It was the great work Description de l'Egypt, published in Paris in 1809-1928, that first drew Western attention to Egyptian art and architecture. Using this work as his primary source, Dieter Arnold has reconstructed and redrawn all of the lost buildings of the Late Period--some in computer assisted images--and redrawn all other available plans. These, along with superb photographs of extant temples dating to Ptolemaic and Roman times, are included in this book on the formal and stylistic development of Egyptian temple architecture. 

Set against the background of the fascinating struggle of Egyptian culture with Assyrian, Greek, Persian, and Roman instrusion, the study places special emphasis on the survival of Egyptian building elements in Roman and Medieval European architecture. The book includes descriptions of building volume, stylistic evaluations, and foreign connections of the monuments as well as a detailed account of all known building activities from the end of the New Kingdom (c 716 BC) to the end of the Roman period.