Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/513

 The Temple under the New Empire. 417 the battles and triumphs of Rameses, and the king seated upon the laps of goddesses, who act as the tenderest of nurses. Besides the halls which form the main body of the temple, the plan shows eight lateral chambers, some perpendicular to the major axis of the building, others falling upon it obliquely. Several of these do not seem to have been finished. There are indi- cations that they were utilized as depositories for the objects worshipped in the temple. We have now briefly noticed the principal rock-cut temples in Egypt and Nubia. Neither in plan nor in decoration do they materially differ from the temples of wrought masonry. The elements of the building are the same, and they are arranged in the same order — an avenue of sphinxes when there is room for it, colossi before the entrance, a colonnaded court, a hypostyle hall Fig. 249. — Longitudinal section of the Great Temple ; from Iloreau. acting as a pronaos, a naos with its secos, or sanctuary ; but some- times one, sometimes many of these divisions are excavated in the living rock. Sometimes only the sanctuary is subterranean, some- times the hypostyle hall is included, and at Ipsamboul the whole temple is in the mountain, from the secos to those colossal statues which generally form the preface to the pylon of the constructed temple. Except in the case of the peristylar court, the interior of the rock-cut temple did not differ so much in appearance from that of the constructed edifice as might at first be imagined. We have already explained how scantily lighted was the interior of the Egyptian temple ; its innermost chambers were plunged in almost complete darkness, so that the absolute night which was involved in their being excavated in the heart of a mountain was no very VOL. L II