91-759: Sais ( Ancient Greek : Σάϊς , Coptic : Ⲥⲁⲓ ) was an ancient Egyptian city in the Western Nile Delta on the Canopic branch of the Nile , known by the ancient Egyptians as Sꜣw . It was the provincial capital of Sap-Meh , the fifth nome of Lower Egypt and became the seat of power during the Twenty-fourth Dynasty of Egypt ( c. 732 –720 BC) and the Saite Twenty-sixth Dynasty of Egypt (664–525 BC) during
182-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in
273-568: A step pyramid under which he was buried: the Pyramid of Djoser . For the rest of the Old Kingdom, tomb and temple were joined in elaborate stone pyramid complexes. Near each pyramid complex was a town that supplied its needs, as towns would support temples throughout Egyptian history. Other changes came in the reign of Sneferu who, beginning with his first pyramid at Meidum , built pyramid complexes symmetrically along an east–west axis, with
364-471: A key part of the maintenance of maat , the ideal order of nature and of human society in Egyptian belief. Maintaining maat was the entire purpose of Egyptian religion , and it was the purpose of a temple as well. Because he was credited with divine power himself, the pharaoh , as a sacred king , was regarded as Egypt's representative to the gods and its most important upholder of maat . Thus, it
455-477: A lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and
546-677: A large portion of Egypt's wealth. Anthony Spalinger suggests that, as the influence of temples expanded, religious celebrations that had once been fully public were absorbed into the temples' increasingly important festival rituals. The most important god of the time was Amun , whose main cult center, the Precinct of Amun-Re at Karnak in Thebes , eventually became the largest of all temples, and whose high priests may have wielded considerable political influence. Many temples were now built entirely of stone, and their general plan became fixed, with
637-419: A lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in
728-707: A long tradition of sophisticated Nubian temple building. Amid this turmoil, the fortunes of various temples and clergies shifted and the independence of Amun's priesthood was broken, but the power of the priesthood in general remained. Despite the political upheaval, the Egyptian temple style continued to evolve without absorbing much foreign influence. Whereas earlier temple building mostly focused on male gods, goddesses and child deities grew increasingly prominent. Temples focused more on popular religious activities such as oracles, animal cults , and prayer. New architectural forms continued to develop, such as covered kiosks in front of gateways, more elaborate column styles, and
819-509: A medical school associated with it, as did many ancient Egyptian temples . The medical school at Sais had many female students and apparently women faculty as well, mainly in gynecology and obstetrics . An inscription from the period survives at Sais, and reads, "I have come from the school of medicine at Heliopolis, and have studied at the woman's school at Sais, where the divine mothers have taught me how to cure diseases". In Plato 's Timaeus and Critias (around 395 BC, 200 years after
910-577: A pillared hall frequently appears in Middle Kingdom temples, and sometimes these two elements are fronted by open courts, foreshadowing the standard temple layout used in later times. With greater power and wealth during the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC), Egypt devoted still more resources to its temples, which grew larger and more elaborate. Higher-ranking priestly roles became permanent rather than rotating positions, and they controlled
1001-550: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment
SECTION 10
#17327755402841092-526: A principal deity, and most were dedicated to other gods as well. Not all deities had temples dedicated to them. Many demons and household gods were involved primarily in magical or private religious practice, with little or no presence in temple ceremonies. There were also other gods who had significant roles in the cosmos but, for unclear reasons, were not honored with temples of their own. Of those gods who did have temples of their own, many were venerated mainly in certain areas of Egypt, though many gods with
1183-415: A reform on land possession and taxation. The Egyptian temples, as important landowners, were made to either pay rent to the government for the land they owned or surrender that land to the state in exchange for a government stipend. However, the temples and priests continued to enjoy privileges under Roman rule, e.g., exemption from taxes and compulsory services. On the official level, the leading officials of
1274-608: A separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek
1365-630: A standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c. 300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as
1456-467: A strong local tie were also important across the nation. Even deities whose worship spanned the country were strongly associated with the cities where their chief temples were located. In Egyptian creation myths , the first temple originated as a shelter for a god—which god it was varied according to the city—that stood on the mound of land where the process of creation began. Each temple in Egypt, therefore,
