Posted on by Tales from the Two Lands

Dendera Temple

One of the sites on the standard tourist itinerary is the temple at Dendera – it’s near modern Qena, a bit under 100km north of Luxor on a large bend on the river Nile. When I’ve visited we’ve done it on the way back to our Luxor hotel from Abydos. Dendera isn’t the original Egyptian name of the site, it’s derived from later Greek names (Tantere and Tentyris) – the Egyptians called the town Iunet. It’s positioned near the entrance to the Wadi Hammamat, which was an important route to the Red Sea as well as providing resources itself (including all the siltstone that Predynastic palettes were made from). As a result it was a strategically important place, and was the capital of the sixth Upper Egyptian Nome (nomes were administrative districts). Unsurprisingly, therefore, there are indications that the site was occupied from early on – the necropolis has graves at least as far back as the Early Dynastic Period.

It’s not clear when the temple complex at Dendera was first built, but there is evidence that there was a temple there during the time of Pepi I and that this may’ve been an older temple which was rebuilt during the reign of Khufu. After this there is definitely a chapel dating to the Middle Kingdom (dedicated to Montuhotep II, now in the Cairo Museum). And there is quite a bit of evidence to show that New Kingdom kings built and extended the temples at the site. The surviving temple, the one you’ve been to see if you’ve been to the site, primarily dates to the Ptolemaic Period. One reason archaeological evidence preceding this is slim is that it appears when the current structure was built the site was flattened and it’s built directly on top of the remains from the Old Kingdom. The first surviving structure at the site dates to the reign of Nectanebo I (the founder of the 30th Dynasty in the Late Period, the last native dynasty of Egyptian kings). But most of what you see is Ptolemaic or Roman. The earliest Ptolemaic cartouche in the main temple is that of Ptolemy XII Auletes (Cleopatra VII’s father, really very late, tho see below when I come back to empty cartouches at the site), and Kent Weeks suggests that most of the building work for the Ptolemaic parts of the temples took place in the reign of Cleopatra VII.

The temple was first visited by Europeans quite early in the Western “rediscovery” of Egypt. The first European to write about it was Peter Lucas who visited in 1716 CE. And the site was also one of the places that Napoleon’s great expedition in 1798 visited – they removed the Dendera Zodiac from a roof chapel and sent it to the Louvre (replacing it with a copy that has been painted black to resemble the surroundings).

Like any large Egyptian temple there are several structures on the site which are part of the temple complex as a whole, and the surviving ones are only some of those that once stood there. The primary dedication of the complex is the triad of Horus, Hathor and Ihy. The surviving main temple at the site is the one dedicated to Hathor, but there would once have been two more – the others dedicated to Horus and to Ihy (and this was Ihy’s main cult centre). Dendera is the principle cult centre of Hathor, and has been since at least the Old Kingdom. As well as the temple here there is also a burial ground for cows, the sacred animal of Hathor. The local form of Hathor is closely associated with Nut – emphasising her roles as a sky goddess and a daughter of Re. She is also a goddess with strong links to the west and the dead.

As I said, there are many structures on the site not just the main temple. These include a couple of mammisis, a sanatorium, a temple of Isis and even a Coptic church! The main temple lies on a north-south orientation and most of the other structures are at right angles to this with their entrances to the east. This is actually quite an unusual orientation, and has to do with the direction the Nile is flowing in this part of Egypt. Despite our labelling the axes according to the cardinal directions, from an Ancient Egyptian perspective it was often the case that these were relative to the flow of the Nile rather than the true cardinal directions. So temples were often situated with their main axis at right angles to the Nile, which is notionally an east/west axis (as the Nile flows from south to north). But at Dendera there is a great bend in the Nile, and it’s actually flowing to the east at this point – hence a temple pointing towards the Nile is oriented from north to south in terms of cardinal directions but is still symbolically facing east towards the Nile.

