FIGURE 4
The hyspostile hall of an Egyptian Temple
The Hypostyle Hall
In Fig.4 below we show a drawing of a typical hypostyle hall being crossed by a procession during
a festival of the god. As can be seen from this figure and the preceding ones, both the amount of
pillars and their impressive thickness are clearly exaggerated for the weight of the superstructure
they had to bear.
The Egyptians were fine engineers, and would never commit such a mistake. Hence, we may clearly conclude that the purpose of the exaggerated number and thickness of these pillars was ritual.
What ritual was that, though? In the introduction to the present essay, we mentioned the fact
that the hypostyle hall was indeed a replica of the subterranean realm of Atlantis or, rather, of
its tropical forest with its enormous trees. Indeed, it represents the Lost Continent sunken under-
ground and rendered dark when the sky collapsed over it. Can we justify such an unusual assertion?
We certainly can.
The semi-obscurity of the hypostyle hall was intended to convey the idea of a nocturnal, gloomy
realm like Hades and Cimmeria. This darkness is further enhanced by the decoration on the roof,
which depicts the starry night sky. The same symbolism is also encountered in tombs such as the
tholoi of Minoan Crete and the tumuli of Etruscan Rome, or even in the domes and crypts of certain
early Christian churches. If we look again at our discussion of Fig.3, we see that this gloomy sky represents the belly of Nut, the Celestial goddess in Egyptian tradition.
This dark abode of the dead corresponds, as we said there, to the region of Paradise, enclosed
between the four Pillars of the World. But the Egyptian Paradise, their land ancestral, was Punt,
the Land of the Gods. Punt is in reality Atlantis, this Egyptian name being a corruption of the
Sanskrit Bandha, a name that literally corresponds to the Dravidian Punt. Punt was precisely the
local (Dravidian) name of Indonesia in ancient times, when the Dravidas still inhabited the place,
before moving on to India and elsewhere. This name was translated into Sanskrit as Bhanda
("Bridge") in the magnificent relation of the Ramayana, one of the first and greatest epics of
all times.
