Journal: Friday 25 November 2005
Staying on the East Bank in Luxor today, Jim and Jane, Fiona, Malcolm and I set off together for a day in Karnak Temple. Getting there around 12.00pm is about the best time of day to visit the temple because the tour groups are generally leaving and it gets gradually less crowded as the afternoon progresses, until around 4.00pm when the next groups arrive.
We began our tour together, but as always at Karnak because there is so much to see, we gradually drifted off into different directions. I took my camera on a walk-through of the Amun Temple and spent quite a lot of time in the Festival Temple of Tuthmose III. The ‘botanical reliefs’ in the back of the temple were beautifully lit by the afternoon sun. Later I went into the open-air museum to see what was new. The Chapelle Rouge, the barque-shrine built by Hatshepsut has been reconstructed by the French team working in Karnak over the past several years and now completed, it looks magnificent. I spent a long time photographing each block in the shrine, remembering those that used to be stored on risers many years ago. It is a work of pure dedication. The portico of Tuthmose IV at the back of the museum has also had much more added since I was last here. The colourful reliefs of the King and the Gods, today shining in the sun, really bring it to life.
We had arranged to meet up in the cafeteria later in the afternoon, but getting side-tracked on the way, I began to photograph the reliefs of Rameses II on the southern girdle wall as the light here was perfect. Surprise surprise, I met Jim who had the same idea. After a quick drink in the café it was time to leave. The sun was low as we left through the main entrance, stopping only briefly to say goodbye to the ram-headed sphinxes that lead up to the first pylon.
In the evening we all went out to eat together at Farag’s open-air restaurant in the bazaar, which is set in a little garden festooned with coloured lights. Sitting chatting about Karnak in the cool of the evening was a perfect end to another good day.
the museum area was the work in progress of a reconstruction of Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel. Many of the red quartzite blocks of this chapel could still be seen stacked on risers in rows at the entrance to the museum, about 300 of them which had been found in the foundations of the third pylon. The French Mission at Karnak was carefully reconstructing the blocks into a representation of the queen’s original barque shrine. The walls were about 6 feet high and it looked like it was quite a challenge to match the jig-saw puzzle of blocks and get them into the right place. The individual reliefs were very delicate, depicting the female pharaoh and her co-regent Tuthmose III with various deities. It was also very interesting to watch the restorers at work. I chatted to one of the team called Hammad for a while and he told me about the reconstruction work. At the back of the museum there was also ongoing work on a reconstruction of a temple portico of Tuthmose IV.
There were also a few other small reconstructed shrines, but my favourite structure in the Open Air Museum was the 12th dynasty barque shrine of Senwosret I. These white limestone blocks had also been recovered from the foundations of the third pylon and the ‘White Chapel’ was reconstructed here in 1938. It has become one of the real treasures of Karnak as there are very few of the Middle Kingdom buildings still in existence. This important structure was decorated with very detailed raised hieroglyphs, the most beautifully carved I have seen in Egypt, depicting scenes of the king, wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt and the white crown of Upper Egypt, offering to various deities. Around the base on the outer wall, is a list of the Nomes of Upper and Lower Egypt during the 12th dynasty. By late morning we all met up at the café for a drink and decided we had had enough of Karnak for today. Five hours in this heat and I felt like I had been microwaved – my brain had given up a couple of hours ago!
Later we walked down to Luxor Temple, which is floodlit at night and open until around 10.00pm in summer. There is a very different atmosphere at night here and many of the reliefs which are in low contrast during the day, stand out beautifully in the artificial lighting. I saw quite a lot of scenes I hadn’t even noticed before. One scene I especially love in Luxor Temple is the birth scene of Amenhotep III, his mother Mutemwiya being impregnated by the god Amun and the king’s ka being fashioned by Khnum on his potter’s wheel. This scene is almost invisible by day but in the spotlights it is very well-defined.
Robin and I took a caleche to the end of Sharia Karnak, past the bridge and through Karnak village to the Mut Temple. We spoke nicely to the guards, who agreed to let us in to have a quick look around, as restoration work had finished for the day. They were very friendly and helpful and were obviously proud of the remains in their care, offering to guide us around the various areas. We gratefully accepted because all we could see from the entrance was cracked paving and long grass and scrub. It was difficult to make out any kind of plan, and we had forgotten to bring our copy of Porter & Moss with us. We knew that the temple was first constructed in the 18th Dynasty by Amenhotep III and had been added to by many other pharaohs.