The whole thing is surrounded by a mudbrick enclosure wall, built with a technique called “pan bedding” – this produces a wavy profile to the wall, as there are alternating areas of convex and concave courses of bricks. This does have practical implications (it may improve stability on ground that expanded and contracted as the waters of the Nile rose & fell with the inundation), but in typical Egyptian fashion they may also have had a symbolic meaning. The wavy profile may symbolise the waters of Nun – the boundary wall is thus holding chaos back from the sacred ground of the temple (which is thus the domain of order or ma’at). There are a couple of gateways in the wall, one in the north (the primary gate) and one at the southern end of the east wall. The main gateway is actually rather smaller and less imposing than is the case for other temples. It’s not the typical huge pylon, but instead a structure called a “propylon gateway” and it was built during the reigns of the Roman Emperors Domitian and Trajan. Outside this gate are some other Roman structures – chapels of a type we call kiosks. And within the mudbrick enclosure wall there is also an inner wall – this was built in stone but was never finished.

As well as buildings within the walls there are also a couple of water-related features. Unlike the one at the Precinct of Mut at Karnak this is a typical example – it is rectangular in shape. At the corners were flights of stairs descending into the water, down which the priests would walk to purify themselves. There are also wells on the site, one of which may be a nilometer used to measure the annual inundation.

To the west of the main temple between the gateway and the outer hypostyle hall of the main temple are four buildings. Two of these are mammisis – mammisi is a word that was coined by Jean-François Champollion (as a new word in the Coptic language). It means “birth-place” or “birth-house” and it used for a particular type of building found associated with several Egyptian temples dating from the Late Period through to the Roman Period. The two at Dendera pretty much cover the date range. The older one was built during the reign of Nectanebo I and the other was built by the Emperor Augustus and decorated by Trajan. As is typical they are both small temples placed at right angles to the main temple. The decorations within focus on the marriage (in this case of Hathor) and the birth of Ihy (the child of the triad) and the Pharaoh. The decoration in the Roman mammisi is particularly fine. One of the most famous scenes is of Ihy being formed on the potter’s wheel, and there are also scenes of other deities praising Ihy. The texts include hymns to all three members of the triad. And in keeping with the theme of birth the god Bes (a patron of childbirth) is depicted around the tops of the columns.

The temples were the site of “mystery plays” (so-called by analogy to medieval European mystery plays, I think, rather than being an Egyptian term). The play had 13 acts, with 2 intervals, and re-enacted the birth of Ihy and of the Pharaoh – symbolically linking them together and ensuring the continued existence of the royal line. Although not quite the same idea there are resonances between these plays and the reliefs from the New Kingdom that depict the parentage of the king as being the god Amun impregnating his human mother. Both link the king’s birth explicitly with the gods, even though the link is different in each case.

The other ancient Egyptian building in this group i that’s still on the site is a sanatorium – the chapel dedicated to Montuhotep II that I mentioned above isn’t on the site any more. The sanatorium is where pilgrims to the site would’ve stayed and was also for their healing. It is possible it was a place where they slept in order to receive healing dreams (an “incubation chamber”), but it’s more likely that the primary function was as a centre for cippus healing (where water would be poured over a stela called a cippus depicting Horus and covered in spells, and the now magical water was ingested by the ill person). The presence of a sanatorium at this temple may be because Hathor has healing associations (in one myth she restores the sight of Horus after Seth put his eye out), but they were also more generally attached to temples regardless of dedication from the Late Period onward. Although, having said that – this one is the only one that is known to’ve been built for this purpose, at other sites the evidence is less clear cut.

And finally, nestled between the mammisis, is a Coptic church which was built in the 5th Century CE. This seems a little incongruous but it’s something that often happens – a lot of Ancient Egyptian temples have Coptic churches or monasteries built in or next to the ancient structure. This isn’t restricted to Christian buildings, for instance there’s a mosque inside Luxor Temple. Sacred sites seem to hang on to their sacredness even as the religion around them changes.

