Leaving the Botanical Garden from its northeast corner, a wooden ramp leads over the broken wall of the Akh-Menou and into the easternmost part of the Central Enclosure, behind the Temple of Amen. The exterior walls, built by Thutmes III, were mostly decorated by Rameses II. The Chapel of the Hearing Ear was constructed by Thutmes III in the eastern wall of the Temple of Amen and alabaster statues of the king and a goddess sit inside it. Here, ordinary people came to petition the god, seeking cures for medical or social problems. Not having undergone ritual purification and therefore barred from entering the main part of the temple, this was as close as a commoner could get to the god’s abode. Rameses II also built a temple here for similar purposes, and he usurped the six Osirid statues that stand nearby.

Farther east, still largely unexcavated and covered with brush, two temples were built by Thutmes IV and Rameses II. Thutmes IV also re-erected here an obelisk originally  commissioned by his grandfather, Thutmes III. It stood 33 meters (107 feet) tall and in AD 357 was removed to the Circus Maximus in Rome. In AD 1567 it was transferred to the Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano. Rameses II built a temple in this area that extended east to the enclosure’s undulating mudbrick wall. The monumental gateway there (19 meters, 62 feet tall) was built by Nectanebo I in Dynasty 30. Beyond the eastern wall of the Central Enclosure lie the partially excavated remains of a huge temple erected by Amenhetep IV/Akhenaten. South of the Thutmes III temple, past walls heavily decorated with scenes of Rameses II offering to various deities, lies Karnak’s Sacred Lake, in its present form the work of Taharqa (Dynasty 26). It measures 200 by 117 meters (650 by 380 feet).

The lake is filled with seeping ground water and for much of the year is a dirty and smelly algae color, in spite of recent attempts to clean and aerate it. Locals call it the Saltwater Lake. Recent tests indicate that it contains an extremely high level of the parasite that causes schistosomiasis (Bilharzia) and one should avoid any contact with the water.

Three thousand years ago, temple priests also avoided the lake, but not because it was polluted. Religious regulations demanded that they use fresh, flowing water for their daily ablutions, but they did row small sacred barks across the lake’s surface on festival days. A modern Luxor folktale predicts that gilded barks rowed by solid gold statues will one day sail on the Sacred Lake—after the last liar and thief have been banished from Egypt. In the southern wall of the lake a stone-lined tunnel, one meter square, leads to a small stone building that served as home to a flock of geese raised by temple priests. Geese were symbols of Amen, and each morning these representatives of the god .

were driven through the tunnel to spend the day swimming in the lake’s sacred waters. Thutmes III wrote, “My majesty formed for him [Amen] flocks of geese, to fill the Sacred Lake, for the offerings of every day. Behold, my majesty gave to him two fattened geese each day, as fixed dues, for my father Amen.” From the late New Kingdom onward, priests of Amen lived to the east and south of the lake. Several of their houses, some with household goods and priestly accessories still lying on their floors, were uncovered in the 1970s when Sound and Light (Son et Lumière) built its bleachers there. In this religious community within the sacred enclosure, away from the impurities of normal life, priests led a segregated existence, praying, meditating, and performing the tasks necessary for proper temple operations. Inscriptions on walls of the village and its gates reminded the clergy of the importance of sound moral behavior and ritual purification.

At the northwestern corner of the Sacred Lake, a refreshment stand sells soft drinks and postcards. Immediately to its west, a large granite pedestal topped by a huge stone scarab, a model of the dung beetle representing Atum-Khepri, a form of the sun-god, is the only remaining scarab of four that Amenhetep III installed in his memorial temple on the West Bank. It was brought here in Dynasty 25 by Taharqa, whose temple to the sungod lies immediately to the north. (Do not believe tour guides who will tell you with a straight face that ancient Egyptian women walked seven times around this scarab to become pregnant. There is noproof of this.) A few meters to the north lies the top of one of the Hatshepsut obelisks that stood between the Fourth and Fifth Pylons. The scenes on this fragment show the queen’s coronation.

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