Karnak & Luxor Temples sit beside the Nile River in the city of Luxor. At one time, they were connected by a 3 km corridor lined with Sphinx statues but today that corridor has been destroyed by modern development (houses, shops and roads break it into sections – but the Egyptian government is in the process of restoring the entire corridor and in five years you’ll be able to walk the corridor the entire 3 km).
We first visited Karnak Temple, a complex which was built over hundreds of years as new pharaohs just kept adding to the original grounds. The complex is a mix of styles and designs, comprised of various temples, structures and buildings. It is massive in size (it would probably take two hours to walk the entire temple and see everything there is to see). It reminded me of the Roman Forum, but is much better preserved. The most impressive part of the temple is a section where 100+ columns still stand in their original positions. The columns are massive – probably about 100 feet high and so wide in that it would take 4-5 people standing ring-around-the-rosie style to circle it. The columns are all intricately carved with pictures and hieroglyphics, and I kept having to remind myself that this was constructed thousands of years ago. It is so well preserved because for hundreds of years it was buried in the sand – after the Christians took over, they lost interest in keeping the flood walls in-tact so each year the Nile would flood more and more silt would be deposited in the temple. Over time, it was completely buried by the Nile silt and the by the sand blowing over from the nearby desert.
In the back part of the temple, where only the pharaoh and high priest were allowed, it is most evident that Egypt was ruled by many different people over the course of its history. In the courtyard of this sacred place, you can still see a painting in the Roman-style like you would see in Europe. The actual scared space holds a room within a room – the original room built by the pharaohs and another, smaller room built by Alexander the Great when he conquered Egypt. The different in the two rooms is evident because the outer walls have relief carvings in hieroglyphics, and the inner walls have relief carvings in the Greek alphabet (I actually found a spot that had the symbols for Alpha and Phi right next to each other!) The sacred room is also cool because from it you have a good vantage point of the entire main corridor of the temple, through the rows and rows of columns and into the public prayer courtyard. Standing in the courtyard, however, the sacred space appears dark and you wouldn’t even realize it was there. This was done on purpose, so that the high priest and pharaoh could see everything that was going on but so that commoners were not allowed any sort of access whatsoever into the sacred space.
A little ways from the sacred space is a lake where the high priest would come to wash and prepare to make the daily offerings. There is a statue of a scarab beetle, which is a symbol of luck in the Egyptian culture. Modern legend has it that if you walk around the beetle five times you’ll be rich, if you walk around it three more times you’ll get married, and if you walk around it three more times you’ll have a baby.
By the time we were done seeing the temple, we were all so hot we thought we were going to die. We were there in the middle of the day, there was no shade anywhere, and the air was so hot it felt like you could never even catch your breath. I see now why summer in Egypt is considered the off-season.
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