The Temple of Dendur: Understanding the Artwork
This paper shall address the Temple of Dendur, that was given to the United States by Egypt in 1965, awarded to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967, and installed in The Sackler Wing in 1978, as a work of art, that was executed for a single purpose - that of drawing a visitor into the rear prayer room - and that the building, is as effective in achieving this purpose for even a modern viewer, far removed from the religion and the period in which this artwork was first executed. I will try to demonstrate this point through exploring the form of this extraordinary temple.While perhaps not perceived as a work of art rather than a building, the Temple of Dendur is one of the most remarkable works of art found within museum's trove. It dates from Nubia (c.a. 15 BCE) and is composed predominantly of carved sandstone blocks which form two separate pieces: The first piece of this work is an entrance portal approximately eighteen feet in height, and the second piece is a temple consisting of an anteroom and a rear chamber. The length of the two pieces when it was first discovered was eighty- two feet from the entrance portal to the rear of the temple, and the Metropolitan Museum has faithfully reproduced the remarkable masterpiece
The structure of the Temple, is likewise simple but is also designed to serve a purpose: The artists, are most likely craftsmen, who have designed the piece, treated it in part as a building but also as a medium for sculpture, where the building was designed as a permanent showcase for the work that would soon decorate the structure. The base of the outside of the temple is carved in images of river grass and papyrus with Hapy, a god of the Nile River, and the columns in the antechamber are decorated as though they were flowers growing to the sky. The entrance gate and the temple itself are carved in a bas relief of Horus, a god of the sky, who is placed next to a disk which illustrates the sun god Amen- Ra. These decorations indicate that the temple itself was designed not simply as a prayer hall, but as a conduit between this world and the next where worshiper from this world could pass through the building and reach the gods featured within the artwork carved on its face. Evaluating this piece according to an objective, modern perspective is challenging: This work is clearly a religious piece from an era long dead and buried, and not many examples of similar temples exists within the United States for comparison viewing. However, the comprehension of this work in the current era is no doubt identical to that intend
Some common words found in the essay are:
Temple Dendur, Amen- Ra, Sackler Wing, Nile River, Metropolitan Museum, temple dendur, United Egypt, Museum Art, , metropolitan museum, entrance portal, modern viewer, temple carved, rear prayer,
Approximate Word count = 898
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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