1547-544: A temple's most sacred areas. Nevertheless, a temple was an important religious site for all classes of Egyptians, who went there to pray , give offerings, and seek oracular guidance from the god dwelling within. The most important part of the temple was the sanctuary , which typically contained a cult image , a statue of its god. The rooms outside the sanctuary grew larger and more elaborate over time, so that temples evolved from small shrines in late Prehistoric Egypt (late fourth millennium BC) to large stone edifices in
1638-467: A temple, but in some cases, as with mortuary temples or the temples in Nubia, the temple was a new foundation on previously empty land. The exact site of a temple was often chosen for religious reasons; it might, for example, be the mythical birthplace or burial place of a god. The temple axis might also be designed to align with locations of religious significance, such as the site of a neighboring temple or
1729-442: A temple. Other revenue came from private individuals, who offered land, slaves , or goods to temples in exchange for a supply of offerings and priestly services to sustain their spirits in the afterlife. Much of a temple's economic support came from its own resources. These included large tracts of land beyond the temple enclosure, sometimes in a completely different region than the temple itself. The most important type of property
1820-448: A valley temple on the banks of the Nile linked to a pyramid temple at the foot of the pyramid. Sneferu's immediate successors followed this pattern, but beginning in the late Old Kingdom, pyramid complexes combined different elements from the axial plan and from the rectangular plan of Djoser. To supply the pyramid complexes, kings founded new towns and farming estates on undeveloped lands across Egypt. The flow of goods from these lands to
1911-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and
SECTION 20
#17327755402842002-570: Is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in the epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of
2093-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected
2184-666: Is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to
2275-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in
2366-602: Is depicted as under the control of a member of the Order of the Ancients named "The Scarab". 30°57′53″N 30°46′6″E / 30.96472°N 30.76833°E / 30.96472; 30.76833 Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It
2457-491: Is no clear division between the two. The Egyptians did not refer to mortuary temples by any distinct name. Nor were rituals for the dead and rituals for the gods mutually exclusive; the symbolism surrounding death was present in all Egyptian temples. The worship of gods was present to some degree in mortuary temples, and the Egyptologist Stephen Quirke has said that "at all periods royal cult involves
2548-556: Is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c. 1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c. 1200–800 BC ), the Archaic or Epic period ( c. 800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c. 500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been
2639-494: Is reflected in the Egyptian term for temple lands and their administration, pr , meaning "house" or "estate". Some of the temple's supplies came from direct donations by the king. In the New Kingdom , when Egypt was an imperial power , these donations often came out of the spoils of the king's military campaigns or the tribute given by his client states. The king might also levy various taxes that went directly to support
2730-529: Is where the grave of Osiris was located and that the sufferings of the god were displayed as a mystery by night on an adjacent lake. The city's patron goddess was Neith , whose cult is attested as early as the First Dynasty of Egypt ( c. 3100 –3050 BC). The Greeks, such as Herodotus, Plato , and Diodorus Siculus , identified her with Athena and hence postulated a primordial link to Athens . Diodorus recounts that Athenians built Sais before
2821-726: The mammisi , a building celebrating the mythical birth of a god. Though the characteristics of the late temple style had developed by the last period of native rule, most of the examples date from the era of the Ptolemies , Greek kings who ruled as pharaohs for nearly 300 years. After Rome conquered the Ptolemaic kingdom in 30 BC, Roman emperors took on the role of ruler and temple patron. Many temples in Roman Egypt continued to be built in Egyptian style. Others, including some that were dedicated to Egyptian gods—such as
Sais, Egypt - Misplaced Pages Continue
2912-708: The Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as the Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect
3003-561: The Late Period . On its ruins today stands the town of Sa el-Hagar ( Egyptian Arabic : صا الحجر ) or Sa El Hajar . A Neolithic settlement has been identified at Sais recently (1999), dating to 5000 BC. Agriculture appears here during this period, as well as at another similar site, Merimde Beni Salama , which is located about 80km south of Sais. The Neolithic period at Sais consists of three phases. The earliest phases are Early Neolithic (Sais I) and Late Neolithic (Sais II). During
