The Temple of Dendur

0:00:04.9 Dr. Beth Harris: We’re at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We’ve just walked through the Egyptian galleries, and we enter this enormous space where we see an actual ancient temple.

0:00:14.0 Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay: It’s an Egyptian temple, except the thing that makes it really interesting is that it is from the Roman period. And this is the Temple of Dendur, which is one of the crowning jewels in the Metropolitan Museum’s outstanding collection of Egyptian art. And the story of how it got here is a really interesting question.

0:00:29.0 Dr. Beth Harris: When Egypt decided to build the Second Aswan Dam.

0:00:32.5 Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay: Otherwise known as the High Dam.

0:00:36.8 Dr. Beth Harris: They realized that this was going to put many Nubian monuments on the border between Egypt and Sudan in danger.

0:00:41.5 Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay: Ancient Nubia is in very southern Egypt, or what we would call, Upper Egypt, and then in the northern part of modern day Sudan.

0:00:48.6 Dr. Beth Harris: And when we think about this area, we could think about the monuments of Abu Simbel. And we realized the incredible beauty of the temples, and funerary complexes that were in danger, because as they were going to build the High Dam, which would bring electricity and new areas for agricultural development, it was also going to endanger these important, beautiful monuments.

0:01:10.8 Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay: It was soon acknowledged that there was going to need to be an international undertaking. So working with UNESCO, Egypt launched a campaign to save the monuments of Nubia. Dendur was documented and then taken apart in 1963.

0:01:23.0 Dr. Beth Harris: And we have photographs of it partially submerged. So it was really important to get this monument out of this region in order to preserve it.

0:01:31.1 Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay: By the time the British built the next dam, which was finished, I think in 1931, Dendur was underwater nine months of the year. And that caused some of the polychrome, the painted colors on the sides of the temple, this whole temple would have been painted, to be washed off. And so the monument was already at risk. What the Egyptian government decided to do was give certain temples to four nations that had provided extraordinary financial or technical support. And those nations were the United States, Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy.

0:02:01.4 Dr. Beth Harris: And I love to think about all the nations that were involved in this effort because it gives us a sense of a developing idea of antiquity as something that matters to all of us. So the Met said, we want the Temple of Dendur to come here, and we’re even going to build a special place to house it that’s climate controlled, that will preserve the monument.

0:02:24.0 Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay: Well, and that was the reason why the Metropolitan Museum of Art got it, and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. didn’t.

0:02:29.1 Dr. Beth Harris: This temple was deconstructed years before it came here, block by block. It was stored in Egypt and then shipped to the United States. There’s one photo that even shows the stones on a truck going down Fifth Avenue, headed toward the Met. This space was constructed and the platform constructed, specifically to give us a sense of what this temple looked like when it was situated along the Nile.

0:02:54.1 Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay: Temples in ancient Egypt were not places where congregations would go in to worship a god. In fact, it’s a temporary house or residence of the god. And the god will come out to greet other gods, as well as adherents and congregants.

0:03:08.5 Dr. Beth Harris: When we look at this gate, we immediately, from our perspective, think, “Oh, this is a gate that people would walk through.” But in fact, it’s really a gate from which the deity, the statue of the deity, would emerge.

0:03:19.8 Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay: And the deity to whom this temple was dedicated was Isis, who’s one of the most important goddesses in the Egyptian pantheon. But it’s important for us to remember that this is from the Roman era, but you would never know it was Roman. And that’s the point. Because Egypt has one of the best established, longest established traditions of art and architecture that has ever existed. And it was incredibly powerful, such that almost every foreign ruler who came to Egypt, adopted Egyptian art and architecture. And the only way we would know that this temple is Roman, is from its architecture, knowing that it has screenwalls. And also by looking at the hieroglyphs, because we’re able to identify some important figures in history.

0:04:00.3 Dr. Beth Harris: Most notably, we see the ancient Roman Emperor Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire, here on this ancient Egyptian temple, dressed as a Pharaoh.

0:04:10.7 Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay: And he is doing what he should do as the Pharaoh. The Pharaoh was the chief priest. So he is there making offerings and sacrifices to various Egyptian gods and goddesses. But you would never be able to spot him if you didn’t know who you were looking for. And so it’s a reminder that he knows, in Egypt, he has to use the systems that exist so that he can present himself in this long tradition. He is no different than Ramses or Thutmose III. He is showing himself as yet the next inheritor of the traditions of Pharaonic Egypt.

0:04:39.0 Dr. Beth Harris: So when we walk in this room, we know immediately that this is using the forms of ancient Egyptian architecture.

0:04:45.1 Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay: It has the standard Cavetto cornice. The other thing that we see, is we see the winged solar disk along that cornice in the architrave. The other thing we see in the temple is that its walls are sloping inward, which is a telltale sign of Egyptian architecture. But we also see a lot of beautiful details that evoke the Nile.

0:05:02.0 Dr. Beth Harris: We see papyrus motifs, we see lotus motifs.

0:05:05.9 Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay: One of the things that makes the building clearly so Egyptian, is these Nile motifs. And it’s a reminder of the fecundity and fertility of the life-giving Nile, that was just core to all aspects of ancient Egyptian civilization.

0:05:17.9 Dr. Beth Harris: Here we are at the Met, we have the privilege of seeing this ancient Egyptian temple, all of the hundreds of people who worked to disassemble it, to ship it, to reassemble it, to try to discern its original painted colors, its iconography. But we’re still not beside the Nile, and we’re still not looking at it the way it would have looked to the ancient Egyptians. So all we can do is get close to that.

0:05:43.2 Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay: And that’s one of the things that all archaeologists, art historians, are trying to do. And so by seeing possible color projections on the side, we can start to get a hint. We may never fully be able to recover it, but through detailed scholarship, work, and understanding, we may be able to understand a little bit more of what this monument meant for ancient Egyptians, for ancient Romans as well, and what it can mean for us today in the 21st century.