<P> The traditional design was a highly symbolic variety of sacred architecture . It was a greatly elaborated variant on the design of an Egyptian house, reflecting its role as the god's home . Moreover, the temple represented a piece of the divine realm on earth . The elevated, enclosed sanctuary was equated with the sacred hill where the world was created in Egyptian myth and with the burial chamber of a tomb, where the god's ba, or spirit, came to inhabit its cult image just as a human ba came to inhabit its mummy . This crucial place, the Egyptians believed, had to be insulated from the impure outside world . Therefore, as one moved toward the sanctuary the amount of outside light decreased, and restrictions on who could enter increased . Yet the temple could also represent the world itself . The processional way could therefore stand for the path of the sun traveling across the sky, and the sanctuary for the Duat where it was believed to set and to be reborn at night . The space outside the building was thus equated with the waters of chaos that lay outside the world, while the temple represented the order of the cosmos and the place where that order was continually renewed . </P> <P> The temple's inner chambers centered on the sanctuary of the temple's primary god, which typically lay along the axis near the back of the temple building, and in pyramid temples directly against the pyramid base . The sanctuary was the focus of temple ritual, the place where the divine presence manifested most strongly . The form in which it manifested itself varied . In Aten temples and traditional solar shrines, the object of ritual was the sun itself or a benben stone representing the sun, worshipped in a court open to the sky . In many mortuary temples, the inner areas contained statues of the deceased pharaoh, or a false door where his bꜣ ("personality", Egyptological ba) was believed to appear to receive offerings . </P> <P> In most temples, the focus was the cult image: a statue of the temple god which that god's ba was believed to inhabit while interacting with humans . The sanctuary in these temples contained either a naos, a cabinet - like shrine that housed the divine image, or a model barque containing the image within its cabin, which was used to carry the image during festival processions . In some cases the sanctuary may have housed several cult statues . To emphasize the sanctuary's sacred nature, it was kept in total darkness . Whereas in earlier times the sanctuary lay at the very back of the building, in the Late and Ptolemaic periods it became a freestanding building inside the temple, further insulated from the outside world by the surrounding corridors and rooms . </P> <P> Subsidiary chapels, dedicated to deities associated with the primary god, lay to the sides of the main one . When the main temple god was male, the secondary chapels were often dedicated to that god's mythological consort and child . The secondary chapels in mortuary temples were devoted to gods associated with kingship . </P>

The egyptian structures were designed for all of the following purposes except