Unlike Christian churches, temples in Ancient Egypt were not places where the general public could go inside and worship. And so there had to be more accessible structures for personal petitions to the gods. On the outside of the southern wall of the main temple there is a false door which is shaped like a Hathor sistrum which once had a wooden canopy. This is a place where those who could not enter the temple itself could leave their offerings and make their prayers. Inside the temple, in a chapel that backs onto this false door there is a niche that matches up with the outer structure, which once contained a statue of the goddess.

As a tourist visitor to the temple one is also taken to this wall, but not to leave one’s prayers for Hathor. Instead what we look at is the large relief on the western end of the wall that shows Cleopatra VII (“the” Cleopatra) and her son by Julius Caesar, Caesarion, standing and making offerings to the gods. A part of Cleopatra’s campaign to promote Caesarion as the heir to her throne. Whilst with hindsight we know it was doomed, she must’ve been hoping that with Rome as her ally (and her Roman son lined up to take the throne) there might be a new period of stability for Egypt. The Ptolemaic Period in general, and particularly towards the end of it, was a time of great political instability with multiple civil wars and a high turnover of rulers. You can maybe see signs of that elsewhere in the decoration of Dendera Temple as well – there are reliefs where the cartouches are empty and the name of the king hasn’t been filled in, and some just contain the word per-aa (Pharaoh). One possible explanation is that as the king kept changing the people carving the reliefs didn’t have time (or want to commit) to carve a name in them. But I’ve also heard an alternative explanation that it’s more about symbolising eternal kingship rather than one particular king, and I’m not sure if there’s convincing evidence to determine which is the case.

The rest of the decorative scheme of the outer side of the walls of the main temple focuses on scenes of the king laying out the temple, placing the first stones (symbolically one assumes!) and dedicating the temple to Hathor. There are similar scenes in other more public spaces of the temple, including the outer and inner hypostyle halls (see below) – this tells us something about how the kings (mostly Roman Emperors) who commissioned this decoration wanted to be seen. Not as much emphasis on warmongering as earlier kings (perhaps a little close to the bone in a country they conquered?), and more on building houses for the gods.

Immediately behind the main temple is a structure called the Iseum – it’s a temple dedicated to Isis and build by the Emperor Augustus re-using stones from earlier structures on the site. The axis of this temple is unusual – it’s split with the main part of the temple facing towards the east like all the other subsidiary temples on the site, but then the sanctuary faces north towards the sanctuary of Hathor in the main temple. Once there was a statue of Osiris supported by Isis & Nephthys in the sanctuary.

Temple of Dendera

Entering the temple proper (finally!) the facade that greets you consists of six columns joined by a half-height wall between them and a central doorway that leads into the temple. This part of the temple, and the outer hypostyle hall behind it, was built after Cleopatra’s time – in the 1st Century CE, at the orders of the Emperor Tiberius. There’s a Greek inscription above the door that tells us this, saying that the temple is “for the Emperor Tiberius Caesar, the new Augustus, son of the divine Augustus […]”. The columns in this area are all topped with four heads of Hathor arranged to make a cube. These heads are themselves topped with a naos-shaped sistrum. The heads were pretty much all deliberately damaged in antiquity. Hathoric columns are not unique to this Roman structure at Dendera – there are examples seen from the Middle Kingdom onward at a variety of different sites. This is just the most well known example.

Inside the outer hypostyle hall is a spectacular ceiling – it still retains a lot of its colour, and has recently been cleaned, so it looks pretty impressive. It’s decorated with a chart of the sky, mixing newer ideas about the stars brought in by the Greeks and Romans with traditional Egyptian ideas about the sun’s journey. For instance there are signs of the zodiac that came, ultimately, from the Babylonians mixed in with images of Nut swallowing the sun so that she can give birth to it again which is a very old Egyptian belief. The walls include the decorative motifs I talked about above – the king (or rather, Emperor in this case) laying out, building and dedicating the temple. There are also scenes of the purification of the king.

