Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/423

 The Temple under the Middle Empire. 333 only one is in a good state of preservation. Wlien we recall the texts which we have quoted, when we compare the temple of the Sphinx with tombs like the pyramids or the sepulchre of Ti, we must acknowledge that the energies of the Egyptians during the early dynasties were mainly directed to their resting-places after death, that the worship of the dead held the largest place in their religious life. Their temples were small in size, insignificant in height, and severe in their absence of ornament. They give slight earnest of the magnificent edifices which the country was to rear some ten or fifteen centuries afterwards at the command of the great Theban pharaohs. The monolithic pillars, however, of which we have spoken, give some slight foretaste of a feature which was to reach unrivalled majesty in the hypostyle halls of Karnak and Luxor. § 2. The Temple tmder the Middle Einph'e. No temples constructed under the first Theban empire are now in existence ; and yet the Egyptians had then generally adopted the worship of all those deities whose characters and attributes have been made known to us through the monuments of the New- Empire. The Theban triad received the homage of the Ousourtesens and Amenemhats ; its principal personage, Amen, or Ammon, identified with Ra, already showed a tendency to become a supreme deity for the nation as a whole. To him successful sovereigns attributed their successes both of peace and war. As the god of the king and of the capital. Amen acquired an uncontested superiority throughout the whole valley of the Nile, which affected, however, neither the worship of the local deities, nor the homage paid by every man and woman in Egypt to Osiris, the god to whom they looked for happiness beyond the grave. Art, at this period, had advanced so far that there was no longer any difficulty in marking the distinction between the temple and the tomb. In the sepulchres at Beni- Hassan which date from the twelfth dynasty, we find two very different kinds of support, and there was nothing to prevent the forms employed in these rock-cut chambers from being made use of in constructed buildings, seeing especially how skilful the Egyptians had shown themselves to be