3094-408: The New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC) and later. These edifices are among the largest and most enduring examples of ancient Egyptian architecture , with their elements arranged and decorated according to complex patterns of religious symbolism . Their typical layout consisted of a series of enclosed halls, open courts, and entrance pylons aligned along the path used for festival processions. Beyond
3185-584: The Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2181 BC) that followed the Early Dynastic Period, royal funerary monuments greatly expanded, while most divine temples remained comparatively small, suggesting that official religion in this period emphasized the cult of the king more than the direct worship of deities. Deities closely connected with the king, such as the sun god Ra , received more royal contributions than other deities. Ra's temple at Heliopolis
3276-498: The de facto ruler of Upper Egypt , beginning the political fragmentation of the Third Intermediate Period (c. 1070–664 BC). As the New Kingdom crumbled, the building of mortuary temples ceased and was never revived. Some rulers of the Third Intermediate Period , such as those at Tanis , were buried within the enclosures of divine temples, thus continuing the close link between temple and tomb. In
3367-490: The deluge . While all Greek cities were destroyed during that cataclysm, including Athens, Sais and the others Egyptian cities survived. There are today no surviving traces of this town prior to the Late New Kingdom ( c. 1100 BC ) due to the extensive destruction of the city by the sebakhin (farmers removing mudbrick deposits for use as fertilizer) leaving only a few relief blocks in situ . Though
3458-487: The gods to reside on earth. Indeed, the term the Egyptians most commonly used to describe the temple building, ḥwt-nṯr , means "mansion (or enclosure) of a god". A divine presence in the temple linked the human and divine realms and allowed humans to interact with the god through ritual . These rituals, it was believed, sustained the god and allowed it to continue to play its proper role in nature. They were therefore
3549-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)
3640-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):
3731-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from
Sais, Egypt - Misplaced Pages Continue
3822-576: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs, Egyptian temple B C D F G H I K M N P Q R S T U W Egyptian temples were built for
3913-649: The Early Neolithic, the site started as a fishing camp but later, in the Middle to Late Neolithic Period, it was settled by agriculturalists for the cultivation of the floodplain. The evolution of activity from fish processing to a settled hunting and agricultural phase may be connected to gradual changes in climatic conditions from 4600 BC onwards. It is believed that the Middle Holocene Moist phase started at that time. Herodotus wrote that Sais
4004-577: The Nile from quarries elsewhere. Temple structures were built on foundations of stone slabs set into sand-filled trenches. In most periods, walls and other structures were built with large blocks of varying shape. The blocks were laid in courses , usually without mortar . Each stone was dressed to fit with its neighbors, producing cuboid blocks whose uneven shapes interlocked. The interiors of walls were often built with less care, using rougher, poorer-quality stones. To build structures above ground level,
4095-614: The Third Intermediate Period and the following Late Period (664–323 BC), the weakened Egyptian state fell to a series of outside powers, experiencing only occasional periods of independence. Many of these foreign rulers funded and expanded temples to strengthen their claim to the kingship of Egypt. One such group, the Kushite pharaohs of the eighth and seventh centuries BC, adopted Egyptian-style temple architecture for use in their native land of Nubia , beginning
4186-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has
4277-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in
4368-438: The center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for the dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West
4459-483: The central government and its temples helped unify the kingdom. The rulers of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055–1650 BC) continued building pyramids and their associated complexes. The rare remains from Middle Kingdom temples, like the one at Medinet Madi , show that temple plans grew more symmetrical during that period, and divine temples made increasing use of stone. The pattern of a sanctuary lying behind
4550-529: The city's foundation to one "Sā ibn Misr"; Ibn Iyas called the founder "Sā ibn Marqunus". The site was used as a stone quarry during this period. By the time of Ibn Iyas, the city had fallen almost completely into ruin. The 1885 Census of Egypt recorded Sa el-Hagar as a nahiyah under the district of Kafr az-Zayyat in Gharbia Governorate ; at that time, the population of the town was 4,474 (2,250 men and 2,224 women). The Temple of Sais had
