双语+MP3|美国学生艺术史61 神　庙

 
以上就是世界上最古老的房子，为死人建造的房屋。它们是金字塔和坟墓。 
61 HOUSES FOR GODS神　庙
 
ALL of you at some time or other have built a house. It may have been a house of cards that blew over very easily, or it may have been made of books, or it may have been made of building blocks, or it may have been a shack in the back yard. 
Now, every house must have walls and a roof. If you lean two blocks or cards together you have the walls forming a roof and the roof forming the walls. That is the simplest way—the sides form both walls and roof, as in a tent or a wigwam. The sides of the pyramids were both walls and roof. A pyramid was shaped something like a tent, but was built solid except for the small rooms in the center. 
I told you the oldest buildings were tombs. The next oldest buildings were temples— houses men built for their gods. On the next page is a picture of the ruin of what we think was a temple. It probably never had a roof, but you can see several stone crossbeams still in place. It is called Stonehenge and it’s not in Egypt, it’s in England. I am showing it to you here because the stones still standing show very well how it was built—not as the pyramids were built, but by putting one stone across two standing stones. This is the second way of building. 
 
No.61-1　STONEHENGE, ENGLAND （史前巨石柱，英国） 
Photograph by Ewing Galloway 
The ruins of Stonehenge look very much like something a child might build out of blocks—two blocks standing up with one laid across. But these blocks are of stone, immense stones many times bigger than a man. Stonehenge probably was built just to inclose a space that was set aside as holy ground, where the ancient men came to worship the Sun God, for this was long before Christ was born and before the Christian religion. We call the people who built Stonehenge, Druids. 
One of the greatest and oldest of temples is in Egypt. It is the temple at Karnak, part of which was built by Rameses the Great, the Pharaoh who ordered all the Israelite children in Egypt killed. It also is a ruin and one of the most beautiful ruins in the world. You may feel that a ruin could not be beautiful. A broken down and dilapidated house or man is not usually beautiful. Why do you suppose this ruin of Karnak is called beautiful? I know a man who built a ruin in his garden! That’s absurd, of 
The main columns at Karnak which once supported the roof were almost seventy feet high (twelve times as high as a man standing up) and twelve feet wide (twice as thick as a man’s height when he is lying down). These columns were made to look either like a single lotus flower or a bouquet of lotus flowers. Lotus flowers were water lilies that grew in the Nile. 
There are other Egyptian temples, but though all of them are smaller, all were built in somewhat the same way. First there was an avenue of sphinxes leading to the temple, and then there were two obelisks. An obelisk is a tall, upright stone pointed at the top and it was supposed to represent a ray of the sun. 
 
No.61-2　RESTORATION OF TEMPLE OF AMON, KARNAK （卡尔纳克的阿蒙神庙复原） 
Courtesy of The University Prints 
After the obelisks, came the gateway to the temple. This was made with two huge towers called pylons one at each side of the door. The pylon walls slant inward and if they went higher they would meet like a pyramid. It is thought that the old astrologers— that is, men who told fortunes from the stars—used to go up on top of these pylons to“read the stars.” The front of these pylons had figures cut into the rock face. See picture No.32-1 in Chapter32. 
Back of the gateway was a walled courtyard, and back of that was a hall of columns called a hypostyle hall, and back of that the Holy of Holies where the statue of the god was kept. 
You know how people, when they go abroad, bring home souvenirs. Well, nations have done the same thing. They have carried away many of the obelisks in Egypt and taken them to their own countries. Sometimes these souvenirs have been given, sometimes they have been bought, sometimes they have been stolen. We have one in Central Park, New York, and there is another in London on the bank of the river Thames. These two obelisks are called “Cleopatra’s Needles,” though they were made long before the Queen of Egypt named Cleopatra lived and they look more like giant pencils than needles. One is in Paris in the center of a beautiful square. There are many in Rome.