History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2 by John Romer

Author:John Romer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-12-18T16:00:00+00:00

The century-long enlargement of an archaic rock shrine on Elephantine Island at Aswan, first under the three Intefs, then into the extended architecture of the temple of Mentuhotep II, which was built above the rocks and covered the earlier shrines. In its later phases, the mud brick of the central shrine was clad in stone but varied little in its size, being slightly less than six feet wide.

More of the Intefs’ distinctive sandstone blocks have been found at Hierakonpolis, that huge archaic site, and also at the ancient settlements of Medamud and Tod on either side of Thebes. And at Armant, on the west bank of the river close to Tod, an old provincial temple of the times of the Memphite kings, the house of a local god, one Montu, from whom the Montuhoteps had derived their royal name, had been renewed and decorated with reliefs of their royal ancestors.

Similarly, at the ancient sites of Gebelein and Dendera the masons of Montuhotep II erected some splendid freestanding shrines, which, though they were dismantled and re-used in later times, have been reconstructed on paper from their remaining fragments. At Abydos, also, the Intefs and the Montuhoteps set stone shrines and gateways within the compound of the mud-brick temple of the local god Khentyamentiu, a programme of working that the courts of later kings consciously adopted and enlarged, as the fragments of a great granite offering altar sculpted by the craftsmen of Senwosret I and dedicated to his predecessor, Montuhotep III, attests. In those same times, the great desert plain behind the ancient Abydos temple became a burying ground and, perhaps, a place of pilgrimage, where an annual regatta in the manner of Ankhtifi’s living festival at Hefat was followed by a procession of the living and the dead together, out across the low dunes of the windy desert to the subterranean graves of the archaic kings.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.