Moving further into the temple you come to the inner hypostyle hall. This room is called the Hall of Appearances, and is where the statue of the goddess was brought to appear at the beginning of rituals and processions. The hall has 6 columns, and the walls are decorated once again with depictions of the king participating in the building of the temple. There are six small rooms opening off the hall, 3 on the east side and 3 on the west. One of the eastern ones we call a “perfume laboratory” as the reliefs have to do with the making of perfume and show the king offering incense – this also has representations of the god Shezmu, originally the god of wine & oil presses but by the Ptolemaic Period known as the Provider of Perfumes for the gods. In another room on the east the king offers food to the goddess. And on the western side there is a room where the king offers silver, and another where he pours libations of water. The rearmost room on each side is a treasury. An opening to the east allows offerings to be brought in, and to the west another opening leads to a well. The area as a whole appears to be for the preparation of offerings and the storage of items needed for the daily ritual at the temple.

Continuing deeper into the temple you come to a room called the Hall of Offerings, to the sides of this room are the stairs to the roof. This hall was the area where sacrifices were dedicated to the deities of the temple, and the scenes on the walls show the king making these offerings . From each side of this room are stairs leading to the roof. The room after this is called the Hall of the Ennead (the name for “group of nine gods”) which is immediately outside the inner sanctuary – here the statues of other deities assembled before joining processions. Amongst the various deities represented in the temple at Dendera were Shezmu (who I just mentioned), Shepet (a form of Taweret, in the Roman mammisi), the Heliopolitan Bull Mnevis and the lion god Mahes. To the left and right are chambers that sorted the clothing and other accessories of these gods – the western room is a linen chamber, and the eastern room is a treasury. If you go through this treasury you come to a courtyard with a set of stairs at the end leading up to a room called the wabet or “Pure Chapel”. In this room ceremonies of offering to Hathor are performed, and these are shown on the walls of the courtyard (along with scenes of processions of deities from Upper & Lower Egypt).

The sanctuary itself is now empty, but it would once have held a shrine containing the statue of the goddess Hathor and her ceremonial barque in which she would travel during processions. These items are depicted on the decoration of the sanctuary. Surrounding this room were 11 chapels dedicated to the other deities who were associated with Hathor at this site. These included deified forms of two of Hathor’s chief attributes – her sistrum and the menat necklace.

Underneath the main temple and within its walls there are crypts, which were used to store cult objects used in the temple. I remember when I visited the temple I’d assumed that this usually invisible and functional space would also be plain – but that is not the Egyptian way, the walls of the underground one I went into are decorated with reliefs that depict the items that were once stored there. This includes a ba statue of Hathor which was once used in processions, such as one at New Year. In this procession the statue was taken out to visit various parts of the temple, including a chapel for Nut and a chapel on the roof where the ba statue was placed overnight. In the morning with the first sunrise of the New Year the statue was bathed in sunlight, which was seen to infuse it with new life for the new year. The staircases on which the procession travelled were decorated with representations of the procession itself – participated in by gods & kings for eternity. On the western staircase the procession carved into the walls leads up to the roof, and in the eastern one the procession goes down into the temple once more.

This was not the only chapel on the roof of the temple at Dendera – there were also others, including two symbolic mortuary chapels for Osiris. These were mirrored with one suite on the east and one on the west of the roof. The roof of one of these was the famous Zodiac ceiling which is now in the Louvre as I mentioned above. The zodiac design itself is primarily a Babylonian zodiac, and is not the same as earlier Egyptian depictions of the heavens (such as those in tombs in the Valley of the Kings). Having said that, it’s not purely a foreign import, elements of Egyptian ideas are incorporated – just like the outer hypostyle hall ceiling combines both ideas of the heavens. Nonetheless even the idea that the stars can influence human destiny wasn’t part of the Ancient Egyptian mindset until the Ptolemaic Period – presumably imported from the Greek culture of the new rulers – previously unlucky and lucky days were based on mythology and the timing of festivals. The date that this zodiac depicts isn’t clear, as it’s difficult to be sure how to match the Egyptian constellations and planet names to our own. However one suggestion is that it may’ve originally represented the conception date for Caesarion, but was later altered to a significant date in the Emperor Augustus’s life. I don’t think that’s widely accepted, however.

