True, the modern paved road is ugly, certainly less attractive than the original stone causeway along which priests carried statues of gods and kings. One would also wish away the huge asphalt parking lot filled with tour buses and gaudy kiosks thoughtlessly built before it. Nevertheless, even these cannot diminish the overwhelming beauty of this masterpiece. Traffic and curio sellers notwithstanding, one sees this temple and stands in awe. European visitors first saw Queen Hatshepsut’s memorial temple in a very ruined state at the end of the eighteenth century.

Originally buried beneath tons of debris, it has undergone almost continuous excavation and restoration since the end of the nineteenth century. But it was not until the 1920s that enough clearing had been done that visitors could appreciate the temple’s beauty. When Howard Carter (who later went on to discover the tomb of Tutankhamen) published the first paintings of its decoration at the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans were stunned. Before then, the temple had rated only a few lines in most guidebooks; since then, it has become one of the most-visited and most-admired monuments in Egypt.

The design of the temple may seem dramatically different from other New Kingdom temples. However, it was meant to function as a memorial temple and therefore shares all such temples’ components and plan: its gates, pillars, columns, Osirid statues, sphinxes, gardens, rising central axis, and tripartite plan are standard features. What makes Hatshepsut’s temple unique is the way these features fit together to take advantage of their natural setting.

The temple’s design was obviously influenced by the Dynasty 11 temple of Nebhepetra-Mentuhetep a few meters to the south. It too used ramps, colonnades, and terraces. But Hatshepsut’s temple was not a copy of her predecessor’s structure, in spite of comments to that effect by detractors. To the contrary, one Egyptologist referred to the earlier temple as a “lost opportunity” and described Hatshepsut’s as “the only possible solution to the problem presented by a most attractive, but also most difficult, site.” Hatshepsut’s architect, Senenmut, may have found inspiration in the earlier Mentuhetep monument—the idea of using a series of terraces is an obvious borrowing—but he went far beyond it, creating a work of art by “divining that only long horizontal lines could live in the presence of the overwhelming vertical lines of the background.”

The building site was certainly chosen in part because of the formidable cliffs behind it. But there were other reasons, too. The god Amen was given special prominence in the temple and that is why it was built almost exactly in the same axial line as  the Temple of Amen at Karnak. Indeed, if you extend the principal axis of Hatshepsut’s temple five kilometers (three miles) east to Karnak, it runs within one hundred meters (three hundred feet) of the axis of the Temple of Amen-Ra.There had been a shrine to Hathor at Dayr al-Bahari for centuries before Hatshepsut ordered that her own temple be built there. A shrine to Hathor stood in the Nebhepetra-Mentuhetep Temple immediately south, and Hatshepsut built her own Hathor shrine as close to it as possible.

 Amenhetep I erected a substantial temple with a shrine to Hathor on what later became the Hatshepsut Temple’s middle terrace. Indeed, so important was this area to the cult of Hathor and its associated Beautiful Festival of the Valley—an annual festival formerly of minor importance but given great emphasis by Hatshepsut—that Hatshepsut deliberately sited her temple here so that it would become the principal West Bank destination of the festival’s processions. It is also no coincidence that KV 20, the tomb attributed to Hatshepsut, was dug in the  Valley of the Kings behind the temple. If her tomb had been dug along a straight axis, as some believe was the original idea, its burial chamber could have lain directly beneath the temple. But poor quality bedrock forced workmen to follow a corkscrew-like course in a vain search for better stone, and the burial chamber was finally located deeper and to the southwest.

The ancient Egyptians called the temple Djeser-djeseru, “Most Holy of Holies.” Originally, a causeway connected it to a canal dug along the edge of the cultivation. The valley temple there was never completed, but the causeway leading from it was, and it measured 13 meters (40 feet) wide, 400 meters (1,200 feet) long. It was lined with statues and sphinxes that probably stood as close together as those leading to Luxor Temple. They were not inconsequential sculptures: the red granite sphinxes were over 3 meters (nearly 10 feet) long and each weighed seven and a half tons. Indeed, Hatshepsut’s program of statuary set a record for quantity and size not equaled until the reign of Amenhetep III. Statues of Hatshepsut in the pose of Osiris, for example, were erected at either end of the upper and lower terraces, before each of the upper terrace’s twenty-four pillars, in each of ten niches in the upper hall, and in the four corners of the upper sanctuary.

 A Coptic monastery, Dayr Apa Phoibamon, was built in the northwest part of the temple’s upper terrace and flourished in the seventh and eighth centuries AD. It was one of the largest monasteries in Upper Egypt and survived remarkably well for over a millennium until it was dismantled by Egyptologists early in the twentieth century. The monastery is the reason that Djeser-djerseru came to be called Dayr al-Bahari, meaning “The Northern Monastery” in Arabic. Its construction did substantial damage to the upper terrace, and archaeologists have worked for over a century to restore it, a task that is still not completed.

Once you have run the gauntlet of curio  sellers and taxi drivers and passed through the security gate, walk slowly and take time to savor the splendor of the Dayr al-Bahari cirque and the temple’s place within it. Way stations used in the many processions that came here every year stood along the avenue. North and south of the axis lay gardens, orchards, and ponds. Small planting holes can still be seen in parts of the temple compound and the original ancient tree roots are still visible. Near the bottom of the first ramp, two small T-shaped ponds surrounded by such holes have been outlined by their excavators. They once contained tamarisk, sycomore fig, and persea trees, as well as rare species brought back from the African land of Punt.

Before ascending the first ramp to the middle terrace, spend some time in the two colonnades on either side. That on the left especially has some interesting and important reliefs. But be forewarned: recently the Supreme Council of Antiquities installed iron rails at the front of each colonnade to keep tourists several meters from the walls. It is now extremely difficult to see the decoration. Patience, imagination, and a keen eye are needed. The temple is best viewed early in the morning when the sun is low in the sky. Later in the day, the reliefs are all but invisible. Another reason to avoid an afternoon visit is that Dayr al-Bahari holds the record as one of the hottest places on our planet (a temperature of 55 degrees Celsius was recorded recently).


From" The Illustrated Guide to Luxor" by kent R.Weeks ,published by the American University in Cairo Press. Copyright © 2005 White Star S.p.a