mahendra’s egypt
© mahendra myshkin 2024
In March 2024, I went to the Egyptian Red Sea coast near the ancient port Al-Qoseir and I visited the ancient sites around Luxor and in Dendera in the Nile valley. With great fascination I explored the surprisingly well preserved ancient temples, statues, paintings, and tombs.
Over a period of more than 3000 years—from the time of the first pyramids to the Temple of Hathor at Denderah—the soil and the sands of Egypt bore the longest lasting culture ever, which produced an unparalleled succession of achievements in the fields of art, architecture, politics, religion and science.
I realized that many elements of the ancient Egyptian culture had a central function in the development of the human mind. Many ideas, especially about gods and the afterlife which had come from animistic sources were further developed in Egypt and spread from there into Iran, Mesopotamia, Greece, the Roman empire and even to India.
[When we look at the Egyptian animal deities or animal-headed gods,] we are confronted with the remnants of an older, shamanistic past. The Egyptian pantheon, until the Old Kingdom period, represented female deities in human shapes, while the male gods were depicted in four progressively diverse forms as:
(1) zoomorphic, either animals or birds;
(2) zoomorphic, but with parts of the human body;
(3) humans, with animal or bird heads;
(4) fully anthropomorphic.
It can be argued readily that polytheism had its roots in totemism and shamanism. The symbolic contingencies leading to the transition from the totemic-shamanistic to the polytheistic system are attributed to the interplay of newly emerging phenomena; an increased preponderance for conceptual thinking effected a decline in the use of visual imagery in cognitive processes, in turn, leading to intensified reliance on metaphors and analogues in conceptualization. These phenomenological developments threw open the doors for speculative and abstract configurations in symbolic thought. (Anthropologist Michael Ripinsky-Naxon. The Nature of Shamanism : Substance and Function of a Religious Metaphor)
Thus we can observe today the metamorphoses that the ancient metaphors underwent over the centuries.
The Red Sea
The Temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Dayr al-Baḥrī
Built 1470 BCE this mortuary temple is a fine example, how advanced the ancient Egyptian architecture was. The building was designed as Hatshepsut’s mortuary during her lifetime. It was also built as a place of worship of the god Amun.
Hatshepsut, was the female king of Egypt (reigned as coregent c. 1479–73 BCE and in her own right c. 1473–58 BCE) who attained unprecedented power for a woman, adopting the full titles and regalia of a pharaoh. The elder daughter of the 18th-dynasty king Thutmose I and his consort Ahmose was married to her half brother Thutmose II, son of the lady Mutnofret. Since three of Mutnofret’s older sons had died prematurely, Thutmose II inherited his father’s throne about 1492 BCE, with Hatshepsut as his consort. Hatshepsut bore one daughter, Neferure, but no son. When her husband died about 1479 BCE, the throne passed to his son Thutmose III, born to Isis, a lesser harem queen. As Thutmose III was an infant, Hatshepsut acted as regent for the young king.
For the first few years of her stepson’s reign, Hatshepsut was an entirely conventional regent. But, by the end of his seventh regnal year, she had been crowned king and adopted a full royal titulary (the royal protocol adopted by Egyptian sovereigns). Hatshepsut and Thutmose III were now corulers of Egypt, with Hatshepsut very much the dominant king. Hitherto Hatshepsut had been depicted as a typical queen, with a female body and appropriately feminine garments. But now, after a brief period of experimentation that involved combining a female body with kingly (male) regalia, her formal portraits began to show Hatshepsut with a male body, wearing the traditional regalia of kilt, crown or head-cloth, and false beard. To dismiss this as a serious attempt to pass herself off as a man is to misunderstand Egyptian artistic convention, which showed things not as they were but as they should be. In causing herself to be depicted as a traditional king, Hatshepsut ensured that this is what she would become. (Britannica)
The Valley of the Kings
In the mountains near the valley of the Nile close to modern day Luxor hundreds of pharaohs, queens and noblemen have been buried in caves which were dug deep into the rocks. The emperors of the old kingdom in the north had built the famous pyramids for their afterlife, but later pharaohs thought it was wiser to be buried in a remote valley where the graves couldn’t be discovered and plundered easily. Over 80 graves of pharaohs and noblemen have been excavated in the Valley of the Kings, most of them richly decorated. Archeologists are still searching for undiscovered tombs in the area. On some of the images I carefully repaired some of the damage.
Extensive descriptions of the tombs and the artwork is available at the site of the Theban Mapping Project.
The Medinet Habu Temple
One of the most impressive temples in Egypt, Medinet Habu is both a temple complex and a complex of temples, for the great estate encompasses the main temple of Ramesses III and several smaller structures from earlier and later periods. The main temple itself is the best preserved of all the mortuary temples of Thebes.
