Karnak

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Karnak is the immense temple complex on the east bank of the Nile at Thebes, modern Luxor, raised over roughly two millennia in honor of Amun-Ra and the gods who shared his city. It is not a single building but an accumulation of them: courts, pylons, obelisks, processional ways, and three walled precincts, the greatest of them devoted to Amun. By the reckoning of area enclosed it is the largest religious site to survive from the ancient world, and it grew not to a plan but by addition, each reign leaving its stone on top of the last.

A precinct, not a building

The name in modern use covers three walled sacred enclosures lying close together on the floodplain north of the old city. The largest is the Precinct of Amun-Re, a sprawl of pylons, halls, chapels, a sacred lake, and a forest of obelisks, enclosing on its own some thirty hectares; to its south, joined by a processional way, stands the smaller Precinct of Mut, Amun’s consort, with its own crescent lake; to the north lies the Precinct of Montu, the older falcon war-god of the region whom Amun displaced. A fourth temple, raised east of the Amun enclosure by the heretic king Akhenaten to the sun-disk Aten, was pulled down within a generation, its small inscribed blocks — the talatat — buried as rubble inside later pylons, where excavators have since recovered tens of thousands of them. Together the standing enclosures cover close to three square kilometers. What a visitor walks through is therefore not architecture in the ordinary sense but a thousand years of architecture stacked, demolished, recut, and overbuilt, the whole of it staged as a single act of worship to one city’s god.

Three deities held the central cult: Amun, Mut, and their son Khonsu the moon-god, the grouping the priests of Thebes called the Theban Triad. The cult of that triad is the thread that runs through every phase of the building, from the first modest shrine of the Middle Kingdom to the last columns the Romans propped up — the reason the stones were quarried, hauled, and set at all.

Amun’s rise and the growth of the stone

The cult reaches back to the Middle Kingdom, when Amun, a local Theban god, began his rise. The earliest securely datable work on the site belongs to Senusret I of the Twelfth Dynasty, who in the twentieth century BCE raised a small limestone barque-shrine — the so-called White Chapel, dismantled in antiquity and reassembled from reused blocks in modern times — and around it the nucleus of a temple to a god who was then still one local power among many. As Thebes became the seat of empire in the New Kingdom, Amun rose with it — fused with the sun-god Ra into Amun-Ra, hailed as king of the gods — and his temple swelled accordingly.

Pharaoh after pharaoh enlarged it as an act of piety and of record. Hatshepsut, the woman who ruled as king in the fifteenth century BCE, raised obelisks here; one of her granite pair still stands in the Amun precinct at close to thirty meters, the tallest ancient obelisk surviving upright in Egypt, its base walled around in antiquity so that only the shafts showed above the masonry. Her successor and rival Thutmose III, the empire’s great campaigner, walled his wars onto the surfaces of the temple: the long inscriptions Egyptologists call his Annals — the official record of his Asiatic campaigns from his twenty-second regnal year onward, including the account of the siege of Megiddo — were cut on the walls around the inner sanctuary, where the booty of conquered cities was itemized as offerings due to the god who had granted the victories. In a hall behind the sanctuary, the Akh-menu, he had carved a procession of exotic plants and animals gathered abroad, a “botanical garden” in stone, dedicated, like everything else, to Amun.

The kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty built the Great Hypostyle Hall, the single most overwhelming space at Karnak and the work by which the place is most often pictured: a roofed hall of one hundred and thirty-four columns set in sixteen rows across some five thousand square meters. Seti I began it and cut the reliefs of its northern half; his son Ramesses II completed the southern half and, in the manner of the dynasty, recut much of his father’s work in his own name along the processional aisle. The twelve columns of that central aisle rise above twenty meters, their open-papyrus capitals broad enough to crowd a hundred men; the lower columns flanking them, with closed-bud capitals, carried a clerestory that let light fall in bars across a floor otherwise kept in shadow. The scale of that hall still governs the place. The work continued, intermittently, into the Ptolemaic and Roman centuries, the last pylon of the Amun temple left forever unfinished, its mud-brick construction ramps still banked against the stone.

The sealed image and the two processions

Within these walls served one of the wealthiest priesthoods of the ancient world, and the labor of that priesthood divided into two unlike rhythms: the daily rite performed in darkness, and the great festivals that carried the god out into the light.

The daily cult attended the god’s image in the dark of the inner sanctuary. The cult statue of Amun — gold, small, kept behind sealed doors at the deepest and highest point of the temple — was treated as the living body the god inhabited when he chose to be present. The architecture of the rite is one of approach and withdrawal. At dawn the seal on the shrine was broken, the doors drawn back; the image was purified with water and incense, clothed in fresh linen, anointed, presented with food and drink, and then closed away again, the doors resealed and the priest’s own footprints swept from the sanctuary floor as he withdrew. The food reverted to the temple and its staff. None of this was public. The descending darkness and narrowing space of the temple — each court smaller, lower, and more restricted than the last as one moved inward — enforced a graded secrecy, so that only the king, or the high priest acting in his place, reached the god at all. The mass of worshippers never passed the first great court.