There are other more typically Ancient Egyptian elements to the decorative scheme of these chapels. These include figures of Nut (so a more typically Egyptian sky than the Babylonian zodiac) and scenes depicting elements from the mythology of Osiris. This includes the conception of Horus, with Isis as a falcon hovering over the phallus of the mummified body of her dead brother-husband Osiris in order to receive his seed. An inscription also details the annual ceremonial burial of a corn mummy made of soil and grains of barley mixed together. This would then sprout, symbolising the rebirth of Osiris.

Another chapel is one of the earlier structures of the temple – at the southwestern corner of the roof is a kiosk with 12 Hathor-headed columns surrounding it which once supported a wooden roof. This has cartouches of Ptolemy XII on it. And demonstrating that the roof continued to be important ceremonial space the roof of the outer hypostyle hall (the newest part of the temple proper) was used by pilgrims in antiquity who waited there for signs & miracles from Hathor herself.

And also on the roof are waterspouts. Even though it doesn’t rain often in Ancient Egypt, when it does it can be as substantial rainstorms – so the flat roofs of temples need some sort of drainage. The spouts at Dendera (as at some other temples) have lion heads decorating them. These are thus symbolically protective as well as functional pieces of architecture. And as well as these protective associations they are also harnessed to generate water imbued with magic powers – in a vertical line on the wall directly below the waterspout are written magical texts. In the Egyptian belief system the written word itself had power, and pouring water over words (like with the cippi I mentioned above) would transfer this power into the water.

So here ends our tour of the temple complex at Dendera – it’s a delight to see, as it’s so well preserved. But equally it’s so well preserved because it’s so new, relatively speaking – although a lot is Ptolemaic, it’s late Ptolemaic and a lot is also Roman.

Resources used:

Park, Rosalind. 2015. “Reflections on the Dendara Zodiac: Addressing the What, When and Why.” Spring Lodge Centre, Witham, Essex, December 6.
Shaw, Ian, and Paul T. Nicholson. 2008. The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt. British Museum.
Weeks, Kent R. 2005. The Illustrated Guide to Luxor Tombs, Temples, and Museums.American Univ. in Cairo Press.
Wilkinson, Richard H. 2000. The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt.Thames & Hudson.
———. 2003. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson.

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Medinet Habu

It’s easy to visit Medinet Habu and think of it as just the one temple, the mortuary temple of Ramesses III, standing in proud almost-isolation with only a brief mention of the palace next door and something something harem conspiracy. A bit like a great medieval cathedral, self-contained and singular. But that’s really not true of Medinet Habu (nor necessarily of cathedrals, but that’s a story for someone else’s blog entirely!).

The temple the name Medinet Habu conjures up in the mind isn’t even the earliest remaining temple on the site – that is what is now referred to as the Small Temple, which was founded by Hatshepsut and Thutmose III. And beneath that are the remains of a Middle Kingdom structure. This temple was built to house the primeval mound the creator god Amun-Re Kamutef rose from and returned to to be rejuvenated – referred to as “The Mound of Djeme” or “The Genuine Mound of the West”. Every 10 days a festival procession came to the temple bringing the image of Amun from Luxor Temple to be rejuvenated at the mound, before returning to Luxor. This didn’t stop when Ramesses III built his much bigger temple just next door some 300 years later. It is a measure of its continuing relevance that the Small Temple was still the occasional recipient of royal building works well into the Roman Period. The last structure here is an unfinished court & portico begun by Antoninus Pius in the 2nd Century CE.

