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Egypt
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| Remember the Tonight Show starring Johnny
Carson? He did a skit portraying an Egyptian mystic, the Great
Karnak, in which he predicted the
answer to a question in a sealed envelop. Then he'd open the
envelop and read the question which had been "kept in a hermetically
sealed mayonnaise jar on Funk and Wagnall's doorstep." Always very funny.
Until
this trip, I thought Karnak was a mystic. I am now among
the enlightened. You can be too, just read on. |
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The Great Paulnak at the Temple of Karnak.
The red line (to the right) shows the path we walked . This
temple is over 240 hectares in size. (240 Hectares equals 2372 Roods... about 1 square mile.) Big place, huh?
Note the Hypostyle hall indicated by the yellow arrow and black square. |
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| The temple was
begun in 1960 BC and added to by every subsequent Pharaoh for the next
2000 years. It was linked to the temple of Luxor, dedicated to Amon, 1.8 miles away by an avenue of Ram-headed sphinxes. The big contributers
were: Seti I & II, Ramses I, II &
III, Horemheb, Amenophis III, Imhotep, Thutmosis I, II and III
and Paul I. |
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Carol in the Avenue of
Sheep-headed Sphinx (The guide said Ram, but my eyes said sheep).
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More of the
Sheepie Rams, but this time with our Italian Postlady in Blue and
Painterlady in purple. The wall in the background (one of nine in
the Temple) is almost 50 feet thick, was built during the last
dynasty. Various Pharaohs built the walls (called Pylons) to mark the boundaries
of temples to different deities. |
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Entrance
to the Hypostyle hall. The hall is bigger
than a football field! (click here to see it on the
map.) It is filled with 134 columns with Lotus and
Papyrus flower
shaped capitals. The Lotus flower is a symbol of Upper Egypt,
while the Papyrus flower is a symbol of Lower Egypt.
The Lotus
is also a symbol of the sun, of creation and rebirth. Because at night the
flower closes and sinks underwater, at dawn it rises and opens again.
According to one creation myth it was a giant lotus which first rose out
of the watery chaos at the beginning of time. From this giant lotus the
sun itself rose on the first day. |
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Amenophis III started the
hall, Horemheb, Seti I and Ramses II continued his work, Ramses IV
finished it and Paul I inspected it. |
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These columns
are 23 meters high and 15 meters around. Look at how small the
people are! The columns are over twice as high as a telephone pole
and if we put one in the room you're sitting in, it would touch all four
walls!. You could put a small car inside one. There are 134 of
them and they were built 3500 years ago (No cranes, no winches, no cement,
no steel...)
These columns are so close together that it is difficult to see their
actual shape. Click here to see similar
columns at a different temple. |
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Paul
I standing below his Cartouche. Look closely and you can see that
the symbols of his cartouche are a laptop, gin and tonic, empty
wallet and a book of memories. |
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Some one was here
before us!! Gordon left his mark in 1828. (I enhanced the
inscription a little.) |
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Looking back
into the hall, you can see the open lotus flowers...the disks on top of
the columns and a statue of Ramses III. |
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| At
one time the temple held six of these 300 ton, 95 foot tall giant
blocks of pink granite. Not pieces, mind you, but one solid
block of stone brought from several miles away. Queen
Hatshepsut was responsible for four of them. |
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| 3500 years ago,
Queen Hatshepsut wanted to add another obelisk to the temple.
When the block (below) was nearly cut, a defect was found and
the stone was abandoned. A 300 ton mistake. |
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| Queen
Hatshepsut is always portrayed dressed as a man, wearing the
Pharaoh's false beard and all the other trappings of a male
Pharaoh. |
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| The
Scarab is a symbol of good luck revered by the Egyptians.
Here are a couple of thousand
pounds worth of good luck for you. Just touch your screen.
Did you really
touch your screen? No, not really? |
| Amenophis
III dedicated this scarab to the god Khepri |
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This was one of my favorite sites.
On to Kom Ombo |
