Amazing Temples of the World

Temples have been places of worship, a focus for spirituality and a place for communities to gather since the earliest days of human civilisation. The first temples date back to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, deriving from the cult of deities and residing places for gods and immortals. Today, temple buildings remain lively focal points for the Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain and Sikh religions.
Organised by continent, Amazing Temples of the World offers the reader an intimate portrait of some spectacular and unusual places of worship dating from the fourth millennium BCE to the present.
Marvel at Abu Simbel, the 33-metre (108-ft) high rock-carved monument to the Pharaoh Ramses II in southern Egypt; learn about the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the spiritual home of the world’s 25 million Sikhs; explore the Eldridge Street Synagogue, built in 1887 by East European Jews in the heart of New York’s Chinatown; tour the Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu, the fifteenth-century Inca citadel perched high in the Peruvian Andes; and experience the tranquillity of the floating torii gate at the Itsukushima Shinto shrine in Japan.
Illustrated with more than 180 photographs, Amazing Temples of the World includes more than 120 places of worship, from Ancient Greece and Rome, through traditional synagogues to modern Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist and Sikh temples.