It is fair, however, to say that the mortuary temple of Ramesses III dominates the site. For a long time I thought mortuary temples were just sites where the king was worshipped after he died, a bit like the medieval practice of saying masses for the deceased in a chantry chapel. But, as seems to be the theme today, there’s more to them than that somewhat misleading name. The Egyptians called them Temples of Millions of Years and they were not solely concerned with the king (deceased or otherwise) nor were they solely religious in nature. I mustn’t downplay the mortuary function too much, though. The practice of making offerings to the deceased king goes back to at least Early Dynastic times if not before, with kings of the 1st & 2nd Dynasties constructing large enclosures within which their funerary cult was practised. Over time the forms and rituals evolved with changing beliefs, but the basic idea of ensuring a smooth (and permanent) transition into the afterlife for the king by means of a funerary cult remained the same. The decoration scheme of some of the innermost chambers of Ramesses III’s Temple of Millions of Years reflects this. In one set of chambers he is shown partaking in the Osirian afterlife – ploughing and harvesting in the Field of Reeds. In chambers on the other side of the same hall he is shown travelling with Ra in his sacred boat. Both sets of scenes are intended to guarantee the successful rebirth of the king.

Medinet Habu

Other festivals not directly connected with Ramesses III’s afterlife were also celebrated at this temple, during the king’s life and beyond. There’s a calendar of these festivals on the outside of the south wall of the temple which gives details of the necessary offerings, and some of the major ones are shown on the walls of the second courtyard. There are daily offerings to be made, as well as much bigger annual festivals. One of these was the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, where the sacred boats of Amun-Re, Mut and Khonsu came across the Nile from Karnak Temple. Originally they visited the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el Bahri, and then as each new Temple of Millions of Years was built it was added onto the processional route so the festival got longer with each Pharaoh’s reign. There was also a one day annual festival of Min and a several day festival of Sokar, both of which are shown on the walls of the second court of the temple.

The king visited the temple to take part in these ceremonies (the major ones, that is), and so he needed suitable accommodation. To the south side of the temple are the remains of a palace. Or rather remains of two palaces – the original buildings were pulled down and rebuilt during Ramesses III’s reign. The palace was attached to the south of the temple, with access into the first court as well as a window of appearances overlooking this court. From the window Ramesses III could view and participate in festivals, and be seen by his courtiers and priests – it makes me think of the Royal Box in the Royal Albert Hall (and other theatres). As well as providing access to the religious ceremonies the palace was also the seat of royal ceremony. There’s a throne room with a raised dais, where presumably Ramesses III would sit in state. And as almost every book and tour guide is keen to point out, the throne room also has an en-suite loo accessed via a door in one corner.

As well as the ceremonial rooms of the palace there was other accommodation provided for the king and/or his household. The whole of the site is surrounded by a double wall, through which there were two gates. One of these was small and at the back (west) of the site – the servants entrance, for minor officials, temple employees, delivery men and the like. At the front (east) of the site there is a much more impressive structure – modelled on a Near Eastern fortress called a migdol. And within this imposing gatehouse are other rooms for the royal household. Often these are referred to as the harem where the king’s women would stay, and the internal decoration is said to represent the king indulging in pastimes with his concubines. But Betsy M. Bryan (writing in “Valley of the Kings: The Tombs and the Funerary Temples of Thebes West” ed. Kent Weeks) suggests that these might’ve been the more functional accommodation for the king, leisure rooms away from the formality and ceremony of the palace proper. And she then interprets the young women in the reliefs as Ramesses III’s daughters. A reminder that we don’t actually know for sure the purpose of these rooms, and that we are still working our way through the hangover from what 19th Century Europeans thought about “exotic eastern cultures”.

