Karnak is a difficult site to understand. JeanFrancois Champollion, the Frenchman who first deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, described it as “so vast and so grandiose” that the Egyptians must have designed it for “men one hundred feet tall.” [...]

In ancient times, religious processions moved between the Karnak Temple complex and Luxor Temple along a 2.5–kilometer-long paved Avenue of Sphinxes. [...]

When archaeologists working at Karnak have found stones from earlier buildings re-used in later walls and pylons, they have removed and catalogued the blocks and stored them in open fields within the central enclosure. [...]