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20 April 2001 - Day 8 - Luxor and Karnak We finished lunch, rested for a bit, and then were back out at our bus by 3:30 for the brief drive out to the Temple of Karnak.
Ah *heck*, it's the afternoon of May 30th right now and I'll be flying off to Europe on vacation in about 7 hours, and I still haven't packed or prepared, so I'm gonna make this page a brief one! I do hope you understand! I've got a plane to catch! :-} |
The lowdown on Karnak, as per my All of Egypt handbook:
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Karnak About three kilometers from the temple at Luxor one finds the vast zone covered by the monuments at Karnak which the Greeks called Hermonthis. The area covered by the monuments is divided into three with rough brick walls separating them. The largest, which covers about thirty hectares, is the central area which is also the best preserved. Diodorus of Sicily said of it that it is the most ancient of the four temples at Thebes. It is the temple dedicated to Amon. On the left is the sanctuary of Montu, the god of war, which is rectangular and covers about two and a half hectares. On the other side covering about nine hectares, of which about half is as yet unexplored, is the sanctuary of the goddess Mut, Amon's wife, who is symbolically represented as a vulture. The great temple of Amon amazes one by its sheer size. It is the largest temple supported by columns in the world and is so vast that it could easily contain the whole of Notre Dame de Paris. The most truly amazing feature is the hypostyle hall which is one hundred and two meters long by fifty three meters (yards) wide and in which there stand one hundred and thirty four columns 23 meters (yards) high. The tops of the open papyyrus shaped capitals have a circumference of about fifteen meters and are big enough for fifty people to stand on them. A veritable "forest of columns" which excite tremendous emotion because of their size and the play of light and shade on them. During the XIXth dynasty, 81,322 persons worked in the temple of Amon if we count not only the priests and guardians but also the workmen and peasants involved. The temple enjoyed the income from a considerable number of estates, markets and work sites to which one should add all the riches and booty which the Pharaoh brought back from his victorious military expeditions. Various pharaohs contributed to the realization of the hypostyle hall. Amon Ofis III built the twelve colummns in the central nave which support the enormous architraves. Ramses I initiated the decoration and this work was continued by Seti I and Ramses II. |
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Above: the tourist security police at Karnak.
Above: The statue of Pinedjem in the first courtyard. Below: the surviving column of the pavilion of Taharka.
Above and below: the colossal columns rising up from the floor of the temple.
Above and below: the obelisks of Tutmose I and Amon-Ofis III (there are two total). Sidenote: I'm all about obelisks these days. . .
Above: Aungela photographing the Alvarez family on behalf of mama Anna Maria.
Above: our tourguide Osama standing beside the giant, broken hand of a once-even-more-giant statue at Karnak. |
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More info on Karnak Beyond the hypostyle hall there once stood the obelisks of Tutmose I (where today only one remains) which were 23 meters high and weighed 143 tons. Higher still is the one erected by his daughter Hatshepsut for the construction of which it is said that the queen spared no expense, the chronicles of the period state that she provided "bushels of gold as if they were sacks of grain" for the project. What then remains to be said about the "Banqueting Hall", Tutmoses III's Akh-Menuh? Here too there is a beautiful hypostyle hall with two rows of ten columns and one row of thirty two rectangular pillars. From the traces of paintings dating from the 6th century A.D. we know that this hall was converted into a church by some Christian monks. The complex at Karnak also had a sacred lake, 120 meters (yards) long, where according to Herodotus the priests carried out their nocturnal rituals. Today the reflection of the imposing remains of the temple can be seen in the lake, and on those nights when the mountains are illuminated, the ancient splendour of Thebes comes back to life. |
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Above and below: images from a neighboring minor-temple which Osama pulled a few strings to get us into.
