Forty-three centuries ago, pharaoh Pepi I ordered work to begin on his pyramid complex, which he called Men-Nefer-Pepi, ‘Enduring is the Perfection of Pepi’. This funerary monument was on the small side for a pyramid, but a shortened form of the name, Men-Nefer — later transcribed into Greek as ‘Memphis’ — became associated with the old capital city on the west bank of the Nile, just southwest of the later Cairo. Millennia later and a continent away, along another great river, the Mississippi, Memphis would give its name to a growing city (to be joined by several Cairos and a Thebes as well). Ancient Egypt inspired more than just toponyms in Tennessee. In 1848, William Strickland won the commission for the First Presbyterian Church in Nashville and created what might seem to be a contradiction in terms — a Christian house of worship decorated in the style of the pagan temples of Egypt.
Strickland might never have made his unusual choice, and the committee probably never would have accepted it, were it not for Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. The French military adventure failed, but the savants — architects, engineers and artists whom Napoleon gathered to accompany the soldiers — succeeded in producing the first accurate publications of many ancient Egyptians tombs, temples and assorted artifacts. Of iconic significance among those objects was the Rosetta Stone, which provided the key to the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script in 1822. The lavish plates of the multi-volume Description de l’Egypte also became the initial design manuals for Egyptian Revival art and architecture in Europe and North America.
Following on ancient interest in the African region’s architecture and imagery that last flourished under the Roman Empire, a new burst of Egyptomania had begun. In the first half of the 19th century, ancient Egypt was an important motif in American literature, and US architects mined the style for cemetery gateways, penitentiaries and a medical college, inspired by the ancient civilisation’s approach to death, justice and healing.
William Strickland’s best known works were Neoclassical designs for government buildings, whose columns and pediments evoked the ancient ideals of Athens and pre-imperial Rome that the new republic hoped to emulate. When Strickland proposed an Egyptian Revival church in Nashville, work was already underway on the magnificent Neoclassical Tennessee State Capitol. Strickland had studied under Benjamin Henry Latrobe, another master of Greek and Roman Revival style. Latrobe has the distinction of proposing the earliest American interior with Egyptianising elements, an 1808 design — unfortunately never realised — for the Library of Congress, which included battered windows, mimicking the shapes of Egyptian temple pylon gateways and open papyrus-bud columns.
Strickland incorporated those same design elements in the First Presbyterian Church (now the Downtown Presbyterian Church), and went a step further, placing an ancient Egyptian symbol on the entablature above the main door. When those elements were completed in the 1870s, two decades after the architect’s death, congregants entered the church beneath a sun disk flanked by two outstretched wings, a motif that any ancient priest or priestess would recognise immediately as a common decoration above temple doorways. For the Egyptians, this was an image of the solar disk of the creator deity travelling between wings that originally represented the two halves of the sky. The two rearing cobras on either side of the disk signified that the heavenly body’s warmth and illumination reached to the earth, even into the underworld. In ancient Egypt, rearing cobras also adorned the brow of the king (as on the famous mask of Tutankhamun), the serpent’s burning venom evoking the fiery light of the solar creator and the king’s might.
In the 1880s, bright paintings and trompe-l’oeil frescoes brought the Egyptian designs – including many winged sun-disks – into the First Presbysterian Church and transformed the otherwise spare, rectangular sanctuary into an elaborate columned hall, as well suited to a theatrical set as to a church. German artists Theo Knoch and John Schleicher completed the original paintings, which have been wonderfully restored by EverGreene Architectural Arts.
Three engaged papyrus-capital columns on each side of the pipe organ are painted to resemble their ancient prototypes. Triangles at the bases of the columns are stylisations of the new rhizomes of the papyrus, a manifestation of the ancient Egyptians’ close observation of nature. Frescoes between the engaged columns give the illusion of two additional rows of columns, supporting architraves but otherwise open to the sky. Columned halls in Egyptian temples were roofed, but the frescoes in the Nashville church found inspiration in the famous ‘Pharaoh’s Bed’ on Philae Island, one of the most frequently depicted Nilotic vistas during the 19th century.
Seated in the pews and facing the organ and paintings, you are transported to an ancient temple, but look up and you realise you are actually within that temple. The beams of the coffered ceiling, decorated with intertwined lotuses and gilded rosettes, frame panels of painted sky, mirroring the trompe-l’oeil frescoes. The ceiling of the church sanctuary has become the heavens.
Sacred architecture can embody the divine, encapsulate the infinite, and model the cosmos. In ancient Egyptian temples, the twin pylon towers with their distinctive battered profiles — borrowed for the windows of the First Presbyterian Church — were the hills of the horizon through which the sun rose and set. The scholars and architects who designed the great Gothic cathedrals were also attempting to encapsulate the sacred geometry of the divine creator architect in their works. Probably without fully understanding it, architects of the 19th century who used the Egyptian Revival style — including William Strickland — were reaching back to a much earlier sacred architecture that had done the same.
Strickland and the committee that approved his design certainly appreciated that, theologically, Egypt is a place and a concept that links the Old and New Testament: Moses must leave it, and the infant Jesus must flee to it. In the 19th century, the culture could also have an ecumenical appeal, the source of sacred and sublime beliefs that prefigured Christianity. In the minds of its first parishoners, and certainly its current congregation, the columned hall of the Downtown Presbyterian Church welcomes all. As Yale professor Denison Olmsted stated at the laying of the cornerstone of the Egyptianising cemetery gateway in New Haven, Connecticut, on 18 July 1845, ancient Egypt pre-dated Christianity by so many centuries ‘and is consequently so detached from modern creeds, prejudices or sentiments that it can appeal to any belief’.
