Luxor Temple as a Reactivated Holy Site. Sacred Architecture Between Cosmology and Authority

Abstract

AbstractThe ancient Egyptian temples were the axis of the cosmos and the source of power, with their lingering charisma in the ancient sacred landscape. After the religious paradigm shift from polytheism to monotheism since late Antiquity, their transformation started. It had so many phases or faces: abandonment, destruction, being a source for retrieving building materials, the reuse for a religious or secular purposes. The fate of these temples in late Antiquity cannot be understood without approaching the most broader meaning of the landscape and the metaphysical position of temples in it, as a part of how the traditional man saw his cosmos and the complex system of his ontological understanding. This paper will focus on Luxor Amun-Re Temple in the heart of Ancient Thebes, following its reuse as a military fortress in the third century AD, with the divine king chamber reused for an imperial cult, then reaching the impact of the domination of Christianity, and then reaching the link between the ancient “Opet Festival” and the modern celebratory tradition “Mulid of Sidi Abu'l Hajjaj al-Uqsori”. All indicates the temple transformation as a reactivated holy site over time, within the public ontological understanding of the sacred power and its points of access, in spite of changes in the perceptions of religion. This assumption is based on applying Mircea Eliade’s phenomenological analysis of the religious experience. The research is using the tools of ethnographic descriptions, iconographic representations, archaeological evidences and archaeoastronomical studies for the interpretation, with the hermeneutic phenomenology as a methodology.KeywordsLuxor templeCosmologyChristianizingLate Antiquity