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It is always furnished with a base like that of the polygonal pillar, sometimes square with the ground, and sometimes slightly rounded. This base is either plain, or ornamented only with a line of hieroglyphs. The principal forms fall into three types: the column with campaniform, or lotus-flower capital; the column with lotus-bud capital; the column with Hathor-head capital.
III. Columns with Hathor-head Capitals. We find examples of the Hathor- headed column dating from ancient times, as at Deir el Baharî; but this order is best known in buildings of the Ptolemaic period, as at Contra Latopolis, Philae, and Denderah. The shaft and the base present no special characteristics. They resemble those of the campaniform columns. The capital is in two divisions.
We have thus far treated separately of each type; but when various types were associated in a single building, no fixed relative proportions were observed. There are halls in the temple of Khonsû where the lotus- bud column is the loftiest, and others where the campaniform dominates the rest. In what remains of the Medamot structure, campaniform and lotus-bud columns are of equal height.
Between these are figured shoots of lotus and papyrus in flower and bud. The height of the capital, and the extent of its projection beyond the line of the shaft, varied with the taste of the architect. At Luxor, the campaniform capitals are eleven and a half feet in diameter at the neck, eighteen feet in diameter at the top, and eleven and a half feet in height.
At Medamot, where the shaft is clustered, the architect has doubtless thought that one tie at the top appeared insufficient to hold in a dozen colonnettes; he has therefore marked two other rings of bands at regular intervals. The campaniform capital is decorated from the spring of the curve with a row of leaves, like those which sheathe the base.
And here, in the Ramesseum, I found campaniform, or lotus-flower capitals on the columns here where Rameses once perhaps dreamed of his Syrian campaigns, or of that famous combat when, "like Baal in his fury," he fought single-handed against the host of the Hittites massed in two thousand, five hundred chariots to overthrow him. The Ramesseum is a temple not of winds, but of soft and kindly airs.
In the hypostyle hall of Karnak, at Abydos, at the Ramesseum, and at Medinet Habû, various other ornaments, as triangular leaves, hieroglyphic inscriptions, or bands of cartouches flanked by uraei, fill the space thus unfortunately obtained. Neither is the abacus hidden as in the campaniform capital, but stands out boldly, and displays the cartouche of the royal founder.
At Karnak, the campaniform columns of the hypostyle hall measure 10 feet high in the capital, and 55 feet high in the shaft, with a lower diameter of 11 feet 8 inches. At Luxor, the capital measures 11-1/2 feet, the shaft 49 feet, and the diameter at the spring of the base 11-1/4 feet. At the Ramesseum, the shaft and capital measure 35 feet, and the spring diameter is 6-1/2 feet.
I. Columns with Campaniform Capitals. The shaft is generally plain, or merely engraved with inscriptions or bas-reliefs. Sometimes, however, as at Medamot, it is formed of six large and six small colonnettes in alternation.
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