The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ptolemaic and Roman builders · a temple precinct of the goddess Isis: the main temple, its first pylon, forecourt with birth house, second pylon, pronaos, inner rooms and sanctuary, and chapels on the roof, with the forecourt colonnades, the Kiosk of Nectanebo I, the Temple of Hathor, the Kiosk of Trajan, the Gate of Hadrian and the lesser temples and gates of the precinct · dressed sandstone masonry, trabeated and roofed in stone, carved in relief, with composite floral capitals and traces of painted ceilings · built at the head of the First Cataract of the Nile, just south of Aswan, on Egypt’s southern frontier with Nubia; begun under Ptolemy II Philadelphus about 280 BC and built on and decorated by later Ptolemies and by Roman emperors, the oldest standing part the kiosk of Nectanebo I of the fourth century BC · makers unrecorded, the record naming kings and emperors · closed as a temple under Justinian and part of it made a church of St Stephen; flooded for much of each year for some seventy years after the first Aswan dam · scored as it stands: the temple complex as moved, cut into blocks and re-erected on the island of Agilkia between 1977 and 1980, the moving weighed under The Imperishable alone
Mode
Temple precinct of the late Egyptian type; pylons, courts, birth house, pronaos and sanctuary, with kiosks, gates and lesser temples gathered over six centuries on an island
Mythos
The temple as cosmos: pylon as horizon, sanctuary as primeval mound; the house of Isis facing the tomb of Osiris across water, at the cataract where the Nile was held to rise from its cavern; the birth of Horus built into the court
Phase
Kiosk of Nectanebo I in the fourth century BC; main temple begun under Ptolemy II and built on by later Ptolemies; Roman building and decoration under Augustus, Tiberius, Trajan, Hadrian and later Diocletian; worship kept into late antiquity; closed under Justinian and in part a church; flooded after 1902; moved to Agilkia 1977 to 1980
Presentation
Dressed sandstone, trabeated and roofed in stone; pylons carved in deep relief; colonnades and pronaos with composite floral capitals; a plan without one straight axis, its court narrowing and its pylons out of line
Register
Grace rather than grandeur: the whole seen from the water, the open kiosk on the shore, and within a darkening approach of quiet gravity at a modest scale
Scale
One precinct on one island at a river’s cataract; the goddess and her divine family, the state of foreign rulers, the frontier of Egypt, Nubia and Rome, and the river and its flood
Governing Proposition
At the head of the First Cataract, on Egypt’s southern frontier, Macedonian kings and Roman emperors built and carved the house of Isis on a rock island facing the tomb of Osiris across the water, cutting themselves on its pylons as pharaohs, and bent the old sequence of pylon, court and sanctuary to the shape of the island. The wager was continuity: that the canonical house of the god, restated by foreign rulers, could hold a frontier and a religion together, as it did here after the worship had ended elsewhere in Egypt. The buildings survive whole, taken down and raised again on a neighbouring island; the ground that bent them is under the reservoir.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Philae lay at the head of the First Cataract of the Nile, just south of Aswan, on Egypt’s southern frontier with Nubia. On that island stood the house of Isis. The island is now under the reservoir between the two Aswan dams. The temples stand on Agilkia, an island a few hundred metres away, which was reshaped and landscaped before they were raised again, so that they sit in an island setting like the old one. The island of Biga opposite, with the Abaton of Osiris, and the old island itself are the setting of the work and not its body.
The work scored is the temple complex as it now stands on Agilkia: the main temple of Isis with its pylons, forecourt, birth house, pronaos, inner rooms, sanctuary and roof chapels, together with the colonnades of the forecourt, the Kiosk of Nectanebo I, the Temple of Hathor, the Kiosk of Trajan, the Gate of Hadrian and the lesser temples and gates that went with them. Everything built onto the precinct in its life as a sanctuary, from the fourth century BC kiosk to the Roman gates, is part of the one work. The makers are unrecorded. The record names kings and emperors, not architects.
The first sight of Philae is from the water. Pylons and colonnades rise from the river among granite rocks; the open kiosk stands on the shore; the approach by boat still governs a visit to Agilkia. The image is beautiful, and it recurs at every approach. Within, the rise is lesser. The forecourt is graceful rather than grand, and the darkening approach to the sanctuary has the quiet gravity of every Egyptian temple at a modest scale. There is no terror here and little grandeur of mass. The setting carries much of the elevation, and the setting is now a made island in a reservoir, which tempers what it can claim.
