Temples and Tombs of the Egyptians

Another Article on the Ancient Buildings of the Nile Country.

BY GIDEON A. LYON
Photographs by the Author

RETURNING to Luxor from the west bank of the Nile, after visiting the tombs and temples of the ancient “City of the Dead,” one sees in its fullest proportions the Temple of Luxor, earliest, it is believed, of the great religious structures of the east bank. It presents from this point of view more the aspect of an architectural unit than dees its greater and more celebrated neighbor, the Temple of Karnak. Yet it is sadly ruined and is, more over, marred by the intrussion within its very precincts of a mosque that, standing on higher ground, dominates the scene with its incongruous outlines.

According to accepted hypothesis, ancient Thebes, on the east bank, was regarded as the city of the living, while the Thebes of the west bank was known as the city of the dead. Thus the tombs are on the west bank, while the temples, with a few exceptions, such as the Der el-Bahri, the Medinet Habu and the Ramesseum, are on the east side of the river. Western Thebes was a necropolis, while Eastern Thebes was the city of splendor, of ceremony, of wealth, of active power.

The Temple of Luxor was built perhaps a thousand years before Karnak, and it was erected on the site of an even earlier sanctuary of sandstone, which had almost disappeared when Amenophis III dedicated his new creation to the god Amon, his wife, Mut, and their son, the moon-god, Khons. Later changes caused departures from the original plan of the temple and even in its attribution. Amenophis IV, successor of the builder of the temple, sought to replace the old religion by the worship of a single deity, the sun, and he erased from the Luxor Temple all the names of Amon and his consort and son and substituted therefor the name of Aten, with the disc of the sun dominant in the embellishments. After this innovator came the Emperor Eye, and he was succeeded by Tut Ankh-Amon, who, under pressure from the deposed priestly Amon faction, reversed the action of Amenophis IV, restored the worship of Amon and brought the capital back to Thebes, from which it had been removed to Tel el-Amarna, about half way between Cairo and Luxor. This was the solitary action of Tut Ankh-Amon to cause him to stand out in Egyptian history. But, even without this action, the discovery of his tomb intact would have still given him worldwide present-day fame.

A VISIT to the Temple of Luxor is worthwhile, for the beauty of the sculptures that remain, some of them practically intact, but mainly defaced by time and vandalism. The temple was situated so near the Nile that it was frequently inundated, and this fact led to its gradual decomposition. Yet it stands today in comparatively splendid form, along side of the broad river-bank road that carries the visitor north to the greater and more famous Temple of Karnak, a mile and a half distant.

One portion of the Luxor Temple is of particular interest. This is the small chamber at the southern end, which during the reign of Alexander the Great as the ruler of Egypt, in about 330 E. C., was transformed both structurally and in decorations to introduce the Greek conqueror into the Egyptian mythology. Long later this chapel was used as a place of Christian worship and still bears evidence of such occupation.

Thus the Luxor Temple presents within its present precincts the souvenirs of two forms of ancient Egyptian worship, the hybrid Greek-Egyptian of the brief period of Alexander’s control, the Christian, and, in the small mosque at the northeast corner, the Moslem.

After the great Temple of Amon was erected at Karnak, slightly north of the present town of Luxor, the two temples were united by an avenue, bordered by the longest created line of facing sphinxes. Today this avenue is completely covered by houses and streets. We were told that it is the intention of the Egyptian government to prosecute an extensive exploration with the view of restoring, as far as possible, this grand approach to Karnak. This will involve the destruction of a large number of modern buildings, and, indeed, the Mosque of Abul Haggag. The private property to be taken will be of little value, but there may be difficulty in the matter of razing the mosque, which covers the body of a highly venerated saint of Islam.

Editor’s Fun Fact

The Abu Haggag mosque is integrated into the structure of Luxor Temple, making this one of the oldest continuously used religious structures in the world, dating back to the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep III in the 14th century BC!

If and when this work is accomplished the approach to Karnak will be much more impressive than at present. The visitor now is driven through crooked streets and past unsightly back walls into a sparsely settled space and finally the temple appears, slightly defined by a line of distant crumbled walk, with a square gateway rising just to the south. The road makes a circuit to the west. Comes then of the several avenues of ram-headed sphinxes that constitute a striking feature of Karnak, most of them being almost completely destroyed, and finally the best preserved of these avenues, leading to the “first pylon,’’ the westerly boundary of the great Temple of Amon.

IT is out of question to attempt a verbal picture of Karnak in its immensity, its grandeur, its nobility in ruin, its significance in history, its beauty in detail. Such descriptions have come from far abler pens. Nor will I attempt any recital of proportions, measurements of height, length, breadth. To say that I visited it twice, once by moonlight and the next day in the full blaze of the Egyptian sun, is to confess that I was inadequate in my attention. To see Karnak fully, to get some understanding of even its present condition and aspect, not to say an appreciation of its probable appearance in its day of splendor, calls for many visits, for undisturbed contemplation, for strolls within its chambers and its hypostyle and between Its obelisks and alongside its sacred lakes.

