Page 139 - اثار مصر الفرعونية2

sixteen single block pink granite pillars, many of which are still
in place today, that supported architrave blocks of the same
material, bound together with copper bands in the form of a
swallow's tail. These in turn supported the roof.

Here, in the dim light provided by slits at the tops of the
walls, stood as many as twenty four statues of the king (though
one statue base in the middle that is larger than the others may
have been counted twice) made from diorite, slate and alabaster.
This line of statues continues along the cross of the T shaped hall
ending at a doorway that leads to a corridor from which a
stairway ramp winds clockwise up and over the top of the
corridor before terminating on the roof of the valley temple.

On the south side of the roof was a small courtyard, situated
directly over six storage chambers also built of pink granite and
arranged in two stories of three units each. These were embedded
in the core masonry of the T shaped hall. Symbolic conduits
lined in alabaster, a material specifically identified with
purification, run from the temple's roof courtyard down into the
deep, dark chambers below. These symbolic circuits run through
the entire temple, taking in both the chthonic and the solar
aspects of the afterlife beliefs and of the embalming ritual for
which the valley temple was the stage, according to some
Egyptologists.

Hence, the Polish scholar Bernhardt Grdseloff proposed that

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