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To finish with the Luxor Museum, one of its greatest treasures is a statue of Thutmose III (1490-1436 BC) which looks just like a Francis Bacon. I also enjoyed seeing more statues of Akhenaten, with his long thin horsy face. He reminds me of someone, but I can’t think who it is.
I liked the roof garden of the Nefertiti for its view of the Luxor Temple but they had no alcohol licence and you could only drink in your room, not take booze up there. The more expensive hotels served wine so we visited the Winter Palace more than once. You had to buy a voucher for £500 Egyptian pounds to register as a non-resident guest. (£7. 80 UK) to visit the bars or restaurants. Presumably to keep out poor people. The doorman, of course, had to be paid simply for letting you walk in. It’s part of the French Sofitel chain so has a bit of an international corporate feel to it, but it was built in 1905 to serve British archaeologists and has extensive gardens and a huge pool. The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter was announced here by Lord Carnarvon who stayed here on his frequent visits to the dig, and this was where the international press corps stayed waiting for daily news about the discovery. Agatha Christie wrote Death On The Nile while staying here in 1937. The sunset from the outdoor front bar is spectacular.
The Temple of Karnak, dedicated to Amun-Re, the king of the Gods, is at the other end of the Avenue of the Sphinxes that passed our hotel. It is enormous, and after ticketing you reach the first pylon via an avenue of ram-headed sphinxes. It was the largest sanctuary of ancient Thebes.
You enter through the First Pylon. These wall-like doorways were designed to look like a river valley cutting through a desert escarpment, and in their ruinous state they do. Fortunately, the Great Court was almost free of tourists when we were there so we could appreciate the space. It is dominated by the giant red granite colossus of Ramses II, who guards the entrance to the Second Pylon, leading to the Great Hypostyle Hall. Standing between his legs is a statue of one his daughters, who also became his wife.
The Hypostyle Hall is one of the greatest wonders of ancient Egypt, of the World. One hundred and thirty-four gigantic sandstone columns, built to resemble bundles of papyrus, originally supported a flat stone clerestory roof (the definition of ‘hypostyle’). It was built by Sety I in the 1280’s BC and completed by his son Ramesses II. It covers an acre of land, 5,500 square metres, surrounded by massive walls. The columns are up to 20 metres high, all richly decorated with relief carvings and inscriptions and were designed to stand in water during the annual summer Nile inundation. After 3,300 years the hall remains largely intact though infiltration of ground water and human factors are threatening to destroy it. It remained in use for seventeen centuries: each reign adding more inscriptions and sculpture in varying styles and complexity. Astonishingly only a fraction of the hieroglyphic inscriptions has been recorded and interpreted though a joint project run by the University of Memphis, Tennessee, the Université de Québec in Montreal, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities and the Centre Franco-égyptien d’études des temples de Karnak is attempting a complete scientific record of all the inscriptions as part of their Karnak Hypostyle Hall Project. Not much seemed to be being done except the placing of a few barriers that everyone walked around blocking off a few sections where ladders and tools were stored. It is a breathtaking place. Visitors stand with their mouths agape; Theo and I did so ourselves. You just have to stand in awe. It is, in many ways, a frustrating place because you know that it would take weeks to examine everything there properly, and that you are getting just a brief, superficial look at one of the most extraordinary sights on Earth. I rank it with the Pantheon and Borobudur in a list of the greatest things I have ever seen. Phew!
But we are only just getting started. We pass through the third and fourth pylons to reach the 30 metre obelisk erected by Queen Hatshepsut, the tallest in Egypt. This was originally one of a pair (as usual) and the truncated top half of its mate now stands next to the Sacred Lake, where we will encounter it later.
After the remains of the Fifth and the small sixth pylons you reach the Sacred Sanctuary of Amun. This whole area of the site is pretty ruinous (destroyed by the Persians, rebuilt during the Ptolemaic period) but does contain colossi of Amun and the goddess Amunet though we forgot to photograph them, probably because they were incomplete. The famous Wall of Records is here, an exercise in early accounting showing a tally of offerings left by devotees of Amun. Theo discovered it while examining the wall reliefs and came to find me as it is an amazing thing to see. I was communing with a damaged Sekhmet, standing all alone, poor girl, wishing I had some beer for her. She likes beer. She did have her sun disc at least.
There is an even longer secondary axis to the temple which extends out for a series of four large courtyards, separated by the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth and Tenth pylons. I only made it to the Eighth, where there are the remains of four huge colossi of Ramesses II, one of them a recent reconstruction. Way beyond the Ninth pylon, past an avenue of sphinxes, lies the precinct of Mut, which is so remote as to have its own ticket office. Its claim to fame is an enclosure of Sekhmets, but they are in ruinous condition and the six best and most intact are in the Egyptian Hall of the British Museum where one can study them in ideal conditions.
It was a hot day, and I was exhausted by then. Fortunately, there is a very pleasant café located near the Sacred Lake where we were able to get refreshment. I went there twice. It also sells books, guides and souvenirs. Here we are at the Eighth pylon, in the café and with the view across the lake to the Eighth Pylon, built by Queen Hatshepsut.
The complex ends with the Great Festival Temple of Tuthmosis III. More terrific columns, more painted wall carvings and ceilings. My head was spinning. There is only so much you can take in, like seeing an enormous retrospective art show the brain just closes down after a while. We were still having fun, however. Here is Theo walking like an Egyptian (if you are allowed to say things like that these days – it’s a song title reference). It had been an exhausting day but we had a couple more things to see: the giant scarab which some folks walk around seven times clockwise to bring good luck. It stands next to the lake, not far from the top of Hatshepsut’s truncated column. The Egyptian Army were holding some sort of award ceremony there for Army Cadets but were happy enough for tourists to mingle with them; one officer even asking Theo for a light. We departed, heads spinning.
