page_title: Egyptian temple
section_title: Inner chambers
hierarchical_section_title: Egyptian temple / Design and decoration / Inner chambers
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Heiligtum im Tempel von Edfu, Ägypten
context_page_description: Egyptian temples were built for 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 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. Out of necessity, 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 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.
context_section_description: The temple's inner chambers centered on the sanctuary of the temple's primary god, which typically lay along the axis near the back of the temple building, and in pyramid temples directly against the pyramid base. The sanctuary was the focus of temple ritual, the place where the divine presence manifested most strongly. The form in which it manifested itself varied. In Aten temples and traditional solar shrines, the object of ritual was the sun itself or a benben stone representing the sun, worshipped in a court open to the sky. In many mortuary temples, the inner areas contained statues of the deceased pharaoh, or a false door where his bꜣ ("personality", Egyptological ba) was believed to appear to receive offerings.
  In most temples, the focus was the cult image: a statue of the temple god which that god's ba was believed to inhabit while interacting with humans. The sanctuary in these temples contained either a naos, a cabinet-like shrine that housed the divine image, or a model barque containing the image within its cabin, which was used to carry the image during festival processions. In some cases the sanctuary may have housed several cult statues. To emphasize the sanctuary's sacred nature, it was kept in total darkness. Whereas in earlier times the sanctuary lay at the very back of the building, in the Late and Ptolemaic periods it became a freestanding building inside the temple, further insulated from the outside world by the surrounding corridors and rooms.
  Subsidiary chapels, dedicated to deities associated with the primary god, lay to the sides of the main one. When the main temple god was male, the secondary chapels were often dedicated to that god's mythological consort and child. The secondary chapels in mortuary temples were devoted to gods associated with kingship.
  Several other rooms neighbored the sanctuary. Many of these rooms were used to store ceremonial equipment, ritual texts, or temple valuables; others had specific ritual functions. The room where offerings were given to the deity was often separate from the sanctuary itself, and in temples without a barque in the sanctuary, there was a separate shrine to store the barque. In late temples the ritual areas could extend to chapels on the roof and crypts below the floor. Finally, in the exterior wall at the back of the temple, there were often niches for laymen to pray to the temple god, as close as they could come to its dwelling place.
caption: Shrine in the cella of the Temple of Edfu
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