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.” Not only is Karnak huge—the complex covers over two square kilometers (1.6 square miles)—but it is the result of almost constant building activity that began over 4700 years ago and continues even today. The Temple of Amen-Ra, Karnak’s principal building, is the largest religious structure ever built. It was the god’s home on earth, and around it lay the homes of his relatives—his wife, Mut, and their son, Khonsu. Their temples, too, are enormous. Successive kings renewed, repaired, and enlarged these residences much as generations of a family might remodel their ancestral home to changingneeds and tastes. The earliest structures found at Karnak date to the Middle Kingdom.

 But there are references to building activity as early as Dynasty 3, and archaeological evidence shows that the site was inhabited thousands of years before that, in prehistoric times. In the New Kingdom, each king in turn seems to have vied with his predecessors to build a bigger monument here. Kings tore down earlier buildings and used the stones to construct new ones. For example, Amenhetep III built a pylon with stones he took from over a dozen earlier structures. Kings often remodeled a predecessor’s building, then erased and redecorated its walls, replacing the earlier king’s name with their own. Egyptologists find it difficult to track the history of all this activity.

Egypt’s New Kingdom rulers were exuberant builders and they spent fortunes adding to Karnak’s size and complexity—and to its wealth. Its priesthood was one of the richest in Egypt. New Kingdom records show that the priests of the Temple of Amen owned over 81,000 slaves and servants, 421,000 head of cattle, 691,000 acres of agricultural land, 83 ships, 46 shipyards, and 65 cities. In the reign of Rameses III alone, the temple received gifts that included 31,833 kilograms of gold, 997,805 kilograms of silver, 2,395,120 kilograms of copper, 3722 bolts of cloth, 880,000 bushels of wheat, 289,530 ducks and geese, and untold quantities of oil, wine, fruits, and vegetables. For economic as well as religious reasons, Amen truly was “King of the Gods.” Over two hundred large structures have been found at Karnak. Undoubtedly, there are hundreds more. Some are simple mudbrick buildings that have nearly vanished; some are elegant structures built of fine alabaster; others are enormous monuments of sandstone and granite with walls 15 meters (49 feet) thick that stand 50 meters (164 feet) high. By the late New Kingdom, Karnak had become so crowded that new structures were built wherever space permitted and older buildings were often demolished to accommodate them. Clearly, there never was a master plan for the site.

Many of Karnak’s monuments are poorly preserved. Wind and water erosion have taken their toll, and earthquakes, like that in 27 BC, causeddamage so great that engineers are still working to repair it. Curiously, the huge walls, pylons, and columns at Karnak were erected on the flimsiest of foundations, often nothing more than shallow trenches filled with pea gravel. Rising groundwater so weakened the foundations of some buildings that they simply collapsed. That happened in October 1899, when columns in the Hypostyle Hall toppled with a crash heard for miles around. Many parts of Karnak were razed by later rulers (Ptolemy IX is a prime example of such a vandal), or used by early Christians as houses, stables, and monasteries, or damaged in local riots and wars. Over the last two millennia, tourists have scrawled their names on decorated walls and hacked out pieces of relief. Treasure hunters have dug for objets d’art, in the process destroying much of the site. Yet, hundreds of hectares of Karnak still remain unexplored and many structures are known only from bits of stone jutting through dirt and weeds or found re-used in later buildings. For all these reasons, Karnak remains a bewildering architectural puzzle. It began as a few small shrines scattered about the present site, then grew outward from them like overlapping ripples on a pond. If you walk for ten minutes in any direction among its ruins you will encounter buildings from nearly every period of Egypt’s history in no predictable chronological order.

Karnak can be divided into four areas. To the north, a large enclosure is home to a temple for the god Montu, another enclosure is dedicated tothe goddess Ma’at, and there are numerous smaller buildings of stone and mudbrick. The Montu temple may have been connected by an avenue of sphinxes to a much earlier temple for that god at Medamud, a site five kilometers (three miles) farther north. To the east, Amenhetep IV/Akhenaten built a huge open-air temple complex dedicated to his solar deity, the Aten. To the south, another enclosure wall surrounds a temple to the goddess Mut and smaller temples for Amenhetep III and Rameses III . (None of these areas is open to tourists.) The fourth area is the largest and most important. Called the Central Enclosure, this is the area visited by tourists, and the one to which Egyptologists have paid the most attention. Here lies the great Temple of Amen-Ra, King of the Gods. That building alone stretches 375 meters (1220 feet) front to back and covers over 25 hectares (61 acres). The Central Enclosure covers 100 hectares (247 acres) and, in addition to the Temple of Amen, encompasses temples to Ptah, Khonsu, Osiris, Opet, and others. Surrounding the four temple areas, buried under several meters of Nile silt, the remains of ancient Thebes extend outward in a huge urban sprawl that probably covers thousands of hectares. Even in the New Kingdom, Thebes had a population of over 50,000 people and this ancient city is still virtually unexplored by archaeologists.

The ancient Egyptians called Karnak Ipet Sout, Most Esteemed of Places, although originally that term referred only to a small part of the Temple of Amen, not to the entire complex. Some scholars suggest that the first part of the name, Ipet, with the definite article ta, was pronounced something like “taype,” and Greek visitors heard it as Thebes, the name of a Greek city with which they were familiar. The Egyptians called the city Waset. Karnak is the Arabic name of the adjacent modern village. The word may mean “fortified settlement,” a description suggested to early Moslem visitors by the huge mud brick wall surrounding the Central Enclosure, but its etymology remains unclear. The enclosure wall defines a rectangular area 500 meters (1640 feet) deep and 550 meters (1,790 feet) wide, and stands over 12 meters (39 feet) high and 8 meters (26 feet) thick. Its coursesof mudbrick were not laid horizontally. Instead, they undulate like waves of water. That was intentional; it was meant to mimic waves in the great primeval sea that Egyptians believed had covered the earth before the creation of life. Priests claimed that the land enclosed within this wall—the temple of AmenRa—was an island on which the act of original creation took place. Large parts of the enclosure wall were rebuilt by the Antiquities Department about sixty years ago, when an admission fee was first levied at the site and access had to be controlled, and the undulating pattern of the mudbrick courses was retained in the new additions.

Four monumental gateways and several minor ones pierce the enclosure wall. Decades ago, tourists entered the Central Enclosure through its southern gate. But the principal gate lies in the western wall, in the First Pylon of the Temple of Amen-Ra. It was closed until only a few decades ago because it was farther from the hotels of Luxor where tourists stayed and because, being close to the Nile, it was impassable during the annual inundation. Today, in the absence of the annual flood, one approaches the temple from the Nile, entering into a large, ugly parking lot. Curio shops stand on the left (north); the headquarters of the French archaeological mission lies to the south. The road from the parking area to the temple lies directly atop the route taken by ancient priests, but their journey was made by boat along a canal dug from the Nile to a T-shaped basin beside a stone landing quay. The Karnak ticket office lies in the southeast corner of the parking lot, about a hundred meters (three hundred feet) west of Karnak itself. The Sound and Light (Son et Lumière) ticket office is adjacent.

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