Temple of Hatshepsut Explained Luxor | inglés

Queen Hatshepsut was one of the few women that ruled in Egypt as a pharaoh, and she began the brightest moment of the new kingdom in the 15th century BC. She had a tomb in the Valley of the Kings where all the pharaohs were buried at that time, and she had a mortuary temple built in the other side of the mountain so that offerings could be brought to the temple once she was dead. But her mortuary temple is really one of the most extraordinary because it takes advantage of the cliffs and really uses them as part of the architecture and extends the architecture into the landscape so that the scale of the architecture is augmented by the fact that it's almost seamlessly interconnected with the landscape itself. The mortuary temple of Hatshepsut was built in 1520 BC by her architect Senmund. So from this view you can see something extraordinary about this temple, and that is these different precincts that are used to organize the procession do not happen across a flat terrain, but have to do with moving up into the landscape. A processional way of sphinxes connected the temple with a valley. The terraces approached by ramps are in three levels mounting towards the base of the cliffs. There are faces lined with double colonnades which also serve as retaining walls for the next level. It's like a typical Egyptian temple insofar as there's multiple thresholds, and every time you cross a threshold you get to a space that is increasingly dense and compact, telescoping to the sanctuary. But not only does it move up the mountain, but it also moves into the mountain. The opening feature of the temple is the three terraces fronted by a portico leading up to the temple proper. Each elevated terrace was accessed by a ramp whose balustrade was adorned by falcons resting upon coiled cobras. To the left and right of the face of the middle terrace are chapels of Hathor and Anubis. Since Hathor was the guardian of the area, it is appropriate to find a chapel dedicated to her within Hatshepsut's mortuary temple. The columns that fill the court of this chapel are Hathor columns, the capital of which represents a female head with cow ears tucked with a crown. Anubis was frequently represented with the body of a man and the head of a jackal, as he is shown in his chapel. Anubis was the god of the embalming process and he accompanied dead kings in the afterworld. Here he sits on a throne and he faces a pile of offerings in eight levels. The wall reliefs on this temple are exceptionally fine and include representations of the queen's trade expedition to Punt and of her allegedly divine birth as the child of Amun. Punt was an ancient territory described by the hieroglyphic texts of ancient Egypt, whose location is still uncertain, although it's thought it could have been located in the Somali coast. Hatshepsut brought several goods from her expedition to Punt, including this tree. Today they are sand covered and barren, but in the 18th dynasty the choruses of Hatshepsut's temple were embellished with incense trees planted in earth-filled pits to create a garden for Amun's promenades. Buried irrigation pipes supplied water to sustain the plants and priests placed tributes to the god in the shade beneath the branches. The upper terrace is a walled court lined with a further double colonnade, flanked on the left by the queen's mortuary chapel and on the right by a minor court containing an enormous altar to the The chief sanctuary lies axially in the rear of the upper court, cut deep into the rock. It is the climatic point of the temple. This sanctuary is dedicated to the god Amun, to whom Hatshepsut had dedicated the temple as a garden for her father. The chamber was a chapel which hosted the bark of Amun and a skylight that allowed light to The walls depict scenes of offerings presented by Hatshepsut and Thutmose I to Amun. There are Osirite statues of Hatshepsut in the corners and statues of Amun occupying the niches in the wall. There are also cartouches containing Hatshepsut's name flanked and guarded by those of Amun-Ra. So Hatshepsut didn't have to build a pyramid, she used nature as her pyramid and simply embedded the temple within it. You can even see the similarity of the procession when you look at the section of the temple next to the section of the Great Pyramid of Giza. So if you look at the plan of the Hatshepsut temple in comparison with this great temple at Karnak, you can see lots of similarities in spite of the extreme differences in terms of the sequence and the spaces. We've got the hypostyle hall, we don't exactly have pylons when we have these thresholds that allow the pacing of the procession to be marked in an honorific architectural way. And look at that, it's so great, look at the striations of the rock. The vertical striations on the rock seem to be clarifying and made architectural in these colonnades on the Hatshepsut temple. And this is really a kind of deliberate decision that's been made here because across the river at the Amun-Ra temple we have the same kind of papyrus columns and lotus columns that we saw really way back in Saqqara in Zoser's complex. But here it's stripped away, it's really abstracted, because it's not referring to the river Ritz but it's referring to the rocks. Again it's mimetic of nature but it's just picking up a different piece of nature to respond to. The overall design of the temple of Hatshepsut was doubtless inspired by the neighboring temple of Mentuhetep, built about 500 years earlier, although Hatshepsut's temple is considerably larger in grandeur. The tomb of Mentuhetep II is an exceptional work of architectural innovation, combining temple and tomb chamber in a single composition. The complex, approached by an axial route from the Nile, had two levels of colonnaded terraces surrounding a small, completely solid pyramid raised aloft on a high podium. The pyramid is really a cenotaph, for the rock below is a dummy burial chamber approached by an irregular passage from the forecourt. In the rear of the temple is another pillared hall recessed into the rock face, preceded by an open court, from the ramp leads down to the Mentuhetep's long corridor tomb. The two levels of columns seen upon approach anticipate Greek temples with their surrounding colonnades. Mentuhetep's tomb would serve as a prototype for the more elaborate adjoining funerary complex, built by the new kingdom pharaoh, Hatshepsut. The pyramid has more recently been interpreted as a flat-roofed hall. The building is a ruin today so one cannot be sure of the initial design, but the case for a flat-roofed hall is based on there being insufficient foundations to support even a modest pyramid. You can see here the transformation of the type from typical Egyptian temples to Hatshepsut's temple. It conserves things like the hypostyle hall and the sanctuary, and the series of thresholds, but they are presented in a different way. Here you can see this really abstracted columnar edge. It seems really minimalist, insofar as it is very abstracted and horizontal, and you can see every pure geometry clearly, with no ornamentation nor column capitals. And here we have another column detail which is quite interesting, because it almost looks Greek. It almost looks like it's a kind of Doric column. There are vertical lines like the fluting, and there are little column capitals that are kind of like the Doric column capital, of course anticipating the Greek Doric by a long long time. And here's an example of Greek Doric columns from the Stoas of Attalos in Athens. You can see the great similarity in the fluting and in the capitals. There is a statue of Osiris attached in the front of several columns from the third level of Hatshepsut's temple. Osiris was the Egyptian god of fertility, resurrection, and of the underworld. This statue of Osiris has the delicate features of Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh. He wears the double crown of Egypt and a false beard with a curved tip. Although Hatshepsut reigned and died peacefully, her successors did everything possible to eradicate her memory, erasing her name from inscriptions and smashing almost all of her sculptural representations. The temple of Hatshepsut can be seen from Thebes, from the other side of the river, and completely dominates all the mortuary temples in honor of the rest of the pharaohs. And even today, the funerary temple of Hatshepsut, that is all this extension here, is considered one of the most spectacular monuments in all of pharaonic Egypt. The entire setting of the temple, from the axial ramp approach to the termination of the processional way at a false door, painted on the wall of the final rock-hewn sanctuary, is a masterly blending of architecture into a dramatic landscape. And if you'd like to support me on Patreon so that I can continue to produce these videos, that would be much appreciated. Thank you again and I'll see you very soon with a new video. Goodbye!