Egyptian architecture

During the Old Kingdom, the period when Egypt was ruled by the Kings of the 3^d to 6^th Dynasties, artists and craftsmen were drawn to the court to work under the patronage of the king and his great nobles. Techniques of working in stone, wood, and metal made tremendous progress, demonstrated by surviving large scale monuments, such as the pyramids of the 4^th Dynasty and the sun temples built by the 5^th Dynasty kings. The pyramids of the 4^th Dynasty are the most spectacular of all the funerary works and the only remained wonder of the world. These monuments celebrated the divinity of the kings of Egypt, linking the people with the great gods of earth and sky.

This was a time when trade and the economy flourished. Craftsmen worked in the finest materials which were often brought great distances, and were able to experiment with recalcitrant stones as well as new techniques of metalworking. This enabled them by the 6^th Dynasty to produce large metal figures. The earliest that survive are the copper statues of Pepi I and his son, found at Hierakonpolis. Made c. 2330 BC they are badly corroded but still impressive in their stiffly formal poses. The eyes are inlaid, and the crown and the kilt of the king, now missing, were probably originally made of gilded plaster.

During the prosperous period known as the middle kingdom fortresses were built to defend the southern and eastern borders, and new areas of land were brought under cultivation. Craftsmen achieved new levels of excellence. Very little architecture remains – many royal monuments were robbed for their stone in later periods - but what has survived shows great simplicity and refinement. The example is the pyramid of Sesostris I at Lisht.

The establishment of the 18^th Dynasty marked the beginning of the New Kingdom and a new blossoming of the arts and crafts of ancient Egypt. Craftsmen benefited from wider contact with other civilizations, such as those of Crete and Mesopotamia, and were also to work with imported raw materials.

The kings gave encouragements to artists and craftsmen by ordering great temples and palaces to be built throughout Egypt. The temple walls were covered with reliefs celebrating the achievements of the kings and the powers of the gods. The courtyards and inner sanctuaries were enriched with statuary. The most notable monuments are the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatsheput at Deir-el-Bahari (c. 1480 BC; Fig. 2.1), which had a series of pillared colonnades on three sides of three superimposed terraces linked by gigantic ramps and magnificent Great Temple at Karnak to Amon as the universal of Egypt.

Ancient Egyptian Architecture was revived under the Ptolemies, the successor of Alexander the Great, who built numerous temples of traditional style of which the finest examples that survive are the Temple of Horus at Etfu and the temples on the islands of Philae (c. 323 – 30 BC).

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