Care for the ancients

Looking at the Met's Aida tonight--or at least the first part of it--you can see that much
of the background is painted to look weathered, cracked, and worn. For a palace scene that
makes no sense, of course--everything would be made to look as good as possible.(*)

Egypt has been old for a long time. Did the rulers of Dynasty X take care to keep the temples of Dynasty X-N in good repair? If the gods weren't the currently fashionable ones, the temples might have been left to their own patrons' support. That might leave some decrepit-looking buildings around, which might not be the impression a pharaoh would want to give.

How about the funerary temples?

Some of the later builders scavenged stone, and there has to have been a huge black market in tomb-robbed gold, to which somebody was turning a blind eye. Perhaps, despite the elaborate efforts to maintain service for the dead, the ancestral service only lasted as long as the annuity. In addition, I suppose that the notables of N Dynasties back weren't really the ancestors of the current rulers.

Where paint survives on the temples, I assume we can figure out how often it was repainted. I'm pretty sure they could have used a little touch-up every few hundred years, and it would tell us something about their attitudes to the works of the ancients if the reliefs got the touch-up or not. Although something might be too sacred to monkey with, or too old-fashioned to keep in repair--the effect would be similar.

I'm tolerably sure that, even if a family lived in the same home for centuries and kept up the accruing memorials to the kas of all the ancestors, most of them would be honored en masse, because nobody could remember who they were. To be forgotten was a terrible fate for a ka, and observing this would make it a live worry for the living. "How can I make sure I will be remembered as me and not as 'honored ancestors'?"

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(*) I wonder how many of the "hieroglyphs" Aida used in its decorations actually meant something? I can imagine some of the stage-crew getting a little creative. In their shoes, I'd try. It isn't as though anybody was trying extra hard for authenticity--the central figure in the "stone" trio of statues is a woman, of the same height as the men.