Against that sealed daily routine stood the festivals, when the image left the sanctuary in a portable barque carried on the shoulders of priests and the city could see, or at least come near, its god. Two of these dominated the Theban year. At the Opet festival, kept in the second month of the inundation, the images of Amun, Mut, and Khonsu traveled in procession from Karnak south to the temple at Luxor, along an avenue lined with ram-headed sphinxes — the ram being Amun’s sacred animal — where rites renewed the bond between the god and the reigning king and confirmed the living pharaoh as Amun’s son. At the Beautiful Feast of the Valley, kept in the summer, the same barque crossed the Nile to the west bank to visit the mortuary temples and the necropolis of the dead, the families of Thebes feasting through the night among the tombs of their kin while the god passed among them. The first procession bound the god to kingship; the second bound him to the dead. An avenue of ram-headed sphinxes still marks the southern route.

The estate of Amun

By the later New Kingdom the cult had become an economy. The estate of Amun held land, granaries, herds, fleets, workshops, and a labor force on a scale that made it the largest institution in Egypt outside the crown itself. The great temple was not only a house of the god but the administrative center of those holdings: its storerooms held grain levied across Upper Egypt, its scribes managed estates that may at their height have controlled a substantial fraction of the country’s cultivated land, and the offerings made to the god each day were redistributed down a hierarchy of priests, officials, and dependents who lived on the cult. Wealth on that scale carried political weight. The office of High Priest of Amun, once an appointment in the king’s gift, hardened by the end of the New Kingdom into a hereditary power; in the disorder after the Twentieth Dynasty the high priests of Thebes ruled Upper Egypt in their own right, dating documents by their own years and treating with the kings of the north as something close to equals. Egyptologists have long read the temple’s stones as much for that political weight as for its theology — the granaries and the sanctuary are the same building.

The scholarship and the texts

What is known of Karnak rests on two centuries of survey, excavation, and epigraphy, and the temple is unusual among ancient sites in being read mainly through its own inscribed walls. The standard modern overview of the building’s phases is Richard H. Wilkinson’s The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt (Thames & Hudson, 2000), which sets Karnak within the architecture and ritual logic of Egyptian temples as a class; Elizabeth Blyth’s Karnak: Evolution of a Temple (Routledge, 2006) traces the precinct reign by reign. The day-to-day clearance, recording, and reconstruction of the site is the work of the Centre franco-égyptien d’étude des temples de Karnak, which since 1967 has published the epigraphic and archaeological record of the precinct. The Great Hypostyle Hall has its own long-running epigraphic mission, the Karnak Great Hypostyle Hall Project, directed first by William J. Murnane and then by Peter J. Brand and based at the University of Memphis, which is copying the thousands of square meters of relief in the hall wall by wall. For the general reader the fullest open resource is the Digital Karnak project, begun at UCLA, which models the growth of the complex across more than two thousand years and animates the festival routes through it. The precinct of Thebes, Karnak included, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979 as “Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis.”

The primary sources are the walls themselves — the Annals of Thutmose III, the festival calendars, the king-lists, the hymns to Amun cut into the stone — and, beyond them, the great corpus of Egyptian religious writing whose theology the temple enacted. The funerary literature that frames the Theban afterlife, the Book of the Dead and behind it the older Pyramid Texts, belongs to the same world of ritual that the daily cult performed in miniature each dawn. Among the Greek visitors who left written notice of the place, Herodotus in the fifth century BCE described the Theban priests and their reckoning of the generations; later, under the Roman Empire, Thebes had become a destination for travelers who carved their names on the colossi across the river. Among the early-twentieth-century scholarly framings still in circulation are the works of E. A. Wallis Budge — superseded in method but preserving the texts — including his rendering of the Book of the Dead and his Egyptian Magic.

Egypt imagined and Egypt practiced

Karnak belongs to the deep background of the Western esoteric tradition rather than its foreground. The Hermetic and Neoplatonic writers of late antiquity looked to Egypt as the homeland of an ancient wisdom, and Thebes — Amun’s city, with its hundred gates in Homer’s phrase — was among the names that carried that prestige. The Corpus Hermeticum, composed in Greek in Roman Egypt and ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus — the figure born of the long Greco-Egyptian identification of Thoth with Hermes — speaks of Egypt as the image of heaven and the temple of the whole world. Iamblichus, defending Egyptian ritual against Greek rationalism in his treatise on the mysteries, made the priest-craft of Egypt the model for his theurgy; and the Neoplatonism of late antiquity, like the mystery religions that spread the cults of Isis and Serapis across the Mediterranean, drew on the prestige of Egyptian antiquity for its own purposes.

What those later readers imagined Egyptian religion to be and what the priests of Amun actually practiced are two different things, and the distance between them is itself part of the site’s history. The wisdom the Hermetic writers found in Egypt was, in good part, their own philosophy projected onto a script they could no longer read and a cult they observed from outside; the daily rite at Karnak was not a school of metaphysics but the feeding and clothing of a god. The esoteric Egypt is a reading laid over the documented one, and the two are best kept distinct. The temple kept working, in some form, into the fourth century of the Common Era. Then the cult lapsed, and the great hall stood empty under its roof of stone.

→ In the library: Budge — The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani, 1913) · Budge — Egyptian Magic (1899)

→ Related: Amun · Ancient Egypt · Dendera · Hermes Trismegistus · Thoth · Luxor Temple · Isis · Serapis · Horus · Pyramid Texts · Book Of The Dead · Priest · Cult · Herodotus · Alexandria · Neoplatonism · Corpus Hermeticum · Iamblichus · Mystery Religions · Roman Empire