Although badly ruined, no site in Egypt is more impressive than Karnak. The largest temple complex ever built by man, it represents the combined achievement of generations of ancient builders and covers a truly massive area. Approximately 3 km (1.75 miles) north of the modern city of Luxor, Karnak requires half a day just to walk around its many precincts and years to come to know it well.

The modern name of this great complex, covering over 100 ha (247 acres), is taken from the nearby village of El-Karnak, but its ancient name was Ipet Isut, which means (The Most Select of Places), and it represented not only the seat of the great god Amun-Ra but also contained or adjoined many chapels and temples dedicated to different deities.

There are three main compounds. The main precinct, that of Amun, along with its subsidiary temples, lies in the center directly to the south is the precinct of Amun’s consort Mut; and to the north is the precinct of Montu, the original falcon god of the Theban area who was displaced by Amun. The small temple of Khonsu, third member of Karnak’s great triad (Amun, Mut and Khonsu), stands within the main Amun precinct, along with some 20 other temples and chapels.

I. The Great Temple of Amun:

Built along two axes (east-west and north-south), this sprawling mass of ruined temple must be carefully studied in order to understand its original plan and subsequent growth. The original core of the temple was located near the centre of the east-west axis on a mound which was doubtless an ancient sacred site. From there the temple spread outwards, both towards the Nile in normal temple expansion and also on its other axis towards the outlying Mut temple to the south.

The modern entrance on the west is by way of the quay built by Ramesses II which gave access to the temple from a canal linked to the Nile in ancient times. To the right stands a small barque chapel of Hakoris (393-380 BC) used as a resting station on the gods’ processional journeys to and from the river. A short processional avenue of cryosphixes – their rooms’ heads symbolizing the god Amun and each holding a statue of the king between its lion’s paws – runs from the quay to the temple’s first pylon. This huge entrance structure – originally some 40 m (131 ft) high – is actually unfinished, as may be seen by the unequal height of its upper surface, the uncut blocks which project from its undecorated surfaces, and the remains of the mud brick construction ramp still present on its inner side. The structure may have been built as late as the 30th dynasty by Nectanebo I who raised the temenos walls to which the pylon is attached, but this is uncertain and it is possible that an earlier pylon may have stood on this same spot. High on the thickness of the gate an inscription left by Napoleon’s Expedition is still visible.

The first court encloses an area originally outside the temple proper and so contains a number of criosphinxes displaced from their positions along the processional route as well as several once isolated buildings. To the left is the granite and sandstone triple barque chapel of Sethos II with three chambers for the barques of Mut (left), Amun (centre) and Khonsu (right). Niches within the structure’s walls once held royal statues positioned in watchful attendance on the resting gods. Opposite the triple shrine is a small sphinx with the familiar features of Tutankhamun.

In the centre of the court are the remains of the gigantic kiosk of Taharqa – later usurped by Psammetichus II and restored under the Ptolemies. Originally consisting of ten huge papyrus columns linked by a row screening wall and open at its eastern ends, the building now retains only one great column and a large altar-like block of calcite. Although the function of this building is often presumed to be simply that of a barque shrine, the fact that it was open to the sky suggests that it may in fact have had a special purpose in one of the ritual activities associated with the temple.

To the right is the entrance to the small temple of Ramesses III. In reality it was an elaborate barque shrine designed as a miniature version of that king’s mortuary temple at Madinet Habu. The structure’s first court is thus lined with Osiride statue of the king, and the walls are decorated with various festival scenes and texts. Beyond is a portico and small hypostyle hall and the darkened area of the barque shrines for the members of Karnak’s triad. Next to this temple, on its eastern side, is the so-called ‘Bubastite Portal’ which gives access to the famous scenes of Sheshong I smiting captives on the south face of the main temple’s side wall. The portal on the court’s opposite, northern side leads to an open air museum where a number of small monuments have been reconstructed from dismantled blocks found within the temple’s walls and pylons. These structures include the beautiful and nearly complete limestone barque chapel of Senwosert I, shrines of Amenhotep I and II, and Hatshepsut’s only recently reconstructed red quartzite.

