How to Study Architecture by Charles H. Caffin (free reads .txt) 📕

With the removal of the seat of government from Memphis to Thebes commenced the First Theban Monarchy or Middle Empire, comprising the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth Dynasties. Abydos and Beni Hassan now became the place of tombs.

Two types of tomb distinguish this period. One, frequently found at Abydos, consists of a pyramidal structure with a cubical porch on one side, entered by an arched portal. The latter feature proves that the Egyptians were familiar with the principle of the arch, although they did not employ it in their monumental buildings. It appears later in the elliptical barrel-vaultings which crowned the long tunnel-like cellars that Rameses I (The Great) erected for the storage of grain. The above mentioned tombs were structural, whereas those of the second type were excavated in the vertical rock-wall that forms the west bank of the Nile; their entrance thus being toward the east. At Beni Hassan is a group of thirty-nine such tombs which show a marked progress in architectural design.

The front of each presents a porch, composed of columns supporting a cornice, the latter being surmounted by a row of projections or dentils that resemble the ends of beams. The shafts of the columns are polygonal, with eight, sixteen, or thirty-two faces, and are surmounted by a square abacus. It has been conjectured that these columns may be the prototype of the Doric column and accordingly their type has been designated as proto-Doric. Meanwhile the columns inside the tomb exhibit a stage in the development of the lotus column; the motive of their design having been derived from a post around the top of which had been fastened the decoration of a cluster of lotus buds. The interior walls of these tombs are decorated with pictorial scenes, executed in red, yellow, and blue.

Obelisks.—To the Twelfth Dynasty belongs the earliest Obelisk still in position; that of Usertesen I, in the necropolis of Memphis, its companion having fallen. For these developed forms of the monolithic menhir, regarded by the Egyptians as symbols of royalty and of the Sun-god, Ra, were placed in pairs, usually before the entrance of a temple. Their design was of great refinement, the taper being regulated very carefully in proportion to the width and height. The top was crowned with a small pyramid which in certain instances, at any rate, was capped with metal. The sides of the shaft were given a slight convex curve, or entasis, to offset the effect of concavity which they might have produced if rectilinear, and also to relieve the rigidity of the design. It is one of the instances which prove that the Egyptians understood and practised the principle of asymmetry, or deviation from strictly geometrical formality—a subject we shall study more fully in Hellenic and Gothic architecture.

The two obelisks now known as Cleopatra’s Needles, one of which is on the Thames Embankment, London, the other in Central Park, New York, were removed from Heliopolis to Alexandria by the Romans. They were originally erected by Thothmes III of the Eighteenth Dynasty, whose half-sister, Queen Hatasu, numbered among her achievements the completion and erection of an obelisk, 100 feet high, in the short space of seven months.

From this period of the Middle Empire survive the fragments of three temples. Amid the ruins of Bubastis have been found examples of the type of clustered lotus columns, while portions of polygonal columns, discovered among the ruins of the Great Temple at Karnak, have been identified as belonging to a temple of the Twelfth Dynasty. The evidence which these remains afford of the fact that such columns were employed in actual construction as well as in rock-cut form, has been corroborated by the recent discovery of a sepulchral temple on the south side of the Temple of Deir-el-Bahri—to be mentioned later—of which it is the prototype. For the earlier was reached by steps that led up to a solid mass of masonry, which in the opinion of some authorities was crowned by a pyramid. It was surrounded by a peristyle, composed of an outer range of square piers and an inner one of octagonal columns.

It is surmised, in fact, that during the Middle Empire, which was a period of great development in the arts of peace, many of the architectural problems were worked out in temples, afterwards destroyed, to make way for the superior developments that were achieved under the Second Theban Empire.

No architectural monuments mark the period of Hyksos usurpation. But the expulsion of the invaders and the restoration of the power alike of the monarchy and of the national religion produced an outburst of patriotic ardour that was fostered by rulers of exceptional greatness. The Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties are brilliant with the prowess and architectural creations that are associated with such names as Thothmes, Amenophis, Queen Hatasu, Seti and Rameses.

The Tombs of the New Theban Empire comprised both the structural and the excavated types. The rock-cut royal tombs are distinguished by the extent and complexity of their shafts, passages, and chambers, designed to baffle the efforts of any possible marauder, while notwithstanding the darkness which fills all the spaces, the walls are brilliantly decorated with coloured reliefs for the propitiation of the Ka. In contrast with the interior is the extreme simplicity of the entrance, of which the main features are the majestic colossal seated figures of the Monarch, which take the place of the statue within the tomb. The grandest example is the Temple-Tomb of Rameses II at Abou Simbel.