Movement II
The complex has no single straight axis. The forecourt between its colonnades narrows, and it does not run square to the first pylon. The second pylon is not parallel to the first. Between them, in the court, stands the birth house, the mammisi, its colonnade forming one side of the court. Beyond the second pylon come a small pronaos with columns, a sequence of rooms narrowing and darkening toward the sanctuary, and chapels on the roof. The visitor is made to turn and adjust at each threshold, and the procession is lived as a path among things already there rather than as a ruled line.
The core is necessary as every Egyptian temple’s core is necessary. Pylon, court, pronaos, offering rooms and sanctuary are the stages of the approach to the goddess, and none of them could go without loss to the rite. The bends were compelled too: they follow the rock and the shore of the island, an irregularity imposed by ground rather than chosen. But the precinct accreted over six centuries, and much of it is additive: colonnades of unequal finish, gates, kiosks and small temples set where room allowed. Several of these could go without loss to the sanctuary’s meaning. And the ground that compelled the bends is under water, so that on Agilkia they record a lost island.
The bent plan is the most original thing in the complex, and it is not a departure from the tradition. The Ptolemaic temple was deliberately conservative: its builders sought to restate the old house of the god in its canonical form, and they did so with notable success. Philae’s departures are those of circumstance: the trapezoidal court, the birth house set within it, the free variety of composite floral capitals. They are real accents. They risked nothing the tradition would not allow, because what the builders staked was continuity, and a wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve.
Movement III
The main temple was begun under Ptolemy II Philadelphus and built on and decorated by the Ptolemies who followed him. On the first pylon Ptolemy XII Neos Dionysos smites his enemies before the gods: a Macedonian king cut in the oldest pose of the pharaoh. Roman emperors continued the work. Augustus and Tiberius decorated; Trajan built the kiosk on the shore, its fourteen columns with floral capitals, and left it unfinished; Hadrian built the gate that bears his name; later came the Gate of Diocletian. The oldest standing part is earlier than all of them, the kiosk of Nectanebo I of the Thirtieth Dynasty.
Two things are laid open here. The first is the late Egyptian temple as an enclosure of graded access: the public court, the darker pronaos, the dark sanctuary reached by the priest alone, power over the sacred made into distance. That disclosure was formed at Karnak (8.7) and Edfu (8.4) and is inherited. The second is Philae’s own: foreign power wearing the old religion as its dress, the state legitimising itself by building the goddess’s house at the edge of its territory, and a frontier cult that drew pilgrims from Nubia. It is real and specific, but it is carried more by the reliefs and the history than by the architecture’s own form.
The making holds through all these hands. The masonry is fine Ptolemaic sandstone work, dressed and fitted with precision, and the carving is of a high and consistent order: the deep relief of the pylons, the many varieties of composite floral capital, painted ceilings of which traces survive. The roofed spaces are trabeated stone, with no structural daring, and the late relief is fuller and heavier than the New Kingdom’s. The tradition’s deliberate archaism kept one canon of form, proportion and ornament from Nectanebo’s kiosk to Trajan’s, some five centuries apart, so that the precinct reads as one. What strains its law is accretion and incompletion, not any break in the canon.
Movement IV
The Gate of Hadrian bears a relief of the Nile’s source at Biga, the cataract where the river was held to rise from its cavern. Across the water from the house of Isis, on Biga, Osiris lay in the Abaton: the goddess’s house faces her husband’s tomb. The roof chapel of Osiris carries the reliefs of his death and restoration to the top of the temple, and the birth house builds the birth of Horus into the court. The myth of Isis as restorer and mother is constructed in the relation of island, river, tomb and temple, not merely depicted on the walls.
Beneath that particular myth lie the archetypes of the Egyptian temple, and they bear load: the pylon as horizon, the sanctuary as the primeval mound, the procession from light into the dark of origin. They are received whole from earlier building. What Philae builds beyond them is a relation made by siting, and the moving has loosened it. The buildings stand on another island, on other ground, and the rock and the cataract to which they answered are not the original’s. The myth is held in the plan still; its place in the river is partly a record.
At the same gate is cut the graffito of Esmet-Akhom, dated to 394 AD, the last known inscription in hieroglyphs. Philae kept the worship of Isis after it had ended elsewhere in Egypt, under arrangements with the peoples of Lower Nubia, the Blemmyes and the Nobadae, who came to it as pilgrims, and demotic graffiti run into the 450s. By Procopius’s account the temple was closed under Justinian, about 535 to 537, and part of it was made a church of St Stephen; recent scholarship has questioned how much that closure meant. Crosses and Coptic inscriptions are cut into the fabric, and figures in the reliefs were defaced. The last temple of a religion was converted in place, and the conversion is written on its walls.
