Notes on Medinet Habu

May 17, 2006

Medinet Habu poses some challenges to interpretation, every bit as much as a novel or symphony. Any cultural product experienced in time makes demands on the mind: how do the assorted details cohere and make a unity. Faced with a book of random newspaper clippings, the mind may well give up in its effort.. but shy of that the mind will strive to gather any sequence of experiences into a unity. The design of a temple, as much as for a novel, calls for an ability to use details to link together the experience of a visitor.

1. Medinet Habu.. the mortuary temple for Ramesses III.. begins with a striking architectural exception. The visitor encounters a model Hittite castle:

The castle turrets and and the towers will not be found anywhere else in Egypt but here. Ramesses III was celebrating his victorious battles, and one way to do that was to introduce a heterogeneous structure. It is something of a curveball thrown at the visitor. In its overall effect it reminds me of the faux-news documentary opening to Citizen Kane. In that case too, a larger work has incorporated and used a form that is borrowed from outside the usual stock of film scenes.

2. Once inside Medinet Habu the visitor comes across a much smaller temple that is actually a stand-alone Middle Kingdom temple that has been swallowed by the much larger New Kingdom creation of Ramesses III.

This smallish temple (compare the slender column here with the huge columns used in the mortuary temple proper) was apparently constructed by the earlier rulers Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III.. in honor of the god Amun. The larger mortuary temple by incorporating this earlier temple within its boundaries seems to beg us to interpret it by means of this smaller structure. The mortuary temple of Ramesses III may be much larger, but its meaning is linked to this obviously significant structure, which was not simply razed to the ground to make way for the new, but physically included in the new structure. We could compare the quotation of a poem within a long novel.. a case in which an author is overtly trying to borrow a little literary authority and resonance for his or her own work.

3. Both in Medinet Habu and in the Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir al-Bahri, I thought I detected the use of color as a way to give unity to a large structure. This is difficult to see sometimes because so much of the originally vibrant colors are gone, but on occasion the colors are clear.

I do not mean simply the coloring of the large figures portrayed on the walls, or the stars against a deep blue ceiling.. but the use on the lowest level of colored stripes which are repeated at the same level on columns and on the walls. What goes on above these stripes can be anything, but as long as this lower layer is present, the whole will obviously be part of the same structure. Even more fascinating is the fact that the Temple of Hatshepsut adopts a slightly different, but still consistent, color scheme running along the walls.

In this case the distinctive red over yellow stripe runs along much of the structure. In any experience of a large scale work one hopes for more unity than simple stripes or other color patterns, but while larger thematic themes are the goal, simple stylistic devices can be effective at alerting us that something coherent is taking place.. egging us on to consider more carefully the larger structure.

4. An unsung element of interpretation is metaphoric parallelism. Straight ahead narrative is one way to build a large structure: this happens, then this happens, then this happens.. and finally this takes place. But the parallels between distinct parts of that larger narrative will be signaled by metaphors. In other words, if a novelist tells a multi-generational story of a family, and wants the reader to see a certain pattern in the choices of the various characters, then either the novelist breaks in and tells the reader about the pattern, or the novelist develops verbal and metaphoric parallels that allow the reader, on his or her own, to make those connections. The larger "meaning" for a cultural product will often lie exactly in these metaphoric parallels.

On the outside wall of the mortuary temple, facing the mud brick palace that links with the temple, we ran into the above pictorial representation. It is a scene in which the king (outside the picture to the left) is hunting in the marshes. A large bull charges ahead through the stalks of papyrus, while different fish and even a duck crowd together haphazardly in the right corner. It is a scene that almost exactly mirrors the scene within the temple in which the king is shown riding into a crowd of enemy troops, who are also messily thrown together. In both cases the idea is that the king is mastering places of disorder.. bringing his rule. These portrayals of disorder quickly give way to the usual well-ordered Egyptian hieroglyphic lines, deployed neatly and confidently. If we can speak of a meaning to this mortuary temple, then it will arise as we locate these metaphoric parallels.