The Egyptian Temple and its Gods. Journey of the Divine.
Peeters| N° d'inventaire | 22884 |
| Format | 17 x 24 |
| Détails | 406 p., paperback. |
| Publication | Leuven, 2017 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9789042935334 |
Philae, Kom Ombo, Edfu, Esna, and Dendara are the most visited temples of the Greco-Roman period (between 300 BC and 300 AD). Their walls are covered with texts, unlike the prestigious sanctuaries of Karnak, Medinet Habu, or Abydos, and provide the interpretative keys to the latter. The hierogrammatists of Ptolemy and Caesar transmitted this exegesis by exploiting thousand-year-old archives and pushing the almost infinite possibilities of hieroglyphic writing to their extreme limits. Late Egyptian religious monuments would be merely rather heavy masses of stone if they did not maintain, through their decoration and their texts, the memory of the pharaoh-god who, strong in his legitimacy and thanks to his dual nature - divine and human - perpetuates life in the old country. The common people were certainly invited, on a few rare occasions, to demonstrate their piety, both profound and naively trivial; the splendor of the intellectual conception, where the divine is exalted in an erudite manner on walls bearing the most subtly suggestive writing, constitutes, however, the exclusive prerogative of the "initiates in the temple."
Philae, Kom Ombo, Edfu, Esna, and Dendara are the most visited temples of the Greco-Roman period (between 300 BC and 300 AD). Their walls are covered with texts, unlike the prestigious sanctuaries of Karnak, Medinet Habu, or Abydos, and provide the interpretative keys to the latter. The hierogrammatists of Ptolemy and Caesar transmitted this exegesis by exploiting thousand-year-old archives and pushing the almost infinite possibilities of hieroglyphic writing to their extreme limits. Late Egyptian religious monuments would be merely rather heavy masses of stone if they did not maintain, through their decoration and their texts, the memory of the pharaoh-god who, strong in his legitimacy and thanks to his dual nature - divine and human - perpetuates life in the old country. The common people were certainly invited, on a few rare occasions, to demonstrate their piety, both profound and naively trivial; the splendor of the intellectual conception, where the divine is exalted in an erudite manner on walls bearing the most subtly suggestive writing, constitutes, however, the exclusive prerogative of the "initiates in the temple."