Movement V
The first Aswan dam was completed in 1902 and raised in 1912 and in 1933. For some seventy years after it the island stood under water for much of each year; the temples were visited by boat, the painted colour that had survived was largely leached away, and the lower courses were scoured by silt. The High Dam, built from 1960 to 1970, would have left them in water that rose and fell each day. Under the UNESCO campaign for the monuments of Nubia a cofferdam was built round the island, the water was pumped out, and the buildings were recorded, cut into blocks and raised again on Agilkia between 1977 and 1980. The complex is part of the World Heritage property of the Nubian monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae, inscribed in 1979.
The form has come through. Pylons, courts, birth house, pronaos, sanctuary, roof chapels, kiosks and gates stand, roofed where they were roofed, with their reliefs, and the stones are the original stones. But the form included the island. The plan was bent to a rock in the cataract, and that ground is lost; Agilkia is a careful substitute, and the buildings were kept at the cost of their place. The temple lost its use some fifteen centuries ago and has since been a church for a time and a monument. Its fabric was defaced, stripped of its colour, scoured, and taken down and rebuilt: the heaviest rebuilding a standing monument can undergo short of reconstruction.
Its reach is broad and mostly not architectural. Its inscriptions in hieroglyphic, demotic, Greek, Meroitic and Coptic make it a document of a frontier over a millennium; its obelisk, removed in the nineteenth century, served the decipherment of hieroglyphs; travellers and painters made its kiosk an emblem of the Nile; and its rescue, with that of Abu Simbel (8.5), set the standard for international heritage campaigns. As architecture it is a fine late instance of a type stated more fully at Edfu, an accretion of six centuries on a bent plan whose ground is gone. It is the goddess’s house without its island, and it stands.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on purpose, structure and site. The core of the main temple passes the subtractive test as every Egyptian temple does: pylon, court, pronaos, offering rooms and sanctuary are the stages of the rite’s approach to the goddess, and none could go without loss. Philae’s own necessity is the island’s: the narrowing forecourt and the pylons out of line follow the rock and the shore, an irregularity compelled by ground rather than chosen. But the complex accreted over six centuries, and much of it is additive: colonnades of unequal finish, gates, kiosks and small temples set where room allowed, the Kiosk of Trajan unfinished. Several parts could go without loss to the sanctuary. And the ground that compelled the bends is under water; on Agilkia they follow an island shaped to receive them. A tenth short of the cap.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The temple lays two things open, and both hold. The first is the late Egyptian temple as an enclosure of graded access: the public court, the darker pronaos, the dark sanctuary reached by the priest alone, power over the sacred made into distance. The second is Philae’s own: foreign power wearing the old religion as its dress, Macedonian kings and Roman emperors cut on the pylons as pharaohs, the state building the goddess’s house at the edge of its territory, and a frontier cult that drew Nubian pilgrims across the border. Its history adds a third, the long survival of a religion at its margin and its conversion in place. The first was formed at Karnak and Edfu and is inherited; the second is carried more by reliefs and history than by the architecture’s own form.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Height and frequency. The elevation of Philae is chiefly that of the whole seen from the water: pylons and colonnades rising from the river among granite rocks, the open kiosk on the shore, an approach by boat that still governs a visit on Agilkia. The image is beautiful, and it recurs at every approach. Within, the rise is lesser. The forecourt is graceful rather than grand; the floral capitals of the colonnades and the pronaos give a varied richness; the darkening approach to the sanctuary has the quiet gravity of every Egyptian temple, at a modest scale. The Kiosk of Trajan, open columns under the sky, is the complex’s most memorable figure. There is no terror and little grandeur of mass, and the setting that carries much of the axis is now a made island in a reservoir.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Myth is built here in the siting, beyond what the type supplies. The temple’s inherited archetypes bear load: the pylon as horizon, the sanctuary as the primeval mound, the procession from light into the dark of origin. To them Philae adds the island of Isis facing Biga, where Osiris lay in the Abaton: the goddess’s house across the water from her husband’s tomb, at the cataract where the Nile was held to rise from its cavern, the source shown on the Gate of Hadrian. The roof chapel of Osiris carries his death and restoration to the building’s top; the birth house builds the birth of Horus into the court. Held below the gate because the archetypes are received whole, and because the moving has loosened the built relation of temple to cataract and rock.