page_title: Egyptian temple
section_title: Halls and courts
hierarchical_section_title: Egyptian temple / Design and decoration / Halls and courts
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Interieur van de tempel van Esna (Egypte) English: Interior of the temple of Esna (Egypt) Français&#160;: Vue intérieure du temple d'Esna (Égypte)
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: Hypostyle halls, covered rooms filled with columns, appear in temples throughout Egyptian history. By the New Kingdom they typically lay directly in front of the sanctuary area. These halls were less restricted than the inner rooms, being open to laymen at least in some cases. They were often less dark as well: New Kingdom halls rose into tall central passages over the processional path, allowing a clerestory to provide dim light. The epitome of this style is the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, whose largest columns are 69 feet (21 m) tall. In later periods, the Egyptians favored a different style of hall, where a low screen wall at the front let in the light. The shadowy halls, whose columns were often shaped to imitate plants such as lotus or papyrus, were symbolic of the mythological marsh that surrounded the primeval mound at the time of creation. The columns could also be equated with the pillars that held up the sky in Egyptian cosmology.
  Beyond the hypostyle hall were one or more peristyle courts open to the sky. These open courts, which had been a part of Egyptian temple design since the Old Kingdom, became transitional areas in the standard plan of the New Kingdom, lying between the public space outside the temple and the more restricted areas within. Here the public met with the priests and assembled during festivals. At the front of each court was usually a pylon, a pair of trapezoidal towers flanking the main gateway. The pylon is known from only scattered examples in the Old and Middle Kingdoms, but in the New it quickly became the distinctive and imposing façade common to most Egyptian temples. The pylon served symbolically as a guard tower against the forces of disorder and may also have been meant to resemble the hieroglyph for "horizon", underscoring the temple's solar symbolism.
  The front of every pylon held niches for pairs of flagpoles to stand. Unlike pylons, such flags had stood at temple entrances since the earliest Predynastic shrines. They were so closely associated with the presence of a deity that the hieroglyph for them came to stand for the Egyptian word for "god".
caption: Hypostyle hall of Esna Temple
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