The second pylon was fronted by two striding colossi of Ramesses II, of which only the feet of one remain. In front of these is a third standing statue of the king – with the diminutive figure of the princess Bentanta standing between his feet – which was later usurped by both Ramesses VI (20th dynasty) and the priest ‘king’ Pinudjem I (21st dynasty). The pylon itself was begun in the time of Horemheb but not completed till the reign of Sethos I, and from its core many sandstone talatat blocks of an earlier temple of Akhenaten have been removed.

The second pylon opens into the great hypostyle hall, the most impressive part of the whole Karnak complex. A veritable forest in stone, the hall was filled with 134 papyrus columns, the centre of 12 being larger (some 21 m or 69 ft tall) and with open capitals, the remaining 122 along the sides smaller (some 15 m or 49 ft tall), with closed capitals. Even when standing at their bases it is difficult to grasp the true size of these columns, for a crowd of 50 people could easily stand together on the capitals of the largest. Originally these great columns supported a roof with small clerestory windows – a few of which survive – which would have provided purposely muted illumination for the primeval papyrus swamp which the hall represented. In ancient times the spaces between the columns thronged with statues of gods and kings, a few of which have been placed here in recent times. Against the southern pylon wall is a low alabaster block decorated with Egypt’s enemies, the ‘nine bows’, which served as a barque rest during processions. Although the hall was initiated by Amenophis III, the decoration was begun by Sethos I and completed by Ramesses II, whose more hurried and less subtle sunk reliefs can easily be differentiated from the earlier, raised reliefs in the northern half of the hall. The interior decorations show scenes from the daily ritual as well as processional scenes and mythical topics such as the kings interacting with various gods. The exterior walls of the hall are covered by reliefs celebrating the military exploits of Sethos I and Ramesses II in Syria and Palestine, including Ramesses’ battle at Kadesh.

The third pylon was begun by Amenophis III, though its entrance porch is part of the Ramessid construction of the hall. A great number of reused blocks were found within this pylon – from which most of the monuments of the ‘open air museum’ have been reconstructed. Behind this pylon, four obelisks were erected by Tuthmosis I and III at the entrance to the original, inner temple, though only one of those of the former king remains.

The space between the third and fourth pylons is also the area where the temple’s second axis branches off to the south.

Continuing to the east on the main axis, the fourth and fifth pylons were constructed by Thuthmosis I, and together with the narrow, once-pillared area between them constitute the oldest part of the temple still remaining. This inner temple area received several later additions, however, including the two rose-granite obelisks of Hatshepsut, one of which still stands on the northern side; the other lies shattered to the south.

Little remains of the sixth pylon, built by Tuthmosis III, though the walls still retain the lists of conquered peoples of the south (southern wall) and the north (northern wall). The pylon precedes a court with two magnificent granite pillars bearing the floral emblems of Upper and Lower Egypt on the respective northern and southern sides. The court, which also holds on its north side two large statues of Amun and Amaunet dedicated by Tutankhamun, leads to granite barque shrine. This structure was built by Alexander the great’s successor, Philip Arrhidaeus, and appears to have replaced an earlier shrine of Tuthmosis III. It is divided into two halves: an outer where offerings were made to the god; and the inner, which still contains the pedestal upon which the god’s barque reposed. The inner walls are decorated with depictions of offering rites, with Amun appearing in both his usual anthromorphic guise and also in his alternative ithyphallic form. The outer walls show various festival scenes, some still retaining much of their original brightly colored paint. The sandstone chambers surrounding the granite shrine were built by Hatshepsut, though the walls closest to the structure were added by Tuthmosis III and decorated by him with the ‘annals’ of his military campaigns and dedications to the temple – including a scene in which the king presents his two obelisks.