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The Ptolemaic temple was deliberately conservative: its builders sought to restate the old house of the god in its canonical form, and they did so with notable success. Philae’s departures are those of circumstance: the bent axis and the trapezoidal court that follow the island, the birth house set within the court, the free variety of composite floral capitals, and the Roman kiosk that turns an Egyptian columned pavilion into a waterside gate. They are real accents, and the irregular plan is the most original thing in the complex. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the stake: the departures risked nothing the tradition would not allow, and continuity was the aim. A wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Would changing the form change what the temple knows? For the core, yes: the narrowing, darkening, rising sequence is how the temple knows the approach to the goddess, and a hall or an open court in its place would empty it. At Philae the form knows the island as well. The asymmetric court and the pylons out of line make the visitor turn and adjust, so that the procession is lived as a path among things already there rather than a ruled axis, and the precinct reads as a sacred island, not a temple on a platform. That is the form as instrument. But much of the instrument is the type’s, and the accreted gates, kiosks and lesser temples are containers more than knowledge: the whole is a gathering more than a single shape.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Evidence of yield on return, over two centuries of study. As the last stronghold of the old religion, Philae is a principal site for the end of pagan Egypt and its passage to Christianity, studied and revised; recent scholarship has questioned how much the closure under Justinian meant. Its inscriptions in hieroglyphic, demotic, Greek, Meroitic and Coptic make it a document of a frontier over a millennium, and its obelisk, removed in the nineteenth century, served the decipherment of hieroglyphs. The moving has itself become a subject of return, in the history of conservation. Architecturally the yield is narrower: the bent plan and the late ritual programme reward study, but the building as space has not drawn the return that Karnak or Edfu draws. Much of the depth is the site’s, as text and history.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The field is the late Egyptian and Nubian temple of the Ptolemaic and Roman centuries. The intrinsic force is modest. Philae does not reorganise the type; Edfu is its fuller statement, and Philae’s distinction is setting and adaptation to ground. Its Roman additions, above all the Kiosk of Trajan, are fine and late, at the end of the line rather than its turning. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its region the temple stood at the frontier as the great neighbour of the temples of Lower Nubia that answered the Egyptian type, though it is not shown to have been their model; beyond its age it entered the European picture of Egypt through the travellers and painters of the nineteenth century, and its rescue set a standard for international heritage campaigns. That reach belongs to its survival more than its making.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is legible and nearly whole: pylons, courts, birth house, pronaos, sanctuary, roof chapels, kiosks and gates stand, roofed where they were roofed, with their reliefs, fifteen centuries after the religion, the state and the frontier that made them. But the form included the island, and that ground is under the reservoir; Agilkia is a careful substitute, and the buildings were kept at the cost of their place. The use was lost about 1,500 years ago, after an unusually long late life and a time as a church. The fabric was defaced in late antiquity, stripped of most of its colour and scoured by seventy years of flooding, then cut into blocks and rebuilt, though the stones are the original stones. The highest of the twelve, and above the gate narrowly.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, structure included. The masonry is fine Ptolemaic sandstone work, dressed and fitted with precision, and the decorative making holds a high and consistent order across six centuries and many hands: the deep relief of the pylons, the many varieties of composite floral capital in the colonnades and the pronaos, the painted ceilings of which traces survive. The roofed spaces are trabeated stone, well within the tradition’s means, with no structural daring, and the late relief style is fuller and heavier than the New Kingdom’s. The Kiosk of Trajan, its tall columns and screen walls, is the finest single piece of making, and it is unfinished. The craft is load-bearing: the temple’s meaning lives in its carved surfaces and in the sequence of its rooms, and it holds across hands and centuries.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Do the most distant elements obey one law? The two most distant are the kiosk of Nectanebo I, of the fourth century BC, and the Roman Kiosk of Trajan, some five centuries later, and they do: the tradition’s deliberate archaism kept one canon of form, proportion and ornament through Ptolemaic and Roman hands, so that the whole reads as one Egyptian precinct. The irregular plan does not break the law; it applies it to uneven ground. What strains it is accretion and incompletion: an unfinished colonnade and kiosk, lesser temples set where room allowed, Roman gates of differing scale. The crosses and the defacement of late antiquity belong to survival, not to the law of the making. Coherent over a wide span, which is the achievement; not the single physics of a building conceived at once.