Search Results

Although Karnak was the biggest, dozens and even hundreds of similar?mainly smaller but sometimes very large?temples were built in ancient Egypt. The institution of the temple, in ancient Egypt most often termed ‘abode of the god,’ was not the embodiment of just one idea; it was the place where many beliefs and conceptions came together and became mutually entwined, while its deeper meaning was known only to those with special knowledge?those who had been initiated into the mysteries of the transformations and purposes of the gods. In different places in Egypt the actual worship of gods in the temples was?for the most part?conducted according to the same pattern, and differing only in details. Rituals connected with often overlapping and intersecting myths, religious festivals, hunting magic, agricultural tasks, or the founding of buildings were numerous. The growing number of temples and the practical demands on the king led quite early on to the delegation of the royal cult duties to priests who substituted for the king, having been also initiated into the mysteries of the rituals. So many festivals were celebrated in Egypt over the year. Not all were equally important and not all were celebrated everywhere in the country.

Heliopolis was considered by the historian Herodotus to be the oldest center of learning in Egypt. It is very difficult to reconstruct the history of this ancient city, despite the fact that in size it rivalled Thebes and Memphis and its temples and cults fascinated the learned men of classical antiquity. Schools founded by Plato and Eudoxus flourished here for a long time. The fate of Heliopolis was in many respects even more tragic than that of Memphis, for the City of the Sun was almost completely robbed of its grand monuments in several successive waves of pillage. The locations of all the cult sites in Heliopolis and what remains of them continue to present a great archaeological puzzle, which may never be wholly solved. Although archaeologists have not yet been able to thoroughly investigate the oldest cult site in Heliopolis and form a more precise idea of how the original sun temple might have looked, evidence from elsewhere in Egypt helps to define the possibilities. Heliopolis was probably the oldest religious center of Egypt. According to the Pyramid Texts, it was at Heliopolis that the god-creator Atum emerged from the chaos as a hill or mound and started on his work of creation.

Memphis, that famous metropolis of ancient Egypt, is a city of huge temples, obelisks, and colonnades, of avenues of sphinxes, palaces, and administrative buildings. It is also the city in which luxurious residences of Egyptian magnates and foreign envoys at the court of the pharaohs were built, and a city in which the coronations of the Egyptian kings were once held. At the height of its glory it was home to around a hundred thousand people. Where has it gone? At its foundation the city was given the name of Ineb hejd or ‘White Wall’ because initially it was less a town than a fortress surrounded by a massive wall built either of limestone or of plastered and whitened mud bricks. The fortress was probably encircled by a water channel connected with the Nile. Despite archaeological excavations and surveys of Memphis, archaeological evidence of the White Wall has still to be discovered. Many of the main monuments of the once huge city of Memphis archaeologists have not been able to locate. Where is the oldest Temple of Ptah, one of the most important Egyptian gods? In accordance with the ideas of the ancient Egyptians, there was a cult of the bull Hapi (Apis in Greek) regarded as the earthly embodiment of the ‘life force,’ of the god Ptah. During his lifetime, the sacred bull resided in Memphis and then buried in the Serapeum.

On the west bank of the Nile, about forty kilometres south of Minya, the metropolis of Middle Egypt, lies a site that is rarely visited by tourists but archaeologically very important?Ashmunayn. Its modern Arab name is derived from the Coptic ‘Shmoun,’ which is in turn derived from the Egyptian ‘Khemenu’ (‘City of the Eight’). This unusual name refers to the Eight?that is, four pairs of frog (the male element) and snake (the female element) primordial gods, who were worshiped here from the earliest times. In Greek the city's name was Hermopolis. Hermolopis was linked to the Nile by an artificial canal. Another canal connected the city with its cemetery. In the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods there was a large paved area where festivals and processions were held in the center of the city. The shrine of the primordial gods the Ogdoad was probably located in the southeast part of the sacred district. The title of the high priest of Hermopolis indirectly shows that the god Thoth was venerated in Hermopolis alongside the Ogdoad from as early as the Old Kingdom. Thoth was a very important god with a wide range of powers.

In Middle Egypt, the ancient site of Amarna was the capital city of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, the devotee of a single sun-god, and his chief consort, Nefertiti. Occupied for just sixteen or so years in the fourteenth century BC, the city lay largely abandoned and forgotten until excavations over the last hundred years brought it back into prominence. Discovered at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Amarna did not initially excite much interest among archaeologists. In the last 1920s and early 1930s the key figure in excavations in Amarna was the great and highly eccentric Englishman John Devitt Stringfellow Pendlebury. The Amarna era ended as suddenly as it had begun, and under very obscure circumstances.