Position 70 - Buried For Ages—colonnaded Terraces Of Queen Makere's Magnificent Temple, Der El-bahri, Thebes (looking North)

What temple in all the world is so superbly situated as this beautiful sanctuary of the great queen? The snow-white colonnades are flanked by the naked, desolate cliffs with their fine play of light and shadow, bringing out rich masses of brown and yellow against which the clear lines of the temple are sharply defined, producing an effect of the whole, not to be found in any other temple of Egypt or of any land.

For no such terraced structure as this is known anywhere else, and you are struck from the first with its peculiar arrangement, unlike any temple that we have visited. It is an imitation, on a much larger scale, of a terraced temple recently unearthed here on our left just beside the larger temple. This prototype was erected by one of the Mentuhoteps of the 11th Dynasty.

The temple faces southeast, and we are looking obliquely across the main central axis, nearly due north (Map 9 and Plan 14). On our right are Karnak and the river, behind us are the Ramesseum and the colossi in the plain, on our left the western cliffs and the desert behind them. You have already seen that Queen Makere was a great builder, for you remember her giant obelisk, which we found at Karnak. But we have before us a still greater work of hers.

The Holy of Holies, in this remarkable temple, is hewn in the rock of the cliff, and you can see its entrance at the foot of the cliff on the upper terrace. It is that dark rectangular doorway directly in a line over the head of this nearer native; not the one farthest to the left and lower down, which is the entrance to the side chapel (Plan 14). In the axis of the temple before that door to the Holy of Holies you see a detached stone doorway, out toward the edge of the “upper court.” That is marked as the “Granite Door” on the plan (14).

This will locate for you the upper court. The “middle court” is directly before us with a colonnade both above and below it. Communication between the upper and the “middle court” is maintained by an “ascent” or causeway. A similar causeway which you notice at the extreme right connects the middle and a “lower court,” of which you can see only one corner just behind this house on the right. That is the house of the excavators, who freed this temple from the accumulated débris and rubbish of many centuries, which completely covered it.

The work was done by the Egypt Exploration Fund, under the direction of M. Naville, of Geneva, and when they began, if you had viewed the temple from this place you could have distinguished little more than heaps of rubbish and detritus from the cliffs above Up yonder in the upper court rose the tower of a Coptic convent, built with brick from neighboring late tombs. It was this building which gave to the temple its modern name “Der el-Bahri,” which means Northern Church or Convent; but it was removed in clearing the temple by M. Naville.

The builder, Queen Makere herself, called her temple “The Most Splendid,” and it fully deserved the name. Out here on the right, but now totally destroyed, so that we miss nothing by their being out of range, were a pair of pylon towers, to which an avenue of sphinxes led up from the river. As there is no soil here, the trees and plants, that used to beautify the terraces, were planted in holes excavated in the stone and filled with Nile mud.

The rock forming the middle court before us was not of exactly the proper shape for it and it had therefore to be built out on this side with limestone masonry, adorned with large panels. The sculptures in this temple are among the finest in Egypt, and their subject matter is of the greatest interest. The wall behind the colonnade on the other side of the ascent is covered with scenes depicting the divine birth of the queen, while that on this side of the same causeway is devoted to a most interesting series of reliefs showing the queen's expedition to the lands on the Somali coast of Africa, at the southern end of the Red Sea.

We shall later look at one of these scenes in the last series. In the further corner of the upper court is another small court with a large altar of sacrifice in a fine state of preservation, and of the greatest interest, because such altars have all perished in the temples of Egypt, though one other has since been discovered.

Throughout this magnificent temple the name and figure of the queen have been carefully erased, especially by her great brother, who was also her husband and successor, Thutmosis III, but also by her other brother, Thutmosis II. Thus its walls have become for us the evidence of political factions like that which we found on the wall at Karnak. As we enjoy the peaceful beauty of this lovely temple, we would never have imagined the family feuds, the feverish hate, the plots and counterplots among which its walls rose, until at last when the enemies of the queen were successful, she was thrust aside by her great brother, Thutmosis III, and the temple was left unfinished.

After we have inspected one of her reliefs, we shall climb up the narrow path that leads to the top of those cliffs and from there look down along the line of cliffs at present on our right. The lines marked 71 on our Plan 14 show in what part of the temple we shall find the relief we are now to study.