Understanding Karnak)

The temples at Karnak make up the largest complex of religious structures ever built. For more than 2,000 years, from the Middle Kingdom to the Roman Empire, pharaohs, kings, and emperors added to the Karnak temples, creating a bewildering maze of pylons, halls, and courtyards. In this video, we'll try to make sense of it all. We'll focus on the central enclosure, the vast walled precinct that surrounded the Great Temple of Amun-Ra. The Temple of Amun developed along two axes from its Middle Kingdom nucleus. The primary axis, oriented east-west, developed between the original sanctuary and the banks of the Nile. The secondary north-south axis grew in the direction of the neighboring Temple of Mut. The course of the Nile has shifted west since antiquity. Originally, the river was closer to the entrance than it is now, and priests approached it during festivals by barge, via a purpose-built canal. On land, the main entrance was marked by an avenue of cryo-sphinxes, sphinxes, that is, with the heads of rams, an animal associated with Amun. Note the small figures of Ramses II that stand between their paws. Ahead of us is the first pylon. This is one of the latest additions to the Temple of Amun, built by the pharaoh Mektenebo I in the 4th century BC. It's the biggest temple pylon in Egypt, 50 feet thick and 140 feet high, with four niches, or colossal flagpoles. The central gateway was more than 60 feet tall, enclosed by immense wooden doors. The structure, however, was never completed. The stones are still rough and undecorated. On either side of the pylon is the mud-brick enclosure wall, 40 feet high and 25 feet thick. The courses undulate like the waves of the primordial sea. Now we enter the temple. On the right, abutting the pylon's south tower, are the remains of the mud-brick construction ramp. It consisted of a series of mud-brick enclosures built against the pylon and filled with rubble. All this would have been removed had the pylon's construction been completed, but it never was, and so has remained here for 2400 years. Napoleon's men found stone blocks still sitting on the ramp. Like the first pylon, the first court was constructed during the 30th dynasty, though it had apparently been planned centuries before. It encloses several earlier structures. At the center of the court are the remains of a huge kiosk, a monumental pavilion probably built to shelter the sacred barks of the gods during festivals. Originally, this had 10 pillars. Only one is still standing. The kiosk was constructed by Taharqa, one of the Nubian pharaohs of the 25th dynasty. On the right side of the court is an even older building, a small temple built by the 20th dynasty pharaoh Ramses III. It stood in front of the main temple before the construction of this courtyard. The temple, buried by debris in late antiquity, is well preserved. Its entrance was flanked by two statues of Ramses. The reliefs on the pylon show the pharaoh wearing the crowns of lower and upper Egypt, grasping captives by the hair. Ramses III was the pharaoh who defeated the sea peoples that destroyed so many other Bronze Age civilizations. Doubtless, they are the enemies shown here. To the left of Ramses' temple is the so-called Bubastite portal. Passing through, we find, on the south end of the second pylon, a relief commemorating the victories of the 22nd dynasty pharaoh Shoshenq I. This is the Shishak, king of Egypt, mentioned in the Bible. The inscription proclaims Shoshenq's victories over Rehoboam, king of Judah, the son of Solomon. The reliefs show the 156 villages taken by the pharaoh in Judah and Palestine. The second pylon is much older than the first, constructed mostly by the pharaohs of the 19th dynasty. The most prominent figure, as so often, is Ramses II, whose statues flank the doorway. In the Colossus at the left, note the small figure of Ramses' daughter, standing between the pharaoh's legs. Ramses appears again in the reliefs of the vestibule, smiting his enemies in the sight of Amun. Behind the second pylon is the most famous part of the Karnak temple complex, and one of the most impressive ancient spaces anywhere on the planet, the great Hypostyle Hall, built by Seti I and his son Ramses II. The densely packed columns, with their papyrus flower capitals, symbolize the wreaths of the primordial marsh from which the world was created. Before the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the floodwaters of the Nile covered the floor every year, completing the illusion. Unfortunately, this also had the effect of weakening the columns' foundations. As recently as 1899, 11 columns collapsed and had to be re-erected. There are 134 sandstone columns in the Hypostyle Hall. Between the columns of the central aisle, which were taller than the others, huge sandstone grills were installed, allowing shafts of sunlight to reach the floor. The rest of the hall was suffused in gloom. The columns were decorated, with reliefs showing the pharaoh making offerings to the gods, festival processions, and other sacred themes. The workmanship of the northern half of