant Cemetery. The temple of Isis is one of the best-preserved buildings at Pompeii.
Sources
- D. Arnold, The Encyclopedia of Ancient Egyptian Architecture (2003).
- UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, “Mud-Brick Architecture” (2011) and “Temple Architecture and Decorative Systems”.
- British Museum, “Naukratis: Greeks in Egypt”.
- J. Paul Getty Museum, “Egypt and the Classical World” (2022).
- B. Curran et al., Obelisk: A History (2009).
- Parco Archeologico di Pompei, “Tempio di Iside”.
