Ancient Egyptian

Ancient Egyptian temples and tombs were built of cut limestone and sandstone, with granite for obelisks and statues. Outer walls are battered, sloping inward as they rise. A temple entrance is a pylon: two tapering towers on either side of a gateway. Inside, closely spaced columns have capitals (the carved tops) shaped like papyrus bundles, lotus buds or palm fronds, and walls are covered with painted reliefs and hieroglyphs.

The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, in Luxor, has a stone roof carried on 134 columns in 16 rows; the 12 central columns are 21 m tall. At Abu Simbel, four seated statues of Ramesses II, each 20 m high, are cut from the cliff at the temple entrance. The Temple of Edfu (237-57 BCE) keeps its pylon, courtyard and roofed halls largely intact. Unlike Greek temples, Egyptian temples were enclosed by high walls, and their halls grew smaller and darker toward the sanctuary.

Monumental stone building in Egypt began with the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, built about 2667-2648 BCE. Its designer, Djoser's official Imhotep, started it as a mastaba, a flat-topped rectangular tomb, and enlarged it into six stepped tiers 62.5 m high. It is generally considered the earliest large-scale cut-stone construction. Smooth-sided pyramids followed, including the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, about 2560 BCE.

During the New Kingdom (about 1550-1070 BCE), pharaohs built and enlarged temples. Almost every ruler of the 18th Dynasty added to Karnak, and Seti I and Ramesses II built most of its hypostyle hall. Ramesses II's temples at Abu Simbel date from about 1264-1244 BCE. The Ptolemaic kings, who ruled Egypt from 305 to 30 BCE, kept building in the traditional manner. After Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, the French survey Description de l'Égypte, published through 1826, spread drawings of the ruins in Europe and helped start Egyptian Revival architecture.