The earliest part of Luxor Temple consists of the assemblage of chambers at its southern end. The buildings at the northern end are later, and include substantial structures built in the 19th Dynasty by Rameses II. Those additions, consisting most prominently of the First Pylon and Great Court, form the entrance of the temple today.
In front of the First Pylon, Rameses II erected two red granite obelisks. The one still standing here is 25 meters (82 feet) tall and weighs 254 tons; the other, removed in 1835 to the Place de la Concorde in Paris, stands 22.5 meters (73 feet) tall and weighs 227 tons. Each was erected on a base with four baboons carved on its face.
The story is told that Josephine bade farewell to Napoleon with the words, “While in Egypt, if you go to Thebes, do send me a little obelisk.” After several years of negotiations, the French received permission to do just that. Both Luxor Temple obelisks were originally to have been shipped to Paris, but the work was judged too costly, and the French elected to ship only the better-preserved of the two. The west (right) obelisk was loaded onto a great barge and sailed to Alexandria, then on to France.
It arrived in Paris in October, 1833, and its re-erection was witnessed by the king and queen and 200,000 onlookers. The Place de la Concorde is an especially impressive place because of the obelisk that now stands proudly in its center but, as one observer has remarked, Luxor Temple now resembles an elephant with one tusk missing. In 1846, in a gesture of thanks for being given the obelisk, the French king sent an elaborate clock to Egypt, where it was installed at the Citadel in Cairo, in the courtyard before the Mosque of Mohammed Ali. It is still there. It has never worked.
Next to the Luxor obelisks, two seated statues of the king, seven meters (23 feet) tall, flanked the gate between the pylon’s two towers. There are also traces of four striding statues of the king (one of them now in the Louvre). The seated statue on the east (left) shows a princess and Queen Nefertari, carved at much smaller scale, next to the king’s legs. On both statues, the sides of the king’s throne are decorated with figures of Nile-gods binding together the Two Lands of Egypt. The towers of the First Pylon stand 24 meters (78 feet) high and 65 meters (211 feet) wide. The façade is carved in sunk relief with scenes of Rameses II’s battle against the Hittites at Kadesh, fought in the fifth year of his reign. Many scenes in many temples depict this event. Unfortunately, the façade of the pylon has been badly eroded and this record of the event is difficult to see. On the west (right) tower, the king holds a conference on tactics with his princes and advisors. Nearby, he drives a war chariot into battle. On the east (left) tower, the battle rages, and dead and dying enemies lie strewn across the field. On the jambs of the gateway, Rameses II stands with various gods.
In ancient times, religious processions moved between the Karnak Temple
complex and Luxor Temple along a 2.5–kilometer-long paved Avenue of Sphinxes. The causeway was lined with a thousand larger-than-life-size ram-headed sphinxes backed by gardens and pools. Six bark shrines, similar to those now in Karnak’s Open-Air Museum, were built at intervals along its length, structures in which priests carrying the statue of Amen from the one temple to the other could pause for rest and ceremonies. The northernmost of these shrines lay just outside the Bab al-Amara at Karnak; the southernmost lay in the First Court of Luxor Temple.
Early in the New Kingdom, before the Avenue of Sphinxes was built, a water-filled canal apparently ran here and sacred barks sailed on it between Karnak and Luxor. By the later New Kingdom, however, as lunar-dated festivals progressed through the calendar and began to fall outside the season of the annual flood, there was too little water to float the barks and the canal was filled in and paved over. Henceforth, processions moved overland or on the Nile.
The Avenue of the Sphinxes was begun in the New Kingdom, but took its final form only in the 30th Dynasty reign of Nectanebo I. Only a few short stretches of the Avenue of Sphinxes have been excavated. The best-preserved of them extends a few hundred meters northward in front of the Luxor Temple, and about thirty-five sphinxes are exposed on each side of a paved roadway. Trees and broad strips of grass line the avenue, flowers bloom in season, and the noise of the nearby town is thankfully muted. It is worth walking along the processional way to admire the ancient construction and to enjoy the fine view it offers of the temple’s First Pylon.
In antiquity, an extensive complex of buildings surrounded Luxor temple. The city of Thebes was a warren of narrow streets that wound between markets, workshops, animal pens, and mud brick houses ranging from hovels to villas. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert described the temple compound as it appeared in the nineteenth century: “The houses are built among the capitals of columns; chickens and pigeons perch and nest in great (stone) lotus leaves; walls of bare brick or mud form the divisions between houses; dogs run barking along the walls.” Thebes outside the temple enclosure probably looked very similar 2,500 years earlier. Some of the houses Flaubert saw were torn down in 1885. But, except for a small area of the Roman Period city west of the Avenue of the Sphinxes, most of the ancient urban buildings still lie beneath modern Luxor. It is unlikely they will be excavated any time soon because of the costs involved. markets, workshops, animal pens, and mud brick houses ranging from hovels to villas. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert described the temple compound as it appeared in the nineteenth century: “The houses are built among the capitals of columns; chickens and pigeons perch and nest in great (stone) lotus leaves; walls of bare brick or mud form the divisions between houses; dogs run barking along the walls.” Thebes outside the temple enclosure probably looked very similar 2,500 years earlier. Some of the houses Flaubert saw were torn down in 1885. But, except for a small area of the Roman Period city west of the Avenue of the Sphinxes, most of the ancient urban buildings still lie beneath modern Luxor. It is unlikely they will be excavated any time soon because of the costs involved. prevent their imminent collapse.