I had bought a lovely statue of Sekhmet on my last visit to Luxor, after my first powerful meeting with her image in the Temple of Ptah at Karnak. Since then I had read everything I could about the goddess who had such an ambivalent nature. Like everything in Egypt, duality is the key to understanding her character. She is usually described as a blood-thirsty, violent goddess who accompanied the king into battle. Her body was said to control the violent heat of the sun and her breath was the hot desert wind. But she is also an aspect of other goddesses, especially Hathor and Bastet, and also was known as a healer because of her knowledge of magic. This would explain why she can look both fierce and benign. She was an appropriate figure to encounter in this sun-scorched temple. Amenhotep III, who began building the Temple of Mut, though probably on earlier remains, was known to have had hundreds of Sekhmet statues carved for his mortuary temple on the West Bank and several of these found their way here to Karnak. A huge number have been excavated over the centuries around the Theban area (about 700 at the latest count) and many of them can be seen in museums around the world. I thought the statues here in the temple were hauntingly beautiful.
After a quick walk through the main Temple of Amun, we all decided to investigate the transverse axis, consisting of the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth pylons. During our studies we had discovered a wonderful reference work, the ‘Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Statues, Reliefs and Paintings‘, by Bertha Porter and Rosalind Moss, published in several volumes by The Griffith Institute. This has become my most valuable source of information on the Egyptian monuments and it is usually referred to affectionately as ‘Porter and Moss’. Beginning at the court in front of the Seventh Pylon my friends and I worked as a team, looking at the reliefs with reference to Porter and Moss, listing and photographing each scene. When this court was excavated, a cache of 750 stone statues and stelae were found, along with over 17000 bronzes which now form a large portion of the Cairo Museum collection. Some of the statues are also now in Luxor Museum. They were probably buried during the Ptolemaic Period, but no-one knows exactly why.
Feeling refreshed we next went to look at the Festival Temple of Tuthmose III, beyond the central Middle Kingdom court. This was built as a memorial temple to Tuthmose and his ancestral cult. The pillars inside the hall are said to imitate the ancient tent poles of a pavilion, unique in Egyptian architecture, and still show good remains of the coloured decoration. One of the rooms to the southwest of the pillared hall once contained a famous table of kings which listed the names of 62 kings and is now in the Louvre in Paris. There are several ruined statues to the north of the hall, in an area which was used as a church in the Coptic era. Behind the columned hall is a suite of rooms dedicated to Amun. A larger room to the north is sometimes known as the Zoological Garden, or Botanical Garden, because it contains superb delicate carvings representing plants and animals which Tuthmose encountered on his Syrian campaigns. These were reliefs I particularly wanted to see and the carvings were very beautiful, though I have had to visit them many times since then at different times of the day to get good photographs.
It felt very good to be here in Luxor again after waiting for almost a year to come back. Our first visit today was to Karnak Temple, at that time my favourite place. I did the tour with my group and as we had time to ourselves afterwards I followed the walls around to the north to the Temple of Ptah, which I had not visited before. The original three sanctuaries were constructed by Tuthmose III and dedicated to the Memphite god, Ptah. It was restored by the Nubian king Shabaqo and later much added to by the Ptolemies and Romans. The north and centre sanctuaries were dedicated to Ptah and the southern one to his consort, the lion-headed goddess, Sekhmet (as well as to Hathor). Each one had it’s cult statue, although Ptah is now unfortunately headless. The southern shrine was usually kept locked, and inside there was a restored statue of Sekhmet, which I went to see after giving the guard a little baksheesh. The statue is in complete darkness except for a shaft of light coming down from an opening in the roof which made it very dramatic and powerful standing there alone as the guard opened the door. There is a tale of how local village women would, even in recent times, pray to this statue in order to conceive. She obviously commanded a great deal of respect.
We had a brief visit to Luxor museum. The cachette exhibition had been recently opened and I especially wanted to see the collection of statues which had been found in the ‘Luxor Cachette’. These beautiful sculptures were unearthed when a colonnade at Luxor Temple was dismantled for reconstruction in 1989. They had been buried (for reasons unknown) in the floor of the courtyard where they lay forgotten for over 2000 years. Many of these statues today look as though they have just come out of a sculptor’s workshop. Later in the afternoon I visited Gaddi’s 
bookshop – perhaps a mistake as it contained dozens of Egyptology books and I could see myself spending a lot of money here. But for now I restrained myself and just browsed.
and we hurried to be there before the crowds. How wrong we were – the coach parties were already arriving as we stepped out of our taxi at 8.00am. Once inside we each went off to try to find a quiet place. I headed straight for the sanctuary and sat there alone for a few peaceful moments studying the carvings, the picture of the sacred barque, used to transport the god’s image, and I imagined what this place would have been like in ancient times. Did those priests recognise the turning of the year? They certainly watched the starry heavens and recorded events. I wandered across to the sacred lake, shimmering in the morning light and I followed its edge all the way around. There were a few stone steps leading down into the lake and I went down and dipped my fingers into the green water – an echo of the daily purification of the priests. It was perhaps a symbolic gesture, a bonding with a bygone time and with these stones as they were now shaped. It was a thanksgiving to whatever gods there are for allowing me to be here at this time. I didn’t make a wish, rather a solemn promise that I would be back, whether to the gods or to myself, I couldn’t say. But someone must have been listening because I have returned to Egypt at least once each year since that time.
