Luxor: Karnak Temple

I'm trying to get a slideshow going so I can post more photos at a time, but our camera takes such large files, I'm having a hard time with the technical details. In the meantime, I'll just post a few as will fit.

Some of these pictures are silly--I'd finally gotten enough sleep on this trip to feel like myself, and I made a friend named Sheila. She is about my height, about my age, and funny. So we hammed for the camera a little. I got a card from her today, and I am grateful she was in some of our pictures. She is a fabulous travel companion! As were the rest of the people in our group.

Posing like a statue of a pharoah...
"Papyrus flower with open capital..."

Karnak and Luxor temples are about 2 1/2 miles apart, and at one time had an avenue connecting them that was lined with sphinxes on both sides. The Karnak Temple complex was built to the god Amun, and covers 247 acres. Huge, built of stone, elaborately carved with some of the original color still showing, it is truly an engineering feat. I can't imagine how many people it took to build such a structure. The tops of the columns (Papyrus flower with open capital) are large enough for 100 people to stand on. Construction began during Ramesses I's reign. He was the king who founded the Nineteenth Dynasty and was king for only one year. The work continued under Seti I (1306-1296 BC). The hall was completed by Seti I's son, Ramesses II. After Ramesses, the next pharoahs (one was a woman named Hatshepsut) continued to add on for the next 1300 years, constructing their own statues and obelisks and carving out the previous guys' faces and names. An earthquake in 70 BC destroyed it.

These photos show the top of one of the columns that is big enough to hold 100 people. Also note the color on both sides in the paintings that is still original--3500 years old! Next to it is an example of the name of a king being "erased" or chiseled out by the successor. They just took out his whole body, which was the offensive part of the depiction. On the right is the last remaining obelisk from Queen Hapshetsut. Her son, after her death, built a wall around her offensive obelisk to block it from view.

We spent a couple of hours at Karnak with our Egyptian guide, Rafaat (pronounced Ray-faht). He was a sweet man that has been doing LDS and BYU tours for years. I listened to some of the other guides there with other groups, and we really had the best one. His knowledge was incredible, and he would even get down in the sand and draw pictures to illustrate his points.