<P> Although they were excluded from the formal rituals of the temple, laymen still sought to interact with the gods . There is little evidence of the religious practices of individual people from early Egyptian history, so Egyptologists' understanding of the subject derives mostly from the New Kingdom or later periods . The evidence from those times indicates that while ordinary Egyptians used many venues to interact with the divine, such as household shrines or community chapels, the official temples with their sequestered gods were a major focus for popular veneration . </P> <P> Unable to address the cult image directly, laymen still attempted to convey their prayers to it . At times they related messages to priests to deliver to the temple deity; at other times they expressed their piety in the parts of the temple that they could access . Courts, doorways, and hypostyle halls might have spaces designated for public prayer . Sometimes people directed their appeals to the royal colossi, which were believed to act as divine intermediaries . More private areas for devotion were located at the building's outer wall, where large niches served as "chapels of the hearing ear" for individuals to speak to the god . </P> <P> The Egyptians also interacted with deities through the donation of offerings, ranging from simple bits of jewelry to large and finely carved statues and stelae . Among their contributions were statues that sat in temple courts, serving as memorials to the donors after their deaths and receiving portions of the temple offerings to sustain the donors' spirits . Other statues served as gifts to the temple god, and inscribed stelae conveyed to the resident deity the donors' prayers and messages of thanks . Over the centuries, so many of these statues accumulated within a temple building that priests sometimes moved them out of the way by burying them in caches beneath the floor . Commoners offered simple wooden or clay models as votives . The form of these models may indicate the reason for their donation . Figurines of women are among the most common types of votive figures, and some are inscribed with a prayer for a woman to bear a child . </P> <P> Festival processions offered a chance for laymen to approach and perhaps even glimpse the cult image in its barque, and for them to receive portions of the god's food . Because the key rituals of any festival still took place within the temple, out of public sight, Egyptologist Anthony Spalinger has questioned whether the processions inspired genuine "religious feelings" or were simply seen as occasions for revelry . In any case, the oracular events during festivals provided an opportunity for people to receive responses from the normally isolated deities, as did the other varieties of oracle that developed late in Egyptian history . Temples eventually became a venue for yet another type of divine contact: dreams . The Egyptians saw dreaming as a means of communion with the divine realm, and by the Ptolemaic period many temples provided buildings for ritual incubation . People slept in these buildings in hopes of contacting the temple god . The petitioners often sought a magical solution to sickness or infertility, but at other times they simply sought an answer to a question, receiving the answer through a dream rather than an oracle . </P>

Why would a roman put a little clay foot by a statue at a temple