Egypt -- Jim & Donna's Excellent Adventures, Pt.17, Karnak Temple

     Driving down out of the Valley of the Kings, we stopped at a shop, the Egyptian Alabaster Stone Factory, where local village families had for untold generations been producing stone objects by a variety of handcraft techniques. It's easy to figure out where the stone comes from and why local people gravitated toward working with alabaster.

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    A little further along we stopped at a Nubian village that specializes in "essential oils." At both of these stops we were given presentations of the wares being produced on or near the site. Nubians are an indigenous people originally found in southern Egypt and northern Sudan. Although their civilization is very old, many of their old settlements were displaced by construction of the Aswan High Dam further south on the Nile.

    These opportunities to buy local Egyptian wares allowed us to see where and how the products are produced without the jostling of the markets that can be confusing for tourists unfamiliar with the give and take required of bartering.

    Two of the photographs in my last post, Pt.16 -- that of the impressive colonnade facade and the long staircase looking east toward Luxor -- show the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut. There is a long, complex story related to this temple and its uses, which is confused historically by the fact that Hatshepsut as a female Pharoah, though amazingly accomplished, had to masquerade as a man during her reign and by the fact that following her death many of her likenesses were deliberately defaced. We are familiar, of course, in our own time with how privilege and power create strong jealousies and a desire to control the historical narrative. 

    Throughout our visits to these various sites, Jacob, our tour guide, proved to be a wealth of information about the ruins. He ably directed our attention toward the things we would most benefit from seeing.

    Our last antiquities stop of the day was the Karnak Temple, which is another marvel of engineering, architecture, art, and successive shifts in belief systems. From what I understand, as many as 30 different Pharoahs added to and altered the complex that currently comprises the Karnak Open Air Museum. The part that is open to tourists is commonly thought to be devoted to the god Amun-Re. 

    One item of special interest to me were these stones lower down in the walls along the main thoroughfare that showed the effects of annual flooding from the Nile in ancient times. The annual floods were utilized by engineers to "float" huge stone pieces into place on barges from their quarries in Aswan further south. When the waters receded, the huge stones could be set upright or shifted into place.

Also of interest at this site are the rows of goat-headed Sphinxes. Why there are so many and why they are so well preserved is in itself a genuine curiosity.

    Evidence that the Temple site was appropriated for structures and purposes of subsequent groups abounds. There are, for example, later building materials built into the older, grander materials. The brick wall pictured here clearly employed local materials, but its purpose is not self-evident.

    We didn't get close enough to the white domed structures pictured below to know whether these are elaborate pigeon houses such as we had first observed on our way to Asyut or elaborate human habitation. If these are pigeon houses, their purpose is to raise a food source that would add protein to the diet.

    At other points were signs that the site was later used by Christians. Two of these indicators are the badly damaged relief sculpture at the end of this colonnade with arms outstretched in the form of a crucifix, and the other is a painting of the Virgin Mary near the top of a large column. The painting appears to have weathered away whereas the relief has suffered, apparently, from intentional vandalism. 

  The second largest obelisk in the ancient world -- weighing 343 tons and made of a single piece of granite -- was erected here by Hapshetsut.  As with other references to her accomplishments, Pharaohs who followed her on the throne tried to obliterate her name from the obelisk by chiseling off or altering her name. They failed, however, because they did not recognize and remove one of her alternate names carved into the obelisk. 

    As with other antiquities sites, there is far too much here to take in and process on one short visit, let alone remember for later story-telling. We felt fortunate to have had opportunity to spend an afternoon walking through this Temple, and we are grateful for the pieces of grandeur that have survived and are now being protected and preserved. 

    Reminders of the human desire for power, control, and immortality are overwhelming. Among the multitude of details and reflections now stored in photographs and memory, this experience has  made us realize just how fragile and fleeting is our time to make a difference in the lives God has given us.