Art: Ancient Glory in Manhattan

It had been eight years since Cleopatra put an asp to her bosom, Mark Antony had fallen upon his sword, and Rome's victorious Octavian had taken over Egypt. But the Nubian villagers of Dendur, 400 miles up the Nile from Alexandria, had nothing against the Romans. In fact, on the orders of the new Emperor, now called Augustus, visiting Egyptian artisans were building a temple dedicated to two young Nubian princes, Pedesi and Pihor. Both had drowned in the Nile, and victims so chosen by the god of the Nile were automatically apotheosized, as a Greek might be by a lightning bolt from Zeus. From the Roman point of view, the temple was a simple gesture of appeasement and a bid for the allegiance of the local Nubians in the continuing border war with the energetic Kushite kingdom to the south.

Last week, almost exactly two thousand years later, the temple so built stood beneath a gleaming, towering, glassy pavilion newly erected at the north end of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art overlooking Central Park. Dendur's ancient stones glow softly orange as it stands on a wide granite platform skirted by a moat of lapping water, designed to evoke its old site on the west bank of the Nile. Even the rocky escarpment against which it stood has been simulated. The huge skylight and glass north wall set off its looming 26-ft.-high gateway and the squat bulk of the temple itself. Spotlights etch sharp shadows in the sunken reliefs on its walls, where in panel after panel Emperor Augustus, dressed as a pharaoh, respectfully offers incense, eye paint, wine, crowns or flowers to the two brothers, to the ram-headed Khnum, to the great goddess Isis and her son, the falcon-headed Horus. Two carved lions guard an entrance, and the god Heh kneels to support the heavens as represented on the ceiling. There stylized vultures soar across a sky once painted bright blue and studded with gold stars. The doorway itself is flanked by two goddesses represented as crowned cobras twining around the heraldic plants of Egypt.

The third and innermost chamber, the sanctuary where only priests and an occasional petitioner entered, is bare except for a stela representing the two brothers with Osiris and Isis. A concealed chamber behind it may have contained the embalmed bodies of the brothers or, as some suggest, may have been used by a hidden priest to make oracular pronouncements to impress the faithful. But few of them would ever have heard him. For unlike a Christian church, the Egyptian temple was not designed for worshipers to gather to pray. Rather, it was a house built for the god himself, for his comfort and protection from prying eyes when he manifested himself. As a great king, the god did not like the company of common men. Their offerings were accepted on his behalf by the priests, a practice not always appreciated by the villagers. As early as 10 B.C., one Pakhom angrily scrawled an oath on the temple's north wall denouncing the priests' exorbitant demands for tribute.