A Gateway Shaped Like the Horizon

A pylon consists of two massive, battered towers, their outer walls sloping inward as they rise, joined by a lower gateway section pierced with a single doorway on the temple's central axis. The form is thought to visually echo the hieroglyph for akhet, the horizon, written as the sun disc resting between two hills, so that passing through the gateway between the towers reenacted, on an architectural scale, the sun's own daily passage between the horizon's two peaks. This was not incidental symbolism attached after the fact. Temples were themselves conceived as models of the cosmos, and the pylon functioned as their formal boundary between ordered, consecrated space and the undifferentiated world outside.

Pylon faces were carved and painted with a recurring ceremonial scene, the reigning pharaoh grasping a group of bound enemies by the hair with one hand and raising a mace to strike them with the other, presented before a god who extends the king a sword or symbol of victory. Vertical grooves cut into the towers held tall cedar flagpoles topped with metal finials, from which brightly colored streamers flew, visible from a considerable distance and marking the temple's presence long before a visitor reached its gate.