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entrance. This was meant to accentuate the entrance. Accentuating the entrance of the temple
made a temple look more important according to Roman architectural traditions. The Taffeh
temple being built on a platform with a stairway leading to it might therefore be an indication that
the Taffeh temple was meant to impress people. This could be seen as a form of propaganda from
the Romans to ensure the loyalty of the local population (Van Beek et al. 2014, 115).
As mentioned before the priests in Egypt used to have a powerful position in society. Therefore it
must have been important to the Romans to decrease that power by taking firmer control of the
organisation, including the building, restoring and expanding, of temples. When building temples
themselves and controlling those who were to be in charge of these temples they decreased the
power of the local priests. This could have been the reason behind building the southern temple. It
was much less prominently located than the Taffeh temple, but could have been a way to please
the priests in this area by allowing them to have a temple. At the same time the chapel
overlooking both the southern temple and the Taffeh valley could have been built to impress the
local population and the priests as a reminder they were not in charge anymore and would only be
allowed the privilege of keeping their priesthood as a reward for being loyal to the Roman empire.
This is all related to the Romans controlling their empire. The growth of the Roman empire
resulted in increased interactions between cultural groups that in turn resulted in cultures defining
their own culture and creating differences between themselves and others. At the same time
however those processes of defining cultures and their characteristics also resulted in cultures
taking over each others characteristics and making them their own, as well as the emergence of a
global culture. Aside from the difficulty of controlling a large empire the Romans were dealing with
a lot of different cultures within their territory, which meant they had to carefully establish political
strategies to keep all these areas under control (Hodos 2017, 4-6; Hodos 2014, 244).