Below: The Temple of Luxor But first, some more info! This particular page may be lacking in personal anecdotes, for which I am sorry (but I've gotta fly to Holland in a few hours!), but at least I've included some useful and intereting facts. :-) |
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Temple of Luxor Today it is difficult when one arrives at Luxor to imagine how the great city of Thebes was laid out. For centuries the capital of the Egyptian Kingdom, proverbially famous for its wealth, is the city which Homer in the IX canto of the Illiad referred to as "Thebes of the hundred gates." Just a little village during the Memphis era it was the spot where the god of war Montu was worshipped. Its importance started to increase appreciably from the Xth dynasty onwards, for both political and geographical reasons, until finally it became the capital of the pharaohs of the New Kingdom. The god Amon, part of the traid which also included Mut and Khonsu, was worshipped here with great pomp. Every victory and triumph was celebrated by the construction of new and grandioise temples to the god. Its decline started with the sacking of the city by Ashur-ban-pal in 672 B.C. and it was finally destroyed completely by the Ptolemies. In Roman times it was already just a ruin. As with Memphis a prophesy had been fulfilled, "Thebes shall be rent asunder" said Ezechiel (Exechiel, XXX, 16). The old Egyptian capital is divided in two by a canal; to the south grew up the town of Luxor while to the north the village of Karnak developed. In Luxor the only witness to its splendid past is the grandiose temple that the Egyptians call "Amon's southern harem." 260 meters long, it was started by Amon-Ofis III, enlarged by Tutmose III and finished by Ramses II. It is joined to the temple of Karnak by a long avenue of sphinxes with rams' heads which the XXth dynasty substituted for the human heads. This road has not been completely uncovered and work is still in progress to restore it in its integrity. The road finished at what effectively constituted the entrance of the temple of Luxor, marked by the great pylon built by Ramses II which was 65 meters wide and was decorated with bas-reliefs representing scenes from the military campaign led by Ramses II against the Hittites, and also with the text of the so-called "Poem of Pentaur" in which the Pharaoh's war exploits were celebrated. In front of the pylon there used to stand the two obelisks of Ramses II but today only one on the left (25 meters high) remains, the other having been carried away to France in 1833 and erected by the engineer Lebas on 25th October 1836 in the center of the Place de la Concorde in Paris. The entrance is flanked by two granite colossi representing the Pharaoh seated on his throne fifteen and a half meters high on a base of about one meter. Originally the two colossi stood beside four huge statues of pink granite having their backs to the pylon, of which one represented the Queen Nefertari and another on the right (which is still standing but is much damaged) represents her daughter Merit-Amon. Beyond this triumphal entrance is the courtyard of Ramses II in which stand two rows of columns whose capitals represent a closed papyrus flower, which between the columns, Osirian statues. In this courtyard there also stand the little temple of Tutmose III which possesses three chapels dedicated to the triad of Amon, Mut and Khonsu who are worshipped in the sanctuary of Karnak. Finally and imposing colonnade, 25 meters long, leads into the courtard of Amon-Ofis III which is surrounded on three sides by a double row of columns with close papyrus capitals, a veritable petrified forest which is very evocative. |
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Above: seated statue of Ramses II
Above: Osirian stautes between temple columns
Above left: colossi of Ramses II Above right: whenever I look at my vacation pictures I'm always humored by the random people who get cought up in the background, and I found these two guys at the base of Ramses the 2nd's feet to be rather suspicious! Special agents of the former Soviet Union? Spies for German foreign intelligence?? I mean, these guys just reek of being up to no-good! (or maybe they were just tourists like me???)
Above and below: a mosque which had been built onto the temple centuries ago when most of the structure had been covered by sand and dirt - and when this mosque was erected it was done so at "ground level", which now stands some 15 feet / 5 meters high!
Above: courtyard of Luxor with a mosque in the background and tourists in the far left side of the picture to show a perspective on size. And last but not least, above: sunset over the Nile River on the last night of our trip. At this point, I was going to wrirte this wonderful, sentimental ending to the trip and make all these analogies about the sun going down over the Nile and the spirit of ancient Egypt sinking into the horizon of my soul, BUT, as I've already mentioned twice on this page, I'm heading off to Amsterdam in only 4 hours now, so I GOTTA JAM!!! But as a conclusion, Aungela and I spent the evening in Luxor on The Nile Dream, returned to Cairo by airplane the following day and flew back to America and Saudi Arabia respectively and that I had a truly amazing trip with Aungela (Thanks Aungela!!!). I would highly recommend taking a trip down the Nile to anyone, and if you are ever interested, please email me at danielschereck@yahoo.com and I will give you all the info I can! Thanks for taking a look at my Egypt Tour 2001 pages and I look forward to writing my EuroTour 2001 series when I get back! Amsterdam, Paris, Munich and Prague, here I come!!!
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