The success of this work is uncertain. Carved stone walls have been so adversely affected by rising groundwater that decorated surfaces have already crumbled away. The mud brick walls of the temple’s ancillary structures have fared even worse: many have simply vanished. A burst water main in 2001 did serious damage to the Roman remains at the southern end of the site. Work to protect the temple area continues today and will likely continue long into the future. There has been talk of exposing the entire length of the Avenue of the Sphinxes, clearing the ancient city around Luxor Temple and making the area an open-air museum. But that would cut the modern city of Luxor in half and require turning the highly valuable land between the causeway and the Nile into a park or pedestrian mall. Because of costs and politics and uncertain conservation requirements, the proposal is unlikely to be implemented any time soon.
West of the temple compound, a main street, the Corniche, separates the temple from the Nile. It is lined with rows of benches beneath small shade trees where young Egyptians sit and talk in the cool evening. South of the temple stand the ugly New Winter Palace Hotel and a slowly decaying shopping mall filled with curio shops and cloth merchants. To the northwest, built atop the Roman village, two dilapidated 19th century houses, one of them the headquarters of Egypt’s National Democratic Party, slowly crumble away. The Brooke Animal Hospital, the city jail, the fire department, and a pottery dealer lie behind it, built directly atop the ancient town. To the east, Luxor’s bustling business district is filled with street vendors, grocers, restaurants, department stores, and a thriving McDonald’s. The smells of spices and grilling fish waft through the air. The shouts of men selling sweet dates, fresh juices, tins of mackerel, and a bewildering array of cheap housewares compete with shouting tour guides, honking buses, and the sirens of VIP motorcades. The market streets of Luxor are fascinating (the major weekly market is on Tuesday mornings) and well worth exploring. But to get the flavor of Luxor Temple free from modern intrusions, it is necessary to go deep inside it, where ancient stone walls block views of the modern buildings and shut out the din of the city. It is even better to visit in the evening, when the walls are illuminated and the temple is engulfed by surrounding darkness.
Visitors to the temple today enter from the Corniche on the west. There was an entrance very near here in ancient times, too, and below street level on the edge of the Nile one can see the stones of the landing quay built to receive sacred barks and other vessels that arrived and departed the temple on festival days.
A stone path leads eastward from the entrance across an open area recently cleared of many inscribed stone blocks, alongside remains of the Roman fort, Roman temples and, farther south, a Christian church. A broad stairway leads to a courtyard built by Nectanebo I between the First Pylon and the Avenue of the Sphinxes. Several monuments were built here during the Roman Period. Nearly all of them are destroyed, but an interesting small chapel still stands in the northwest corner, built by Hadrian and dedicated to Serapis early in the second century AD. This is just one of the major building projects the Romans undertook in the Luxor compound when they converted the entire area into a fortified garrison about 250 AD. Luxor Temple itself lay at the center of this defensive complex and served as a temple to Roman emperors who saw themselves as the divine inheritors of Egyptian kingship. In fact, the name Luxor comes from the Arabic al-Uksur, meaning “fortification,” which in turn derived from the Latin word “castrum,” the word for a fortification. The temple was also called the “Temple of Amen of the Opet,” “Amenemopet,” or “The Southern Sanctuary.”
Like the temples at Karnak, Luxor Temple has undergone numerous changes and additions over the past three millennia. Undoubtedly, an earlier Middle Kingdom temple once stood on the site, perhaps even an Old Kingdom temple before that. There is certainly evidence that Queen Hatshepsut built here in the 18th Dynasty. But the earliest structures visible today were erected by Amenhetep III, and he and Rameses II were responsible for most of the temple’s huge colonnades and courts. Later, substantial redecorating was undertaken by Ptolemaic and Roman rulers, Christian priests, and Moslem sheikhs. The architectural history of Luxor Temple is less complex than that of the monuments at Karnak, but we are again forced to work our way backward through time as we enter the temple and explore its many parts.
Throughout its long history, Luxor Temple served as the dwelling-place of an ithyphallic form of the god Amen closely associated with ideas of fertility and rejuvenation. Each year, a statue of Amen of Karnak was carried in a procession to Luxor Temple to greet Amen of the Opet, Amenemopet, in a ceremony called “The Beautiful Festival of the Opet.” The ceremony was one of the most important in Egypt’s religious calendar. The procession between the temples and the ceremonies held at Luxor are shown on the outer walls of the shrine/temple of Rameses III in the Great Court at Karnak and on the walls of Amenhetep III’s Colonnade at Luxor Temple. Among its several functions, the festival was meant to reaffirm the authority of the king, his ties to the royal ancestors, and his bonds to the gods. It was a ceremony of royal rejuvenation and a reassertion of the gods’ power over Egypt. The festival was celebrated in the second month of summer, during the annual inundation of the Nile.
This ancient Luxor tradition of processions and festivals has survived. The modern Festival of Abu-el-Haggag has retained, in modified form, many ancient festival activities. Abu-el-Haggag was a venerated Moslem sheikh whose mosque and tomb lie within the temple compound and who is said to have brought Islam to Luxor eight centuries ago. To celebrate Abu-al-Haggag, each year in the Moslem month of Shaban, Luxor is transformed into a three-day-long carnival. Fruits and nuts are sold on the streets, minstrels and magicians perform, horses race up and down the Corniche, men dress as women, and women wear their fanciest clothes. At the height of the partying, thousands of people watch as a model bark filled with gaily dressed children is paraded through town on a horse-drawn wagon from Luxor Temple toward Karnak. Children scream, women ululate, men chant as the bark passes by. It is a different century, a different religion, a different culture, but the Festival of Abu-el-Haggag continues the traditional forms of the Festival of Opet.
From" The Illustrated Guide to Luxor" by kent R.Weeks ,published by the American University in Cairo Press. Copyright © 2005 White Star S.p.a