Temples of Ancient Egypt

In Temples of Ancient Egypt, five distinguished scholars―Dieter Arnold, Lanny Bell, Ragnhild Bjerre Finnestad, Gerhard Haeny, and Byron E. Shafer―here summarize the state of current knowledge about ancient Egyptian temples and the rituals associated with their use. The first volume in English to survey the major types of Egyptian temples from the Old Kingdom to the Roman period, it offers a unique perspective on ritual and its cultural significance. The authors perceive temples as loci for the creative interplay of sacred space and sacred time. They regard as unacceptable the traditional division of the temples into the categories of "mortuary" and "divine," believing that their functions and symbolic representations were, at once, too varied and too intertwined.