An exception to this external simplicity is the Temple-Tomb of Queen Hatasu at Deir-el-Bahri, which, however, presents a combination of the structural and excavated types, for projecting from the face of the rock was an extensive portico, from which steps seem to have descended to a terrace bounded by a peristyle and communicating by another flight of steps with the lower ground—an impressive architectural ensemble, designed, apparently, for ritual ceremonies.

The most magnificent examples of the purely structural Tomb are the Ramesseum or Tomb of Rameses II, near Deir-el-Bahri, and that of Rameses III at Medinet Abou. They may have been rivalled by the Amenopheum or Tomb of Amenophis III, of which, however, scarce a trace remains except the colossal seated figures, fifty-six feet high, of the King and his Queen. The former is known as the “Vocal Memnon,” a name given to it by the Greeks, after that of the son of Eos (Dawn), because of the legend, that when the statue was smitten by the rays of the rising sun, it gave forth a sound as of a broken chord.

The Ramesseum is a sepulchral temple and its plan, involving a sanctuary and ritual chambers, a hall of columns entered between pylons, and forecourts, presents the typal form of Temple plan.

Temples.—The New Theban Empire was the great age of Temple Building. It is characteristic of the conservatism of the Egyptians not only that the style of their monumental architecture was evolved from the rude primitive hut-construction but also that it preserved features of the latter, even though the necessity for them no longer existed. And so persistent was the adherence to these features, now transformed into elements of beauty, that they were continued even in the later temples, built during the period of Roman domination.

It has been suggested that the origin of the style can be discovered in the modelled and sculptured reliefs of the house of the deceased, found in the earliest rock-cut tombs. The house represents a developed stage of the still earlier hut, the character of which was determined by the scarcity of wood. Instead, therefore, of employing poles, connected by wattled twigs or reeds and covered with mud, the Egyptians fashioned the alluvial deposit into bricks, dried in the sun, which they laid in horizontal courses, each layer projecting inwards, until the walls met at the top. Gradually this beehive form of construction was modified in the better class of dwellings, by the adoption of a square plan and the use of the trunks of palm trees to form the lintel of the door and to support a flat mud-covered roof. The representations at Gizeh show that bundles of reeds were used to reinforce the angles of the structure and were also laid along the top of the walls, so as to form a rolled border, corresponding to what is later called a torus. This, through the weight of the roof, had a tendency to be forced outward, so that it formed what was practically a concave cornice along the top of the wall. Hence the so-called cavetto cornice which is one of the marked distinctions of the Egyptian monumental style. Moreover, while the sun-dried bricks acquire a hardness and compactness, they are unable to sustain much pressure, so that it was necessary to make the walls thicker at the bottom than at the top. From this resulted the batter of the walls, which is another distinctive characteristic of the Egyptian style. Further, owing to the intense heat, windows were dispensed with and the walls in consequence were unbroken except by the entrance. To this day the houses of the poorer classes are built as of old and present the rudiments out of which was developed the style of the stone-built temples, so vastly impressive in the embodied suggestion of elemental grandeur and eternal durability.

From the outside were visible only the walls and portal of the rectangular temple enclosure. The walls sloped backward, like the glacis of a fortification. A clustered torus moulding, as of reeds bound together at intervals, so as to produce alternate hollows and swells, ran up each of the angles of the masonry and along the top of the walls, where it was surmounted by a cavetto cornice, terminating in a square moulding. A similar finish crowned the entrance door and its flanking pylons. The door, framed at the sides and top with squared blocks of stone, frankly proclaimed the post and beam principle that also governed the interior construction of the temple.

The door was flanked by pylons, each a truncated pyramid with oblong base; the form, in fact, of a hut grandiosely enlarged into a decorative feature of immense impressiveness. Set into its walls were rings to hold flag-staffs, and the surface of the pylon, like that of the walls, was resplendent with coloured reliefs, extolling the prowess of the King who had erected the temple. His statue flanked the doorway, in front of which soared two obelisks, while the roadway that led to the temple was embellished with an avenue of sphinxes. These avenues were of great length, the one from Karnak to Luxor extending a mile and a half.

On the lintel over the door was the winged globe, symbol of the Sun’s flight through the sky to conquer Night. Other symbolic ornaments adorned the jambs and the various cornices, while historic pictures, recording the achievements of the monarch’s rule, covered the surfaces of walls and pylons. All were executed in the same way as the symbolic ornament and the pictures in honour of the deity, which covered the walls, columns, beams, and ceiling of the interior of the temple. The forms were either cut down in very low relief or enclosed by incised lines, the edges of which on the side nearer to the form were slightly rounded, in order to give a sense of modelling. In both cases the designs were filled in with the primary colours, blue, red, and yellow. Thus the decoration, derived from the method of drawing patterns in the mud of a wall while it was still damp, was inset, its higher parts being in the same plane as the wall’s surface—a method distinctively mural which also maintained the avoidance of projections. This avoidance of projecting members, except in the cornice, was a marked characteristic