Behind these broken walls is the so-called ‘central court’, an open area upon which the very earliest temple at this site probably once stood and which became the heart of the later temple – the sanctuary with the image of the god. this building was plundered for its stone in antiquity, however, and the area now contains little of note other than the large calcite or ‘alabaster’ slab on which a shrine once stood. Beyond the central court is the relatively complete Festival Temple of Tuthmosis III, one of the Karnak’s more interesting and unusual features. Tuthmosis built this small complex as a kind of memorial to himself and his ancestral cult (his mortuary temple is on the west bank just north of the Ramesseum) and called it the ‘Most Splendid of Monuments’.

The entrance, originally flanked by two statues of the king in festival dress, is at the building’s southwest corner, and leads into an antechamber with magazines and other rooms on the right, and on the left the temple’s great columned hall. The roof of this hall is supported around its perimeter by square pillars, but in the central section by curiously shaped columns imitating ancient tent poles. Although this tent-pole architecture may recall ancient religious booths, it is perhaps more likely that it symbolizes the military tents so familiar to this great warrior Pharaohs. In the Christian era the hall was reused as a church, and haloed icons. Other chambers in the building include a ‘chamber of the ancestors’ and suites of rooms dedicated to the underworld god Sokar, to the sun god in his morning manifestation, and to Amun. The chapel of Amun contains a massive quartzite pedestal which once supported the shrine of the god, and the vestibule of this ‘inclusive temple’ is the famous ‘Botanical Room’ with its representations of exotic flora and fauna encountered on Tuthmosis foreign campaigns.

The rear walls of Thutmosis’ complex are largely broken down, and it is possible to find there and to examine the niche shrines built against the temple’s back, to which the inhabitants of ancient Thebes brought their petitions for transfer to the great gods within Amun’s domain. On either side of the shrines are the bases of two obelisks – long since destroyed – which Hatshepsut set up at the rear of the temple; and a little further to the east, before a reconstructed ‘horned’ altar is the remains of a small ‘temple of the hearing ear’ built for the same purpose as the niche shrines by Ramesses II. This structure also once contained a single obelisk on the central axis (probably the so-called ‘Lateran Obelisk’ in Rome), unusual in that it stood alone on the central axis of the temple. This temple stretched almost to the rear gate of the Karnak complex, an imposing portal nearly 20 m (65 ft 6 in) tall constructed by Nectanebo I. This is the termination of Karnak’s main east-west axis, but to the north, inside the crumbling remains of the mud-brick wall, may be seen the remains of a small 22nd-dynasty temple of Osorkon IV dedicated to Osiris Hekadjet, ‘Ruler of Eternity’, and several other small shrines.

Turning to the south the visitor may walk back towards the sacred lake which, filled by ground water, supplied the water for the priests’ ablutions and other temple needs. There the excavated remains of the priests’ homes now lie beneath the seating erected for the sound and light show at the lake’s eastern end. The lake’s rough-hewn stone edging is punctuated on the southern side by the opining of a stone tunnel through which the domesticated geese of Amun were released into the lake from the fowl-yards a little further to the south. At the laks’ northwest corner is the chapel of Taharqa, a rather strange building, the underground chambers of which contain descriptions of the sun-god’s nightly journey through the earth and his rebirth each day as a scarab beetle. This seems to explain the significance of the large scarab sculpture which was brought from the west bank mortuary temple of Amenhotep III and placed here.

Beyond the pyramidion of Hatshepsut’s second obelisk which also lies at the lake’s north-south axis. Although the pylon (the seventh) of this court was constructed by Thutmosis III, the side walls are the work of Ramesses II’s son Merenptah. It was here, at the south end of the court, that the great Karnak Cachette containing some 20,000 statues and stelae was discovered at the beginning of the century. Although most of the wooden statues had been destroyed by ground water, and many of the bronze ones were also damaged, hundreds of stone figures survived in good condition.

The remaining pylon on this axis are currently undergoing restoration by combined Franco-Egyptian teams. The eighth pylon was built by Hatshepsut and the ninth and tenth by Horemheb, who made considerable use of stone quarried from the temples of Akhenaten.

