Temples, Concept in Ancient Times

The Nature of the Sacred Place

The temple in African religion is devoted to some special activity in a special place based on the historical experiences that occurred at that place. For example, the temple of Edfu was built in its place because it commemorated the battle between Heru and Set. Edfu had been recognized for generations as the spot where good defeated evil. Consequently, a shrine was first erected, probably made of wood or stone, but protected by the priests as a sacred spot, hallowed by the fact that Heru, after many years of combat over the forces represented by Set, killed him at the place where the shrine was erected.

Figure 1 Huge Colossus of Memnon, which stood at the entrance to an ancient Egyptian temple.

Sources: Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama.

Years later, the people replaced the wooden shrine with a more substantial one that reflected the idea of permanence. Thus, the temple of stone announced a new dispensation in the creative imagination of the African people. From the time the people built the temples at Waset, Men-nefer, Heliopolis (On), and other religious sites, there was a continuation of the idea of permanence as material, hard, stone, and physical.

When the Greeks visited Africa as early as the 9th century BC, they found temples that were more than 2,000 years old. What became temples in Greece and later Rome were really relatively recent buildings compared with the antiquity of ancient Africa. Indeed, a site as grand as the Angkor Wat site in Cambodia is merely from the 12th century of this era. Thus, to speak of the ancient Egyptian and Nubian temple sites in the same contexts as others is to diminish the meaning of the term. The temple in the ancient Egyptian conception was often called “the god's house.”

Whenever the people wanted to donate gifts to the gods, they brought them to the temple, and there the priests and priestesses managed them in the name of the gods. These gifts and endowments were essential to the wealth of the gods. In the city of Waset, for example, during the New Kingdom, no god was as rich and powerful as Amen. Like other temples, the Temple of Amen owned land, farms, pastures, livestock, and boats and received the spoils of war in an effort to support a massive staff of temple helpers, priests, and assistants. In some cases, an entire town was used in the service of the temple to prepare and harvest food for the temple or make boats and art for the temple.

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