Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/531

 General Characteristics of the Egyptian Temple. 435 mosque. It was not a place for the meeting of the faithful, for the recital of common prayers ; no public ritual was celebrated within it ; no one was admitted to it except the priests and the king. The temple was a kind of royal oratory, a monument reared by the king in token of his own piety, and in order to purchase the favour of the gods. " The elaborate decoration with which all the walls of the temples are covered is only to be explained by admitting this point of departure. The essential element of this decoration is the picture ; many pictures are arranged symmetrically side by side, and tiers above tiers of pictures cover the walls from floor to ceiling. This arrangement never varies, and the same may be said of the general significance of the pictures : on the one hand, the king, on the other, one or more deities ; these are the subjects of all the compositions. The king makes an offering (meats, fruits, flowers, emblems) to the god and asks for some favour at his hands ; in his answer the deity grants the favour demanded. The whole decoration of a temple consisted therefore in an act of adoration on the part of the monarch repeated in various forms. The temple was therefore the exclusive personal monument of the prince by whom it was founded and decorated. This fact explains the presence of those precious representations of battles which adorn the external w^alls of certain temples.^ The king ascribed all his successes in the field to the immediate protection of the gods. In combating the enemies of Egypt, in bringing them by thousands to the capital, in employing them upon the construction of their temples, he was performing an act as agreeable to the gods as when offering incense, flowers, and the limbs of the animals sacrificed. By such deeds he proved his piety and merited the continuation of those favours for which the erection of a temple was meant to be an acknowledgment." The piety and gratitude of the monarch also found expression in the splendour of the great festivals of which the temple was the scene several times in the course of the year. " The ceremonies consisted for the most part of great processions, issuing from the sanctuary to be marshalled in the hypostyle hall, and afterwards traversing the open courts which lay between the buildings of ^ The canal figured in ficnt of the Charict of Rameses, in Fig. 254 was, according to Ebers, the oldest of the Suez Canals, the one dug by Seti I. This canal was defended by fortifications, and is called in inscriptions the Cutting (JO Egypte^ etc.).