Foundation ceremonies

The ritual sequence

From the First Dynasty down to the Ptolemaic Period the Egyptians performed a ritual ceremony for the foundation of sacred buildings in which practical and symbolic actions were closely interlaced. In the elaborated version of the Ptolemaic Period, this ceremony consisted of ten different steps:

1. – the king departs from his palace;

2. – the king arrives on the site of the new temple;

3. – the king and the goddess Seshat drive into the ground two poles around which a rope is extended. This operation is called pd-šsr, ‘stretching the cord’. Some of the spells which are associated with this scene explicitly state that in this way the orientation of the temple and its four corners were fixed;

4. – the king digs the foundation trench down to the water-table, ‘as far as the limit of Nun’, the primeval ocean;

5. – the king moulds four bricks for the four corners of the temple;

6. – the king pours sand in the foundation trench, thus providing a compact surface on which to build;

7. – the king places a number of stone or metal plaques at the four corners of the temple. In the representations in the Temple of Edfu, the plaques are seventeen, while at Dendera they are twenty-four;

8. – the king moves into place the first stone block;

9. – the king purifies the completed temple by throwing natron all around the building, represented as a small shrine;

10. – the king presents the temple to the god. Once more, the temple is represented as a miniature.

The action corresponding to the third step in the Ptolemaic ritual, the ‘stretching of the cord’, appears to have been the name of the foundation ceremony already at the time of the Palermo Stone, which records two similar events.