The tenth pylon served as the southern entrance to the precinct of Amun and led, through its gate, past two limestone colossi (doubtless of Horemheb) to the sphinx-lined processional way which connected with the precinct of Mut. Within the Amun precinct’s walls, however, lie a number of other smaller temples.

II. Temple of Khonsu:

In the southwest corner of the precinct of Amun the Khonsu temple, dedicated to the lunar deity who was the son of Amun and Mut, provides an excellent example of a small but quite complete New Kingdom temple. Begun by Ramesses III, the structure was finished and decorated by a number of later rulers, including some of the Libyan generals who ruled as virtual kings of Upper Egypt at the close of the New Kingdom.

III. Opet Temple:

Behind the Khonsu temple is the small Graeco-Roman Period sanctuary of the hippopotamus goddess Opet, who was venerated as a helper of women in childbirth. The rather strangely laid-out temple was chiefly built by Ptolemy VIII and decorated by several later rulers including the emperor Augustus. Despite the proximity of the Bab El-Amara gate, the Opet temple had its own gateway through the Amun precinct’s western temenos wall, suggesting a level of importance and interaction with other cults. Entrance into the temple is by way of a door in the back wall which opens into the sanctuary and then the outer offering hall. The reliefs throughout the temple’s interior, though smoke-blackened, are quite well preserved. Although the structure was nominally dedicated to Opet, it was actually a monument in the service of Amun, and particularly of the mythic resurrection cycle which he had assimilated from the god Osiris. The temple has several crypts hidden within its walls as well as larger ones built beneath ground level which served as a ‘tomb’ for Amun-Osiris and as repositories for the items used in the Festival of the Resurrection of the god.

IV. Temple of Ptah:

On the northern perimeter of Amun’s great complex, just inside the gate leading to the Montu precinct, is a small temple of the Memphite creator god Ptah. Like the great Amun temple, the structure is oriented west to east. Its inner core was constructed by Thutmosis III, and this area was expanded and resorted by the Nubian king Shabaka and several Ptolemaic and Roman rulers. Interestingly, the Ptolemies who conducted restoration work did not replace the earlier royal cartouches with their own but actually replaced damaged and missing sections with the names of the original builders. The temple consists of five gateways of different dates and with depictions of kingly figures wearing the red and white crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt on their respective northern and southern jambs. The gateways lead to a small columned hall with flower-capitalled columns fronting three chapels, two of which are dedicated to Ptah and the third (on the southern side) to Hathor. A headless statue of Ptah stands in the central chapel, but the southern chapel now contains a statue not of Hathor but of Ptah’s ‘consort’, the lion-headed Sekhmet. This over life-sized, intrusive, black-granite statue is illuminated by light from a small hole in the roof, giving some idea of the atmosphere of the darkened ancient sanctuaries.

V. Precinct of Montu:

North of the Amun complex lies the precinct of Montu, smallest of Karnak’s three walled compounds. The square-shaped enclosure contains the ruined temple of Montu, the old falcon god of the Theban area, as well as a sacred lake and several smaller chapels to various deities. The Montu temple itself was built by Amenophis III, but several other kings, including Taharqa, carried out modifications to its plan. The temple is oriented on a north-south axis and is fronted by its own quay and a propylon gate (locally called the Bab El-Abd) built by Ptolemy III and IV. Beyond the propylon rows of human-headed sphinxes run to the north along a processional entryway. Parallel to the Montu temple and built against its eastern side is a small temple of Montu’s son, Harpare. And directly behind Montu’s shrine is a simple temple of Maat, oriented in the opposite direction on the same axis and consisting mainly of a court fronting a small pillared hall. Outside the compound, on the east, are the ruins of a small temple of Thutmosis I, and on the west, an even smaller chapel of Osiris.

