=Temples.=--The New Theban Empire was the great age of Temple Building. It is characteristic of the conservatism of the Egyptians not only that the style of their monumental architecture was evolved from the rude primitive hut-construction but also that it preserved features of the latter, even though the necessity for them no longer existed. And so persistent was the adherence to these features, now transformed into elements of beauty, that they were continued even in the later temples, built during the period of Roman domination. It has been suggested that the origin of the style can be discovered in the modelled and sculptured reliefs of the house of the deceased, found in the earliest rock-cut tombs. The house represents a developed stage of the still earlier hut, the character of which was determined by the scarcity of wood. Instead, therefore, of employing poles, connected by wattled twigs or reeds and covered with mud, the Egyptians fashioned the alluvial deposit into bricks, dried in the sun, which they laid in horizontal courses, each layer projecting inwards, until the walls met at the top. Gradually this beehive form of construction was modified in the better class of dwellings, by the adoption of a square plan and the use of the trunks of palm trees to form the lintel of the door and to support a flat mud-covered roof. The representations at =Gizeh= show that bundles of reeds were used to reinforce the angles of the structure and were also laid along the top of the walls, so as to form a rolled border, corresponding to what is later called a _torus_. This, through the weight of the roof, had a tendency to be forced outward, so that it formed what was practically a concave cornice along the top of the wall. Hence the so-called _cavetto_ cornice which is one of the marked distinctions of the Egyptian monumental style. Moreover, while the sun-dried bricks acquire a hardness and compactness, they are unable to sustain much pressure, so that it was necessary to make the walls thicker at the bottom than at the top. From this resulted the _batter_ of the walls, which is another distinctive characteristic of the Egyptian style. Further, owing to the intense heat, windows were dispensed with and the walls in consequence were unbroken except by the entrance. To this day the houses of the poorer classes are built as of old and present the rudiments out of which was developed the style of the stone-built temples, so vastly impressive in the embodied suggestion of elemental grandeur and eternal durability.