So, a couple of temples, some fortifications and palaces – is that it for Medinet Habu? It’s not even the end of what was built on the site during the time of Ramesses III! As I said there are two enclosure walls around the site – the outermost one is a real fortification, whereas the inner one is more symbolic and intended to protect the temple from the profane outer world. Between these two walls were the houses for the priestly and administrative staff necessary to keep the temple functioning. This is the equivalent of the rather more famous Middle Kingdom town next to the pyramid of Senwosret II at Lahun. And inside the inner enclosure wall around the back and north side of the temple were great storage magazines for grain. These are far far bigger than would be necessary for feeding the residents of the temple and the offerings presented in the temple – if full they would hold 56,972 sacks of grain, which would be enough to feed something on the order of 1,000 families for a whole year. Instead one must remember that grain was wealth in Ancient Egypt, and that people were paid with rations of grain. These magazines were the stored wealth of the king used to fund the wars he showed off about on the temple walls, as well as being a significant part of the local economy.

These administrative functions are probably the reason the site is so well preserved – each Temple of Millions of Years was set up like this, but as each Pharaoh built a new one it replaced his predecessor’s one as the administrative hub. Ramesses III built the last one, and so it continued to be the centre of the local economy. For instance this is where the workers at Deir el Medina get their rations (wages) from not only in the reign of Ramesses III but in those of his successors – and this is why when they go on strike over non-payment of wages it’s Medinet Habu they go to. During the 21st Dynasty they even move into Medinet Habu, safe behind the fortifications in the more unsettled times after the end of the New Kingdom.

And so the site continues to evolve and be built on even after Ramesses III is long gone. The neat rows of houses don’t long out last the New Kingdom, Barry Kemp positions this as a triumph of self-organisation rather than decline, however. The palace gets remodelled for senior priests, and may even have been occupied by the God’s Wife of Amun during the 25th & 26th Dynasties. At this time the role was occupied by a daughter of the king and she exercised his authority in Upper Egypt. Four of these priestess princesses were buried in the forecourt of Medinet Habu, Amenirdis of the 25th Dynasty and three more from the 26th Dynasty.

The town that Ramesses III’s Temple of Millions of Years has evolved into continues to thrive into the Coptic era. There may’ve been a gap in occupation before the Roman Period – although it’s hard to tell if this is a real gap or if the Romans levelled out the site before they built on it and destroyed the traces of the immediately preceding houses. Later the Copts converted part of the mortuary temple in the second court into a church, as the Copts were prone to do. And even into very modern times the site retained some significance in the eyes of the local population – in Kent Weeks’s Illustrated Guide to Luxor he says that until the 1970s local women still came to pray for children or to avoid illness.

Not just a temple for the soul of a dead king, not just a religious centre for the state religion, a place of worship and separation from the world – instead a thriving hub for a widespread community, full of bustling bureaucrats and people living their everyday lives.

Resources used:

“Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilisation” Barry J. Kemp
“The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Egypt” Bill Manley
“The Pharaoh: Life at Court and on Campaign” Garry J. Shaw
“The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt” Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson
“The Illustrated Guide to Luxor: Tombs, Temples and Museums” Kent R. Weeks
“Valley of the Kings: The Tombs and the Funerary Temples of Thebes West” ed Kent R. Weeks
“The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt” Richard H. Wilkinson
“The Egyptian World” ed. Toby Wilkinson

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Building for Eternity

It’s not often you get to stand in a place where something was done first, but that’s exactly what you’re doing if you stand in the Step Pyramid complex at Saqqara. This vast structure, which includes the Step Pyramid itself as well as enclosure walls and dummy building facades, is the first ever monumental dressed stone building in the world. It’s difficult to fully grasp how awe-inspiringly new this would’ve looked to the people of the time. I grew up in Oxford and so went about my early life surrounded by the great stone buildings of the university. There are large stone buildings for the government, large stone buildings for religious structures, large stone buildings for education, large stone buildings everywhere you look. Even the village my husband grew up in which only has a dozen houses is less than 3 miles from a large stone parish church (and closer yet to a manor house). Before the modern age of steel and glass, monumental stone structures were how you demonstrated power and wealth. But everything starts somewhere, and Saqqara is the place where one day nearly 5 thousand years ago somebody looked around and said “you know, if we built it out of stone it would last forever”.

