Karnak

Advertisements

Karnak is probably the most famous of the ancient Egyptian reli­gious complexes, also it is the one of the most famous places in the world. Visited every year by thousands of tourists, it has been for decades the focus of careful and painstaking archaeological work that continues to reveal new details on the long evolution of this important sacred site.

Because of the vastness of the remains, of the necessarily dispersed and detailed nature of the archaeological records, and of many ancient pharaohs who unscrupulously demol­ished to the foundations earlier buildings that were in the way of their new plans, following the historical evolution of this temple is not an easy task. At least, not until Elisabeth Blyth wrote this extremely useful book.

The temple of Karnak

The temple of Karnak fully reflects all these events. In the ear­liest years of his reign, before becoming Akhenaten, Amenhotep IV duly completed two monuments that his father had started within the sacred area and added some of his own.

The temple of Karnak

His taste for unconventional forms can be already detected from the extremely scant remains of these buildings, which shared the same damnatio memoriae that be­ fell their founder. They were so thoroughly destroyed-their stones were re-used as filling of later monuments-that we only have a faint and incomplete idea of their original position, outline, and size.

Karnak temple

After the Amarna (The Capital in the reign of Akhenaten) interlude, the young Tutankhamun set up a large stele at Karnak proclaiming the restoration of the ancient cult, and spent energy and wealth to restore the sacred complex. Most of his achievements, however, were later usurped by Horemheb, who also flattened Akhenaten's buildings and erected three monu­mental pylons in full traditional style. It is clear that, at Karnak, history and architecture proceeded in parallel.

Remember:

One of the country's most recognizable landmarks, Luxor's Karnak Temple, was built so that New Year concurred with the midwinter sun reaching its central sanctuary. An article in New Scientist reports that Some of the temples, some dating back as far as 3000 years, would have been exactly adjusted so that their people could set agricultural, political and religious calendars by them.

Experts have long been positive hieroglyphs on temple walls describing the 'stretching of the cord' ceremonial - in which a pharaoh marked out the temple's properties with string - have inferred astronomical aim.

But this research goes a measure further, and presents that each temple was adjusted to its own celestial phenomenon. Links to both solstices and equinoctial points have been found, as good as alignments with the rising of Sirius, the sky's brightest star.

Someone would have had to go to the prospective place during a solar, stellar or lunar event - as we did - to mark out the place that the temple axis should take, tells Juan Belmonte of the Canaries Astrophysical Institute in Tenerife, Spain. For the most significant temples, this may best have been the pharaoh, as the temple drawings display.