Most of the construction surrounding the Middle Kingdom court was the work of Thutmosid rulers. Nearest the court are pylons and enclosure walls of Thutmes I and Thutmes II; a few meters beyond them stand buildings of Thutmes III. The most elaborate of Thutmes III’s monuments is the large and unusual structure immediately east of the Middle Kingdom Court, in ancient times called AkhMenou, Brilliant of Monuments, and today called his Festival Hall. The ceremonies conducted here were closely associated with the king’s Sed-festival, and the building’s architecture and decoration reflect this emphasis. Thutmes III boasted how he carefully prepared the ground before beginning work on the monument: he “exorcised its evil, removed the debris which had mounted to the town quarter,” and began his construction anew because he “would not work upon the monument of another.” Its western wall is broken and many tourists enter the Akh-Menou along the eastwest axis of the Temple of Amen.

But the proper entrance is located in the southeast corner of the Middle Kingdom Court, behind two sixteen-sided columns and a pair of Osirid statues. Another sixteen-sided column stands in the small foyer just beyond the door. To the right, a corridor leads to nine small chambers used as storerooms for ritual equipment and priestly costumes. The contents of each chamber are shown in the reliefs carved on their walls: one held bread, another held vases, a third wine, and so on. The corridor’s long north wall is decorated with scenes of the king’s Sed-festivals. Turning left (north) from the foyer, one enters the vast Festival Hall, 44 meters (143 feet) wide and 16 meters (52 feet) deep. Two rows of ten columns support the high roof of the central aisle. These columns are unique in Egyptian architecture. Each tapers toward the base and is topped with an oddlyshaped capital. The columns are painted red, the color of wood, and are said to imitate tent poles, either those used in the king’s battlefield tent, or more likely, in tents used during the celebration of Sedfestivals. These are surrounded by 32 pillars, shorter than the central columns, to permit clerestory lighting.

Texts and figures on the columns depict the king with various gods, nearly all of them erased by followers of Akhenaten in Dynasty 18 or by Christian priests who used the Festival Hall as a church. Traces of an elaborately painted Christian saint can be seen at the top of the column in the second row, fourth from the southern end. (On one column, the first in the second row, the misspelled name “Champoleon” is a weak nineteenth century joke.) The column bases along the hall’s central axis have been cut to make the space between them nearly a meter wider. This was done after the hall was completed, apparently when priests introduced a new and wider bark than the one used in earlier processions. Until part of the bases had been away, there was concern that priests carrying the sacred bark might stumble and drop the statue of the god. Chapels at the north end of the hall include scenes of royal statues brought to the temple (center chapel, west wall) and offerings to various deities (west chapel, east wall). The left (west) chapel houses a huge, damaged statue of the king with Amen and Mut. A small doorway immediately at the left leads to a corridor with a scene of the king offering to an ithyphallic Amen.In the northeast corner of the hall, a stone staircase leads to a room that held a clepsydra, a pot with a hole through which water drained at a constant rate that was used to measure the passage of time.

Such information was important for determining when liturgical services should be performed. Explorers in the nineteenth century discovered an important stone inscription known as the Karnak King List in the southwest corner of the hall. Written in the reign of Thutmes III, it lists sixtyone kings starting with Snefru of the Old Kingdom. It is not a complete table of Egypt’s rulers but a selection of those who had played especially important roles in the history of Thebes, and whose lineage demonstrated the legitimacy of Thutmes III’s royal line. The blocks inscribed with the King List were dismantled one dark night in spring 1843 by a Frenchman, Emile Prisse d’Avennes, who smuggled them out of Egypt in boxes labeled “natural history specimens.” They are in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Farther east, just south (right) of the main axis, small rooms of Thutmes III were usurped in Ptolemaic times and decorated with several well-painted scenes of Alexander the Great.

The most interesting room in the Akh Menou is the so-called Botanical Garden, which lies immediately north of the main temple axis east of the hall at the end of the temple. A set of modern wooden stairs climb over a badly damaged wall into a rectangular chamber with four papyriform columns down its midline.The walls of the Botanical Garden are carved in very low raised relief best seen in raking early morning light. The room’s south and north walls (15 meters or 49 feet long) and east and west end walls (6 meters or20 feet wide) display remarkable drawings of plants and animals that Thutmes III claims he collected on military campaigns in foreign countries, especially in Syria, in regnal year 25. He writes, “I swear, as Ra (loves me), as my father, Amen, favors me, all these things happened in truth— I have not written fiction about that which really happened to my majesty.” Thutmes III apparently realized that he might be accused of making it all up, that the drawings might raise a few eyebrows.

For decades, the drawings defied explanation and many scholars insisted that they were flights of royal fancy. Recently, however, the figures have been identified. It was discovered that the artist was not always depicting whole organisms, but parts of plants and animals. There are representations of rare birds, animals, flowers, and trees from Asia and East Africa that had never before been seen in Egypt. But also there are drawings of the internal organs of animals, small parts of exotic flowers, deformed creatures, and genetic sports. They include strange seeds, misshapen gourds, and cattle with three horns or two tails. In the words of one scholar, the Botanical Garden is a “cabinet of curiosities.” Why did Thutmes III collect such oddities and devote a part of the AkhMenou to their description? Perhaps it was a way of acknowledging the enlargement of Amen’s domain. As Egypt conquered more and more of western Asia and northeast Africa, they proclaimed that as Egypt’s frontiers were expanding, so were Amen’s. Amen was the creator of things Egyptians had never before imagined and the acknowledgement of this was recognition of the god’s growing power.

Amen was no longer a local Egyptian god but a universal god whose powers extended far beyond Egypt’s borders. Such a view would have had major theological implications at a time when most cultures accepted that the power of their gods was limited to the people who made offerings to them and to the land in which their temples were built

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