Of course in the way of all things archaeological there are caveats that need to be applied – most importantly that our knowledge of the past is shaped by what has survived, so it’s “the first that we know of”. It is backed up, however, by later Egyptians crediting king Djoser and his chancellor Imhotep with inventing building with dressed stone. It was also not the first time that stone had been used in monumental structures: individual elements in earlier structures like paving slabs and doorjambs had been made from stone. This is however the first completely stone built structure.

A photograph of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara.
The Step Pyramid at Saqqara

Another first is that we have an individual to credit with its design – Imhotep. Again there are caveats – no contemporary sources outright say that the chancellor Imhotep was the architect of the Step Pyramid, but he is both the man with the appropriate titles (job description if you will) in the contemporary sources and the man who is later credited with the achievement. I’ve seen him referred to as “the Leonardo da Vinci of Ancient Egypt”, the polymath of his era – although I think this makes more serious Egyptologists wince! And unlike Imhotep, Leonardo has not been deified or even canonised but it did take Imhotep a couple of thousand years so perhaps there’s time yet for da Vinci.

The Step Pyramid enclosure is the tomb and funerary complex for the King Djoser who reigned in the middle of the 27th Century BCE. Following the much later historian Manetho modern Egyptologists designate him as the first ruler of the 3rd Dynasty (which is the beginning of the Old Kingdom period of Ancient Egyptian history). It’s not clear that Djoser himself would’ve seen his reign as the start of something new – it seems plausible that he was the son of the last king of the 2nd Dynasty so there was continuity of leadership. And despite the new material of his building project many of the design elements look back to earlier architecture. Looking around the enclosure one sees several courts lined with dummy facades of buildings. These solid structures are faced with limestone carved to give the impression of buildings made from wood and rush, the forms of which resemble shrines built by earlier rulers from those materials. Even the Step Pyramid itself started out as a recreation in stone of the mastaba tombs which 1st and 2nd Dynasty kings had been buried in, the final form of 6 steps to make a pyramid appears to have been thought of after construction was underway – perhaps to make it stand out in the increasingly crowded necropolis at Saqqara.

One of the questions that springs to mind as you stand there in the Step Pyramid enclosure is how come, if it was first, it seems so well done? Part of the answer to this is that it wasn’t the first time that the Egyptians had been working with stone. As well as the stone architectural elements I mentioned above there was also a very long tradition in Egypt of working with stone to make sculpture and to make items such as stone vases. So Djoser and Imhotep had a pool of highly skilled craftsmen who could be put to work making stone facades rather than vases – a change of form but using existing technology and skills. And as I also mentioned above, the design itself is a mimicking of existing forms in a new material even down to the details. If you stand in the entrance corridor to the enclosure and look up you can see that the ceiling is made to look like a log ceiling – there are even traces of paint to show how it was once painted to look like wood. In the subterranean corridors many faience tiles were found which had lined the walls. They weren’t just stuck on the wall like a modern tile would be, instead they were strung on cords and hung on the walls to look like the reed mats that hung on contemporary palace walls.

A place of firsts, built to provide Djoser with an appropriate setting for his afterlife and the beginning of an Egyptian tradition of building for eternity and not just for “now”.

Resources Used:

“The Story of Egypt” Joann Fletcher
“The Complete Pyramids” Mark Lehner
“Inside the Step Pyramid” Vincent Oeters (talk given to the Essex Egyptology Group, see my write up on my other blog)
“A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid” John Romer
“The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt” Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson
“The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt” Ian Shaw