An important survey of ancient Egyptian temples and the rituals associated with their use. Shafer - a renowned Egyptologist - covers the entire pharaonic era, from the Old Kingdom to the Roman period. He offers a fresh perspective on ritual and its cultural significance, demonstrating the role of temples as loci for the creative interplay of sacred space and sacred time. The book challenges the traditional division of temples into the categories of either mortuary or divine, showing that their functions and symbolic representations were, at once, too varied and too intertwined.