Mariette here again comes to our rescue to a certain extent. He shows, as I have stated in Chapter XI., that in the beginning of things, certainly in the twelfth dynasty, possibly in the eleventh dynasty, and possibly even before that, only the central part, marked 4, of the solar temple existed, less as a temple than as a shrine, with nothing to the west of it and nothing to the east of it.
That being so, the temple B gets its fair-way to the south, and the temple of Mut (X) and the smaller temple (W) to the north.
Mariette in his two plates shows the growth of the temple of Amen-Rā in a most admirable way, from the central portion of the temple to which I have referred—that, is, the small central court, which, he is careful to note, existed before Thothmes I.; how much before, he does not say. Afterwards, the pylons are added; then they are elaborated; then the sanctuary is thrown back to the eastward, and the temple O built, and B thereby blocked, and then thrown forward to the westward, thus blocking X and Z.
If there is anything in these considerations at all, it is suggested that all the temples to which 1 have referred were founded before these easterly and westerly extensions, of which Mariette gives us such ample evidence.
In a subsequent chapter it is suggested that this great lengthening of the original shrine of Amen-Rā was undertaken for the purpose of blocking temples X, Z, and W, all dedicated to Set. Thothmes III. and Taharqa had precisely the same objects in view, apparently.
Here, however, we meet a real difficulty. Mariette states that, so far as he has been able to find, the temple B, a temple of which the worship is Amen, and the temple X, in which the worship is Mut, were built by Amen-hetep III. If that were so, they would have been built blocked; none of the usual ceremonials could have been employed at their foundation. They could not have been used at all for astronomical purposes, because their horizons were blocked by these extensions of the temple of Amen-Rā.
Here I must refer specially to temple B. Its amplitude is, according to Lepsius, 63½° S. of W. I have already shown that the amplitudes of temples L (Khons) and T (Seti II.) are 62° and 63° S. of W., and that in the times of the Ptolemies and Seti II., each faced the star Canopus in turn. Hence the probability that we have three temples of nearly equal orientation sacred to the same divinity.
| Temple. | Orientation. | Declination. | Date. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Khons | 62 | 52½° | 300 B.C. |
| Seti II. | 63 | 53½° | 1350 B.C. |
| B | 63½ | 54 | 1800 B.C. |
The statement is that the part of the temple of Amen-Rā, the building of which blocked B, was commenced by Thothmes III., whose date, according to Brugsch, is 1600 B.C., and continued by Amen-hetep III. (1500 B.C.). Unless, then, some other provision was made, the observations of Canopus were not continued until another shrine was built. We know that another shrine was built, that of Seti II., and that its orientation gives a date of 1350 B.C. It might have been commenced by Seti I. after the Khu-en-Aten troubles, and finished by Seti II.
One is therefore tempted to ask whether we have not here one of those crucial cases which Mariette himself contemplated, in which the true foundation is so far anterior to the last restoration or the last decoration, from which, for the most part, the archæologist gets his information, that one is absolutely misled by the restorations or decorations as to the true date of the original foundation of the shrine.[49]