Karnak & Medinet Habu
Wednesday–Thursday October 16–17, 2002
This is the entrance to the Temple of Karnak at Luxor. Some of the monuments in Egypt are of a very large scale, and this is one of them. Additions were made here over 1,300 years, a period somewhat longer than that encompassing the history of the United States. The area around Luxor (Karnak, Valley of the Kings, etc, is a Unesco World Heritage site.
Hypostile Hall is comprised of massive columns.
One of the obelisks of Hatshepsut, a pharoah, is visible through the window. The obelisk is solid granite and was covered in a mixture of silver and gold when she was the ruler of Egypt.
This photograph makes it easy to see the size of the columns.
Medinet Habu is another large monument near Luxor. It was built as the mortuary temple for Ramses III about 1100 BC and covers about 20 acres. Some of the original interior decorative paint remains easily visible today, as shown in the photograph at the bottom of this page.
The western side of the Nile River was for the dead in ancient Egypt, and the eastern side was for the living. This photograph shows a small part of the hot and dry “Valley of the Kings” where pharaohs were buried across the river from Luxor. The tomb of King Tut was found in this area in 1922. We saw three of the tombs here and one in the nearby Valley of the Queens. The painting inside the tombs was hard to photograph but was remarkable.
We also visited the much photographed mortuary temple of the only female pharaoh, Hatshepsut, as well as the Colossus of Ramses, both on the west bank
We flew about 400 miles south (up river) from Cairo to Luxor, and boarded a shallow draught boat that would be our home base for the next few days as we motored another 100 miles further up river to Aswan.
Near Luxor are the temples of Karnak and Medinet Habu, and the Valley of the Kings, where many kings (including Tut) were buried.
Luxor itself was the capital of Egypt between 1600 BC and 1000 BC.
Next—more temples on the way to Aswan.