The pyramids at Gizeh are grandly impressive in their simplicity of outline and their isolation. The tombs of the kings on the west bank of the Nile and the ruins of temples that lie within the same area are intensely significant of the ancient days of Egypt. Karnak, however, caps all, to my mind, in the appeal to the imagination. Here are evidences of a building enterprise that covered many years and that commanded the highest talents. Its cost must have been mounted into immense figures, even though the wage rate of labor in those days was low and the price of materials was only a slight fraction of modem scales. Armies of slaves were employed in the cutting of the stones and their transportation from distant quarries. Other armies were engaged in the erection of the walls, the fashioning of the pillars, the placing of the roof stones and, finally, the carving and the painting of the decorations.

A most wonderful view of Karnak is obtained from the top of the First Pylon, which, dating from the Ptolomaic period, was never completed. Portions of the scaffolding, constructed of rough bricks, are visible today. Nearly 150 feet in height, it dominates the entire area of the temple, being reached by two flights of steps, one more or less of a ramp rising along the northern wall of the great court and the other, gained by it, scaling the corner of the pylon to the summit.

To this point Georges Mikhail, our dragoman, had led us the night before our formal inspection of the temple, on the moonlight excursion of which I have heretofore written. To look down from this height into the mass of broken walls and pillars is to get, first, an impression of chaos. Then the order of the ruin begins to appear, and finally comes a sense of the completeness of this vast work, the composite of several centuries of successive efforts on the part of various Egyptian monarchs.

GEORGES MIKHAIL has an eye for the taking of effective photographs. He sent me hither and thither to make shots of lovely scenes, of particularly interesting structures, of significant symbols. I doubt whether Georges ever took a photograph in his life. He really did not seem to know much about the mechanism of the apparatus. Doubtless he had observed many hundreds of camera fiends shooting Karnak in the course of his many years of service and he had come to know the most favored places. I owe to him some of my best shots at Karnak.

One of these included the vista from the Sixth Pylon northwestward and including the obelisks of Hetshepsut and Thutmosis I. Another was taken, at his suggestion, from out side the north side door of the great hypostyle hall, with it hundreds of columns. Georges wanted me to shoot the whole works from an entirely inadequate point of view, his only photographic error. I did, however, get a pictured glimpse of the interior through this small portal, showing the reconstruction timbers spanning the spaces within, and on the outer wall both the carvings of the original builders and the scorings in the soft stone made by the “Christians,” as Georges styled them, who used these surfaces for the sharpening of their weapons of war and the chase. These parallel grooves are observable throughout the area of the temples and tombs at and around Luxor.

An illustration of the manner of construction of the pylons is afforded by the partly collapsed Ninth Pylon on the southern side of the great temple. One side of it has crumbled into an indistinguishable mass of materials. The outer edge of the other side still stands, but its fabric is disintegrated until the component stones of the upper courses hang loose from their settings and threaten to fall at any moment. Yet they have probably been hanging thus for many years, perhaps for a century or two, and may so hang for years to come.

Innumerable are the details of interest at Karnak. Here it is an exquisite head, its features as cleanly chiseled as on the day when it was completed by the artist, whose name will never be known. Again it is a great scarab, dedicated to Amenophis III, standing near the sacred lake south of the main temple. Or it is a processional scene carved in relief on one of the walls, its action vivid and its delineation perfect. Then, again, it may be the perfect proportions of a pylon, massive and yet graceful.

To realize the immensity of the undertaking at Karnak requires the knowledge that it was the work of several centuries and of numerous rulers. King after king took a hand at the construction of sacred places, a temple, a pavilian, a pylon, a group of columns, a temple within a temple, perhaps. It is believed that in the course of this successive and to some extent competitive work much that was lovely was destroyed to make room for newer constructions. Old materials were undoubtedly employed for later operations. Nobody will ever know to a certainty how much vandalism was committed by the very builders of Karnak. And doubtless, too, the Nile took its toll of the great monument, seeping through and sweeping over the ground in the course of countless inundations, weakening the foundations and hastening deterioration.

Going to Karnak is virtually a visit to ancient Egypt. There supremely one feels in touch with the past, with the old faith of Egypt, with the artistry of the people and with the ambitions of the rulers. There one gains a concept of what it meant to be a king in those days, with hordes of workers at command, with highly skilled artists available for the greatest of undertakings, and with a setting for giant constructions unequaled elsewhere in the world.

The Evening Star, Washington, DC, March 15, 1931