4641-425: The close intertwining of divinity and kingship in Egyptian belief. Temples were key centers of economic activity. The largest required prodigious resources and employed tens of thousands of priests, craftsmen, and laborers. The temple's economic workings were analogous to those of a large Egyptian household, with servants dedicated to serving the temple god as they might serve the master of an estate. This similarity
SECTION 50
#17327755402844732-426: The country or even beyond Egypt's borders. Thus, as Richard H. Wilkinson says, the temple estate "often represented no less than a slice of Egypt itself". As a major economic center and the employer of a large part of the local population, the temple enclosure was a key part of the town in which it stood. Conversely, when a temple was founded on empty land, a new town was built to support it. All this economic power
4823-426: The course of these additions, they frequently dismantled old temple buildings to use as fill for the interiors of new structures. On rare occasions, this may have been because the old structures or their builders had become anathema , as with Akhenaten's temples, but in most cases, the reason seems to have been convenience. Such expansion and dismantling could considerably distort the original temple plan, as happened at
4914-615: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of
5005-470: The discipline of Egyptology and drawing increasing numbers of visitors to the civilization's remains. Dozens of temples survive today, and some have become world-famous tourist attractions that contribute significantly to the modern Egyptian economy . Egyptologists continue to study the surviving temples and the remains of destroyed ones as invaluable sources of information about ancient Egyptian society. Ancient Egyptian temples were meant as places for
5096-567: The following centuries, Christian emperors issued decrees that were increasingly hostile to pagan cults and temples. Some Christians attacked and destroyed temples, as in the plundering of the Serapeum and other temples in Alexandria in AD 391 or 392. Through some combination of Christian coercion and loss of funds, temples ceased to function at various times. The last temple cults died out in
5187-457: The forces of chaos. These rituals were seen as necessary for the gods to continue to uphold maat , the divine order of the universe. Housing and caring for the gods were the obligations of pharaohs, who therefore dedicated prodigious resources to temple construction and maintenance. Pharaohs delegated most of their ritual duties to a host of priests, but most of the populace was excluded from direct participation in ceremonies and forbidden to enter
5278-612: The fourth through sixth centuries AD, although locals may have venerated some sites long after the regular ceremonies there had ceased. Temples were built throughout Upper and Lower Egypt , as well as at Egyptian-controlled oases in the Libyan Desert as far west as Siwa , and at outposts in the Sinai Peninsula such as Timna . In periods when Egypt dominated Nubia, Egyptian rulers also built temples there, as far south as Jebel Barkal . Most Egyptian towns had
5369-403: The god Aten over all others and eventually abolished the official worship of most other gods. Traditional temples were neglected while new Aten temples, differing sharply in design and construction, were erected. But Akhenaten's revolution was reversed soon after his death, with the traditional cults reinstated and the new temples dismantled. Subsequent pharaohs dedicated still more resources to
5460-566: The gods and set them apart from buildings for the use of mortals, which were built of mudbrick. Early temples were built of brick and other perishable materials, and most of the outlying buildings in temple enclosures remained brick-built throughout Egyptian history. The main stones used in temple construction were limestone and sandstone , which are common in Egypt; stones that are harder and more difficult to carve, such as granite , were used in smaller amounts for individual elements like obelisks . The stone might be quarried nearby or shipped on
5551-429: The gods, but equally... all cult of the gods involves the king". Even so, certain temples were clearly used to commemorate deceased kings and to give offerings to their spirits. Their purpose is not fully understood; they may have been meant to unite the king with the gods, elevating him to a divine status greater than that of ordinary kingship. In any case, the difficulty of separating divine and mortuary temples reflects
SECTION 60
#17327755402845642-561: The historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from
5733-476: The historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to
5824-502: The impermanence of these early buildings, later Egyptian art continually reused and adapted elements from them, evoking the ancient shrines to suggest the eternal nature of the gods and their dwelling places. In the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3100–2686 BC), the first pharaohs built funerary complexes in the religious center of Abydos following a single general pattern, with a rectangular mudbrick enclosure. In