VI. Precinct of Mut:

South of the great temple of Amun and linked to it by a massive causeway of ram-headed sphinxes is the precinct of Amun’s consort, Mut. Mostly destroyed, the compound contains the remains of the temple of Mut itself, a sacred lake – the isheru – which curves around it on three sides, and several smaller temples. The Mut temple was mainly built by Amenophis III, though it received later additions at the behest of Taharqa, Nectanebo I and other kings. A large pylon opened to a narrow court before a second pylon and the temple’s inner areas, though the ruined condition of the structure precludes detailed knowledge of its original form and decoration. The temple is perhaps most famous for the black-granite statues of the goddess Sekhmet which Amenophis had placed there – it is estimated thar over 700 of these statues originally adorned the temple precinct.

On the western edge of the sacred lake Ramesses III built a small temple which still retains some of the military scenes on its outer walls, along with two headless colossi of the king before its entrance. Of the other shrines and chapels built within the compound only that of Khonsupakherod (Khonsu the child) is of significant size. Largely built from reused blocks from New Kingdom structures, the temple retains some of its decoration, including a number of birth and circumcision scenes. The propylon gateway set into the temenos wall to the other structures stood just outside this entrance to the compound: to the east, a temple of Amun-Kamutef (Amun Bull of his Mother), and to the west, a small barque shrine dating to the reigns of Thutmosis III and Hatshepsut. Little more than the foundations of these structures remain, however. The precinct of Mut is undergoing continued study and excavation by the Brooklyn Museum and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

VII. Temple of Akhenaten:

A little to the east of the Nectanebo gate, outside the precinct of Amun enclosure wall, are the remains of the Gem-pa-aten, the temple built by Amenophis IV for his new religion during the first five years of his reign, before changing his name to Akhenaten and moving his capital to the area of El Amarna. The temple’s existence was first suggested in 1926 by Henri Vhevrier, who found a number of its small talatat building blocks and colossal statues of Akhenaten. Since 1966, the site has been investigated by the Akhenaten Temple Project of the University of Toronto under the direction of Donald Redford. The project began by photographing and systematically studying the blocks already in storerooms. Since then it has completed over 20 seasons of excavation and research at the site.

This investigation has revealed much of the Aten temple, but the area is quite large (c.130 x 200 m, 426 ft 6 in x 65 6ft) and a full ground plan has not yet been established because much of the central and eastern parts of the complex lie beneath modern houses.

On the south side, against each pillar, a colossal statue of Akhenaten depicted the king in the somewhat grotesque style characteristic of his early reign and wearing, alternately, the royal double crown and the twin-feather headdress of the god Shu. Statue fragments of life-size figures of the king and queen were found at regular intervals along the line of the western colonnade and a large number of granite offering tables were also found, perhaps intended to stand before the statues and colossi. The telatat blocks of the Gem-pa-aten which have been recovered depict the Sed Jubilee which Amenophis IV celebrated in the second or third year of his reign, along with religious sacrifices, musicians, dancers, foreigners and most importantly, the royal family. In fact, Nefertiti – the king’s chief queen – figures very prominently in the decorative programme, and is actually depicted on more blocks than Akhenaten, making offerings alone or with her daughters.

All building in the area ceased when Akhenaten moved to El-Amarna, and was only briefly resumed under Tutankhamun and Ay (judging by a few talatat blocks bearing their figures and names), and the temple was ultimately destroyed during the reign of Horemheb, when its mud-brick sections were burned and the stone structures dismantled. Many of the 36,000 or more talatat blocks which formed the Gem-pa-aten were found reused in the ninth, second, and possibly the third and tenth pylons, as well as the hypostyle hall of the Great Temple of Amun.

It is known that Amenophis IV constructed other structures in the Theban area – notably the so-called Hut-benben, Rud-menu and Teni-menu, though the precise nature and location of these buildings is not known. Judging by its name, the Hut-benben or ‘Mansion of the Benben’ may have contained something like the pyramidion used in the solar worship of Heliopolis, though the greater part of what has been reconstructed of this temple from its recovered blocks consists only of a number of pillars, each about 9.5 m (31 ft) high, showing Nefertiti with one of her daughters, offering to the Aten.