A drawn reconstruction of the Medinat Habu temple complex (Wilkinson. The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt)
The temple’s outer walls depict historically important battle and victory scenes, showing pharaoh Ramesses III and his army triumphing against the Libyans and Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt during the king’s reign. These themes are continued within the temple’s first court with scenes of soldiers counting hands and phalli of the enemy dead, howing the grisly realities of war. This court was flanked on the northern side by large engaged statues of the divine king as Osiris and, on the south, a columned portico with the ‘window of appearances’ in which the king stood or sat during formal ceremonies and festivities.
The large Osiride statues of the second court were ruthlessly destroyed in the early Christian era by the Copts, who converted the area into a Christian church, though many of the original relief scenes that were painted over at this time have in fact survived in fairly good condition. These scenes depict various rituals connected with the ithyphallic fertility god Min and, on the rear wall of the portico, a procession of the king’s numerous sons and daughters.
The Luxor Temple
The southernmost of the monuments of the Theban east bank, was located in the heart of ancient Thebes (nowadays Luxor) and, like Karnak, was dedicated to the god Amun or Amun-Re. A special manifestation of the god was worshipped here, however. Like the Amun of Karnak he is depicted in two principal forms—as the blue-painted sky god and the blackpainted ithyphallic fertility god—but maintained a kind of separate identity.
Luxor Temple provides a fascinating case study in the growth and expansion of Egyptian temples. While it may have been built on the site of even earlier temple structures, the history of the present structure embraces over 3000 years of growth.
It is known that Hatshepsut built extensively in Luxor Temple, but much of her work was eventually replaced. The core area of Luxor Temple as it stands today was constructed by Amenophis III, the 18th-dynasty’s great ‘sun king’. He constructed and decorated a multi-roomed complex on a raised platform that today is the southernmost part of the temple and later in his reign an open peristyle sun court with a large colonnade.
Work was interrupted, however, during the reign of Amenophis’ son Akhenaten who strove to diminish or destroy the power of Amun’s temples. The colonnade was thus not completed and decorated until the time of Akhenaten’s eventual successor Tutankhamun, who officially restored the worship of Amun in Thebes. Ramesses II and III added a pillared court and the shrines of Amun, Mut and Khonsu.
The continuing importance of Luxor is also seen in the complete renewal of the central barque shrine in the name of Alexander the Great shortly after the Macedonian’s conquest of Egypt. Likewise, the cult of emperor worship was established in the temple, with certain architectural features being added or modified, when Egypt became an imperial province of Rome in the 1st century BCE. (Text adapted from Richard H. Wilkinson. The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt)
The Karnak Temple
The temple of Amun at Karnak is one of the largest religious structures in the world. Its hypostyle hall (an unroofed area made of multiple colossal pillars) and the giant, hieroglyphic-encrusted papyrus columns leading up to the entrance are outstanding, especially as they were built at a time when people in most of the other places of the world didn’t even know how to make little houses.
A model of the Karnak Temple with seven pylons, a roofless hypostyle hall, the water tank and some additional temples.
The Hathor Temple at Dendera
One of the finest examples of ancient Egyptian art is the temple of the Goddess Hathor in Dendera near Luxor with a particularly rich variety of later temple features… Early texts refer to a temple at Dendera which was rebuilt in Old Kingdom times, and several New Kingdom monarchs, including Tuthmosis III, Amenophis III, and Ramesses II and III are known to have embellished the structure. The temple of Hathor which stands at the site today dates to the Graeco-Roman Period, however, and is one of the best-preserved temples of this period in Egypt, surviving despite the destruction of the temples of Hathor’s consort Horus and their child Thy or Harsomptus which originally stood close by.
The artwork on the ceilings and columns is fascinating. Hathor is a multipurpose mother goddess, and her face is shown four times on the top part of each column.
In Roman times the worship of Hathor was continued and emperors like Cleopatra, Nero and Hadrian added some structures to the temple complex. When Christianity became the state religion of the Roman empire, the Christian priests converted the temple into a church. They found it necessary to deface the Hathor images and had hundreds of noses and mouths chiseled off. Fortunately a lot of the artwork remained intact, and luckily the temple escaped destruction by the later Muslim conquerors—so the Hathor Temple remains one of the best-preserved testimonies of the ancient days.
Nowadays, Dendera has developed into a New Age sanctuary where the worship of Hathor and Isis is being revived. However, it is Westerners seeking meaning who make the pilgrimage to the temple. For the local Muslims, the place of worship is actually a place of illicit idolatry, but many modern Egyptians are proud of their cultural heritage today.