5915-550: The inscription "I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised." Hector Berlioz ' L'enfance du Christ ("The Childhood of Christ"), in part Three, has Sais as the setting for the youth of Jesus until age 10, after his parents leave their homeland to escape the Massacre of the Innocents by Herod the Great . Sais is depicted in the video game Assassin's Creed Origins . Here it
6006-416: The king as part of his religious duties; indeed, in Egyptian belief, all temple construction was symbolically his work. In reality, it was the work of hundreds of his subjects, conscripted in the corvée system. The construction process for a new temple, or a major addition to an existing one, could last years or decades. The use of stone in Egyptian temples emphasized their purpose as eternal houses for
6097-452: The king managed the nation's resources and its people. As the direct overseers of their own economic sphere, the administrations of large temples wielded considerable influence and may have posed a challenge to the authority of a weak pharaoh, although it is unclear how independent they were. Once Egypt became a Roman province , one of the first measures of the Roman rulers was to implement
6188-479: The mortuary temples of the Theban Necropolis in the New Kingdom oversaw the provision of the royally employed tomb workers at Deir el-Medina . Kings could also exempt temples or classes of personnel from taxation and conscription. The royal administration could also order one temple to divert its resources to another temple whose influence it wished to expand. Thus, a king might increase the income of
6279-507: The nation's decline and ultimate loss of independence to the Roman Empire in 30 BC. With the coming of Christianity , traditional Egyptian religion faced increasing persecution, and temple cults died out during the fourth through sixth centuries AD. The buildings they left behind suffered centuries of destruction and neglect. At the start of the nineteenth century, a wave of interest in ancient Egypt swept Europe, giving rise to
6370-426: The official worship of the gods and in commemoration of the pharaohs in ancient Egypt and regions under Egyptian control. Temples were seen as houses for the gods or kings to whom they were dedicated. Within them, the Egyptians performed a variety of rituals , the central functions of Egyptian religion : giving offerings to the gods, reenacting their mythological interactions through festivals, and warding off
6461-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which
6552-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c. 1450 BC ) are in
6643-448: The performance of temple rituals was still an official duty, restricted to high-ranking priests. The participation of the general populace in most ceremonies was prohibited. Much of the lay religious activity in Egypt instead took place in private and community shrines , separate from official temples. As the primary link between the human and divine realms, temples attracted considerable veneration from ordinary Egyptians. Each temple had
6734-725: The proposed Sa El Hagar site has little evidence of this city, Obelisks in Piazza della Minerva and Urbino Italy are claimed to originate from Sais. During the Islamic conquest of Egypt , a battle was fought at Sais between the Rashidun Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire , according to John of Nikiû . It remained a pagarchy and Christian bishopric at least through the early 700s. Medieval writers like Yaqut al-Hamawi , al-Maqrizi , and al-Qalqashandi attributed
6825-496: The rising place of the sun or particular stars. The Great Temple of Abu Simbel , for instance, is aligned so that twice a year the rising sun illuminates the statues of the gods in its innermost room. Most temples were aligned toward the Nile with an axis running roughly east–west. An elaborate series of foundation rituals preceded construction. A further set of rituals followed the temple's completion, dedicating it to its patron god. These rites were conducted, at least in theory, by
6916-416: The sanctuary, halls, courtyards, and pylon gateways oriented along the path used for festival processions. New Kingdom pharaohs ceased using pyramids as funerary monuments and placed their tombs a great distance from their mortuary temples. Without pyramids to build around, mortuary temples began using the same plan as those dedicated to the gods. In the middle of the New Kingdom, Pharaoh Akhenaten promoted
7007-460: The stone or, if the stone was of too poor quality to carve, a layer of plaster that covered the stone surface. Reliefs were then decorated with gilding , inlay , or paint. The paints were usually mixtures of mineral pigments with some kind of adhesive, possibly natural gum . Temple construction did not end once the original plan was complete; pharaohs often rebuilt or replaced decayed temple structures or made additions to those still standing. In
7098-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies
7189-501: The temple proper was an outer wall enclosing a wide variety of secondary buildings. A large temple also owned sizable tracts of land and employed thousands of laymen to supply its needs. Temples were therefore key economic as well as religious centers. The priests who managed these powerful institutions wielded considerable influence, and despite their ostensible subordination to the king, they may have posed significant challenges to his authority. Temple-building in Egypt continued despite
