Karnak Temple Complex – Part 1

As I’m starting to go through the many photos from our trip to Egypt, I will write a series of blog posts to delve a bit deeper into each area. Today, I’m starting with the Karnak Temple Complex, also known as Karnak.

A couple of things to note both about Karnak, in general. The Karnak complex sees temples from many time periods extending from the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000-1700 BCE) to the Ptolemaic Era (305 – 30 BCE). The area of the complex was named Ipet-isut in ancient Egyptian, meaning ‘The Most Select of Places’. The modern name Karnak comes from the nearby village of el-Karnak, which means ‘fortified village’.

Let’s start with the entrance toward the 1st Pylon…

In this approach, we look at the 1st pylon, large trapezoidal walls that form the entrance toward the courtyard. This pylon is 113m wide and 15m thick at its base. The entrance way is lined with a procession of ram-headed sphinx statues, representing Amun-Re, whose temple one enters. Construction of this pylon was started in the 30th dynasty and never completed.

As we enter the courtyard, let’s take a closer look at the rightmost of the 1st pylon trapezoids…

There are still ancient mud bricks piled up against the inside of the pylon, which would have been used as ramps during the construction phase.

As we enter the courtyard, we get a sense of the scale ahead of us…

Here we’re looking at the Kiosk of the pharaoh Taharqa, one of the Kushite rulers of Egypt. The columns of this kiosk were 21m tall, and the one remaining column on the right gives us a sense of that size.

Also in this courtyard we find a colossal statue of Ramses II…

Ramses II is one of the best known pharaohs due to the length of his reign and his volume of construction. In this statue we see Ramses II wearing the nemesis headdress with the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. At his feet is the Princess Bent’anta, holding a flower and wearing a Uraeus crown of rearing cobras. The princess’ name, Bet’anta, is Syrian, meaning Daughter of Anath (Anath is a Canaanite goddess).

In the next episode, we’ll go into the great hypostyle hall.