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Orders of reality held in one structure. The sacred is the frame: the goddess, the myth of Osiris, the birth of Horus. The state is held within it, foreign kings and emperors cut as pharaohs and the temple an instrument of rule at a frontier. The natural order is held in the siting at the cataract and in the myth of the Nile’s source and the flood. The frontier between Egypt, Nubia and Rome is held in its pilgrims and its inscriptions, and history in the fabric of the last temple of a religion converted in place, though that order is the building’s fate rather than its design. Consciousness and the family enter only through the divine family of the myth. A large holding for a temple of its size, joined in the siting more than in the plan.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Made at 8.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.1, with The Bottomless Well and The Inner Law at 8.0. A precinct that stands legible and nearly whole fifteen centuries after its religion, though cut from its ground and rebuilt on another island; a sandstone masonry and carving of high and consistent order across six centuries of hands; a myth built in the siting, the house of Isis facing the tomb of Osiris across the water at the river’s fabled source; a site returned to as the last stronghold of the old religion and a document of a frontier; and one canon kept from Nectanebo’s kiosk to Trajan’s.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 6.8, the lowest of the twelve: a deliberately conservative restatement of the canonical temple, whose departures are those of circumstance and risked nothing the tradition would not allow. Then Pressure on Tradition at 7.3: a late instance at the end of the line, its reach owed to its survival and its rescue more than to its making. Then The Inevitable at 7.4: a necessary core inside an accretion of parts that could go, its plan compelled by ground that is now under water. Then The Unconcealment and The Encompassed at 7.6: a disclosure inherited from the older temples and carried more by reliefs than by form, and a large holding joined in the siting more than in the plan. These hold the work below Tier IV. The Temple of Horus at Edfu (8.4), the fuller statement of the same late type, stands higher on all twelve axes; Abu Simbel (8.5), the other monument moved in the Nubian campaign, stands higher on all twelve, closest on survival; Karnak (8.7) stands level on necessity, both being accreted precincts, and higher on the rest. Walt Disney Concert Hall (7.8) stands level with it on a different profile, below it on four axes and above it on six.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable 7.4 falls a tenth short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.7, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.1 falls four tenths short, The Unconcealment at 7.6 nine tenths short, Pressure on Tradition at 7.3 a point and two tenths short and The Swerve at 6.8 a point and seven tenths short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 6.8, Pressure on Tradition, 7.3, and The Inevitable, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, from a sum of 93.2, in the band of Tier III, two tenths short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the Temple of Isis at Philae, of its plan and sequence, its published record and the history of its moving. The complex was not visited, no plan or written source was consulted at the reading, and nothing was measured. Nothing is quoted: no inscription or documented words about the temple are held word for word, and the graffito of Esmet-Akhom is named and dated, not quoted. The unit scored is the temple complex as it stands on the island of Agilkia, where it was moved between 1977 and 1980: the main temple of Isis (first pylon, forecourt with birth house, second pylon, pronaos, inner rooms and sanctuary, roof chapels), with the forecourt colonnades, the Kiosk of Nectanebo I, the Temple of Hathor, the Kiosk of Trajan, the Gate of Hadrian and the lesser temples and gates of the precinct, all built onto it in its life as a sanctuary taken as one work. The makers are unrecorded; the record names the kings and emperors under whom it was built. What now stands where the original was lost: the buildings, taken down in blocks and raised again on Agilkia, an island reshaped and landscaped to receive them, while the island of Philae on which they were built lies under the reservoir between the two Aswan dams; the reliefs defaced in late antiquity and most of their colour lost to some seventy years of seasonal flooding. The moving and the damage are weighed under The Imperishable alone and charged to no maker. Not in the unit, named as context and not scored: the island of Philae itself, the island of Biga with the Abaton of Osiris, the obelisk removed in the nineteenth century, the reliefs and inscriptions as texts in their own right, and the Christian fittings of the church of St Stephen except as changes to what survives. The meaning of the closure under Justinian is given as questioned by recent scholarship, and the temple is not said to have been the model for the temples of Lower Nubia, which is not shown. Facts that could not be verified, among them the number of blocks into which the buildings were cut, the height and width of the first pylon, whether the buildings were raised again in exactly their former relative positions and orientation, whether Biga remains in view from Agilkia, the dimensions of the inner rooms and the areas of the two islands, are not given.