Abstract
Divine and royal statuary is an integral part of the Egyptian temple.
The temples we visit today may have kept their walls, and sometimes even their ceilings, but most of them are almost completely emptied of their rich furnishings, which included statues, altars, offering tables, steles and more.
This material has disappeared through wear and tear, destruction, cutting, transfer, re-use, looting and other unpleasantness. What survived was mostly dispersed in museums and collections of Egyptian antiquities, or as a last resort, simply for security reasons, in national antiquities reserves.
Isolated from their context, these statues are considered as works of art, to be admired for their artistic or technical quality, or as archaeological objects to be studied, often as a support for inscriptions intended to translate them, without always knowing their provenance or understanding their raison d'être.
However, the program of scenes sculpted on the walls of these temples, now devoid of their statuary, based on rare statues preserved in situ and those that have survived in rock temples, helps us to partially reconstruct the content of the furniture. Comparisons between statuary and two-dimensional representations help us to better determine the position of statuary categories and even the distribution of statuary types in distinct parts of the temples, according to a well-defined program.
