Ancient Egyptian texts, known collectively as the Books of the Netherworld, describe pharaonic funerary complexes as sun-powered resurrection machines that somehow affected a merger of the pharaoh's soul with the sun god. The enduring mystery is how these complexes worked. At the core of Ancient Egyptian mythology and architecture is a purely optical construct.
Djoser's serdab
The second reign in the 3rd Dynasty (2630-2611 BCE) saw a transition from reed, wood, and mud brick temples to large-scale stone monuments. King Djoser's Step Pyramid marks the starting point of the iconic pyramidal form. On the north face of the Pyramid is a peculiar little dark room, called a serdab, with no door and two little holes in the wall. Inside the room is the ka statue of the pharoah. The ka is a spirit double, created at birth, with the physical appearance of the person. After death, the ka would leave the body and travel through the underworld at night and return to its physical representation (the mummy, statue, or artworks) each morning. When the sun rose the image of the landscape, the king's realm, would travel through the two small holes and project onto Djoser's ka sculpture. Simultaneously, the image of the ka sculpture would be projected outward onto the landscape. Light rays do not interfere with each other. The visible image flows from bright space to darkened space, but there is also a set of rays reflected from the dark space into the light space, though they are imperceptible to human eyes. This is the conceptual leap that forms the underpinnings of Ancient Egyptian culture. The Pharaoh's ka was projected physically, optically, onto his lands. In subsequent dynasties the serdab/mortuary temple/solar temple would be constructed on the east face of the pyramid where the pharaoh's statue in the darkened inner-sanctuary would directly face the rising sun on the horizon, projecting the image of the sun onto the ka and, conversely, the ka onto the sun, uniting the two.
Ancient Egyptian funerary complexes can be seen as structures that used physical objects to project ephemeral (sometimes invisible) images onto an otherworldly plane, via real and implied sets of intersecting triangles. A pyramid is nothing more than a tangible expression of an intangible process. Attached to the sides of human-made and naturally formed pyramids were sunrise-aligned temples that were large-scale camera obscuras imbued with religious import. The guiding principle of the architectural design of pharaonic memorial temples is focal length, the distance needed to cast the appropriate sized image of the sun into the sanctuary. The great rock cut temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel has a throw of 60 m, projecting an image of the sun over .5 m in diameter into the inner sanctuary, and conversely, the image of the Pharaoh outward to infinity. The king's soul road on a beam of light.
Abu Simbel
Posted March 9, 2010
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