the hall, done in Seti's reign, is often superb, with careful raised reliefs. The part done by Ramses, by contrast, is decorated with hasty and relatively crude sunken reliefs. Traces of the original paint survive in both halves of the hall. The reliefs inside the Hypostyle Hall were intended for a limited audience of priests. The outer walls, by contrast, were visible to the public during festivals. Their decoration functioned as propaganda, proclaiming the greatness of the pharaoh. On the outside of the hall's northern wall, the victories of Seti I in Syria and Palestine appear in impressive detail. The southern outer wall, likewise, shows Ramses' well-advertised victory at the Battle of Kadesh. The back wall of the Hypostyle Hall is the third pylon, built by the 18th dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep III. Many of its blocks were taken from older monuments, a few of which have been reassembled in the open-air museum outside the temple. Amenhotep appears on the outer face of the pylon, sailing on the Bark of Amun during the annual Opet festival. Before continuing along the main east-west axis of the temple, we'll make a brief detour to the north-south axis, which crosses here. This led to the Temple of Mut, and was marked by an additional four pylons. The courtyard in front of the first of those pylons is known as the Court of the Keshet, because it was here, beneath the paving stones, that archaeologists discovered a massive repository of statues and statuettes buried by the temple priests around 300 BC as part of a sacred house cleaning. Returning to the main north-south axis of the temple, the small court between the third and fourth pylons was built by another 18th dynasty pharaoh, Thutmose III. Originally, it boasted four obelisks. Only one remains. In the narrow space between the fourth and fifth pylons are colossal statues of Thutmose and another obelisk, one of a pair set up by the female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Her successor, Thutmose III, who tried to obliterate her memory, had the obelisks walled off, but this only had the effect of preserving the reliefs on their sides, which proclaim that this obelisk and its twin were completed in the space of only seven months. Beyond is the sixth pylon, the last on this axis. On the western side, facing us, are inscribed the names of the many Syrian and Nubian towns conquered by Thutmose III, and an account of his victory at Megiddo, the city better known by its Greek name, Armageddon. Inside the pylon are these two magnificent granite pillars, decorated with the flowers of Upper and Lower Egypt. This striking statue of a moon, set up by Tutankhamun, celebrated the restoration of the old gods after the disruption caused by the heretic pharaoh, Akhenaten. After King Tut's own death, the statue was usurped by a successor and former general, Horemheb. The granite shrine on the central axis of the temple is a thousand years younger. Built to house a moon's sacred tower, it was commissioned by Philip Aridaeus, the half-brother and successor of Alexander the Great, and apparently replaced a damaged or decayed New Kingdom shrine. Beyond is the Middle Kingdom court, the oldest part of the temple. This space was first monumentalized by the pharaohs of the 12th dynasty. It was rebuilt and enlarged, however, during the New Kingdom, and the monuments of the 18th dynasty pharaohs dominate it today. Of these, the most remarkable is directly ahead, the Akh-Menu, or Festival Hall, of Thutmose III. It seems to have been built, like Luxor Temple, to house ceremonies associated with the said festival, the ritual renewal of a pharaoh's power after 30 years of rule. The central aisle of the Festival Hall was supported by these oddly-shaped columns, apparently intended to evoke the wooden poles of the tents set up for the said festival. The king appears with the gods on their reliefs, many of which were erased after the Festival Hall became a church in late antiquity. The most interesting part of the Festival Hall is a small room set off the main axis. Here, in low relief, are drawings of the plants and animals that Thutmose III saw on his Syrian campaigns. Few are immediately recognizable, since the pharaoh's artists represented organs and cross-sections of the flora and fauna, along with such oddities as cattle with two tails. All of this served to convey the extent of the pharaoh's conquests. We'll conclude with the White Chapel in the Open Air Museum. This is an archaeological revenant, dismantled for its stone by the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty, and painstakingly reconstructed 35 centuries later by modern archaeologists. It was a small bark shrine, one of many used in temple processions. It dates to the reign of the Middle Kingdom pharaoh, Senusret I, and seems to have been one of the first structures ever built at Karnak. The pharaoh stands with Amun and the other gods in the remarkably detailed reliefs, which seem as sharp as they were 4,000 years ago, in the first version of what would become the largest temple complex ever built.