7280-455: The temple to Isis at Ras el-Soda were built in a style derived from Roman architecture . Temple-building continued into the third century AD. As the empire weakened in the crisis of the third century , imperial donations to the temple cults dried up, and almost all construction and decoration ceased. Cult activities at some sites continued, relying increasingly on financial support and volunteer labor from surrounding communities. In
7371-573: The temples became part of the Roman ruling apparatus by, for example, collecting taxes and examining charges against priests for violating sacral law. The earliest known shrines appeared in prehistoric Egypt in the late fourth millennium BC, at sites such as Saïs and Buto in Lower Egypt and Nekhen and Coptos in Upper Egypt . Most of these shrines were made of perishable materials such as wood, reed matting, and mudbrick . Despite
7462-442: The temples of a god he favored, and mortuary temples of recent rulers tended to siphon off resources from temples to pharaohs long dead. The most drastic means of controlling the temple estates was to completely revise the distribution of their property nationwide, which might extend to closing down certain temples. Such changes could significantly alter Egypt's economic landscape. The temples were thus important instruments with which
7553-405: The temples, particularly Ramesses II , the most prolific monument-builder in Egyptian history. As the wealth of the priesthoods continued to grow, so did their religious influence: temple oracles, controlled by the priests, were an increasingly popular method of making decisions. Pharaonic power waned, and in the eleventh century BC a military leader Herihor made himself High Priest of Amun and
7644-501: The visit by the Greek legislator Solon), Sais is the city in which Solon receives the story of Atlantis , its military aggression against Greece and Egypt, its eventual defeat and destruction by gods-punishing catastrophe, from an Egyptian priest. Solon visited Egypt in 590 BC. Plato also notes the city as the birthplace of the pharaoh Amasis II . Plutarch said that the shrine of Athena, which he identifies with Isis , in Sais carried
7735-414: The workers used construction ramps built of varying materials such as mud, brick, or rough stone. When cutting chambers in living rock , workers excavated from the top down, carving a crawlspace near the ceiling and cutting down to the floor. Once the temple structure was complete, the rough faces of the stones were dressed to create a smooth surface. In decorating these surfaces, reliefs were carved into
7826-449: Was farmland , producing grain, fruit, or wine, or supporting herds of livestock. The temple either managed these lands directly, rented them out to farmers for a share of the produce, or managed them jointly with the royal administration. Temples also launched expeditions into the desert to collect resources such as salt, honey, or wild game, or to mine precious minerals. Some owned fleets of ships with which to conduct their own trade across
7917-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,
8008-399: Was a major religious center, and several Old Kingdom pharaohs built large sun temples in his honor near their pyramids . Meanwhile, the small provincial temples retained a variety of local styles from Predynastic times, unaffected by the royal cult sites. The expansion of funerary monuments began in the reign of Djoser , who built his complex entirely of stone and placed in the enclosure
8099-608: Was equated with this original temple and with the site of creation itself. As the primordial home of the god and the mythological location of the city's founding, the temple was seen as the hub of the region, from which the city's patron god ruled over it. Pharaohs also built temples where offerings were made to sustain their spirits in the afterlife , often linked with or located near their tombs. These temples are traditionally called " mortuary temples " and regarded as essentially different from divine temples. In recent years some Egyptologists, such as Gerhard Haeny, have argued that there
8190-426: Was theoretically his duty to perform the temple rites. While it is uncertain how often he participated in ceremonies, the existence of temples across Egypt made it impossible for him to do so in all cases, and most of the time these duties were delegated to priests. The pharaoh was nevertheless obligated to maintain, provide for, and expand the temples throughout his realm. Although the pharaoh delegated his authority,
8281-509: Was ultimately under the pharaoh's control, and temple products and property were often taxed. Their employees, even the priests, were subject to the state corvée system, which conscripted labor for royal projects. They could also be ordered to provide supplies for some specific purposes. A trading expedition led by Harkhuf in the Sixth Dynasty ( c. 2255 –2246 BC) was allowed to procure supplies from any temple it wished, and
#283716