Christliche Architektur in Agypten.

• Author: MacCoull, Leslie S.B.
• Position: Book Review

Christliche Architektur in Agypten. By PETER GROSSMANN. Handbook of Oriental Studies, vol. 1, no. 62. Leiden: BRILL, 2002. Pp. xxxi + 605, plates. $145.

For several decades now it has been to the nearly single-handed efforts of Peter Grossmann of the Cairo Deutsches Archaologisches Institut--backed by German government money and power--that we have owed our knowledge and the preservation of the Christian built environment on the soil of Egypt. And this in an era in which all too often (as he describes in a couple of scary footnotes) monasteries and churches vanish under parking lots. Grossmann's achievement has recently been honored by a Festschrift appropriately titled Themelia, "Foundations" (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1998). Now this unrivaled expert has put his comprehensive, on-the-ground knowledge between the covers of an indispensable handbook on the subject that is at once a history, a typology, and a guide.

Part one, in six main chapters, is the historical-typological section. Grossmann emphasizes the continuity of Christian building in Egypt with that of general late Roman antiquity all around the Mediterranean, and rightly downplays romantic notions of Pharaonic carryovers. He also, from an engineering background, stresses the influence of local building materials and the prominence of spolia. (Surprisingly to this reviewer, he hardly admits the influence of confessional stance--Dyophysite or Miaphysite--on constructional form; and on p. 65 he repeats the old opinion that most Greek-speaking upper-class Egyptians were Chalcedonians, which is surely no longer tenable.) Almost nothing early survives, and Grossmann is quite sensible (pp. 43-48) on the rarity of conversions of Pharaonic temples. He divides churches into two main categories: urban and monastic, answering to the needs of two different kinds of congregations. The design of church buildings for these two groups (chaps. 2.1-2.2) was carried on until the historical break of the mid-seventh-century Moslem conquest, with influences going sometimes from monastic to urban, sometimes in the other direction.

In diocesan churches, buildings tended to be either longitudinal (often with multiple sanctuaries) or centralized; while buildings for cenobitic monks, those for the idiorrhythmics, and even self-constructions for solitaries differed as one might expect, with monastic buildings being more idiosyncratic and more conservative than urban. After A.D. 650, with government building...