karnak

The temple at Karnak was the sister to the Temple of Luxor a.k.a. The Temple of Man. The temple core was begun in the twenty-second dynasty, and was added to by every pharoh there-after until the reign of Amenhotep IV, a.k.a. Akhenaton, the heretic king. (more on that later) Karnak was known in ancient times as Ipset-isut, most select of places. The temple complex is so large that it covers 200 square acres, large enough to fit the cathedral of St. Peters in Rome, the cathedral of Milan, and the cathedral of Notre Dame in France easily between its pylons.Karnak is best known, however, for its avenue of Ram-headed gods, (see below), representing the god Amon, one of the Thebian trilogy for whom the temple is dedicated. The other two gods that this temple was dedicated to were Mut and Khonsu, Amon's wife and son. The avenue leads 2.5 miles to the Temple of Luxor where festivals were held yearly celebrating the renewal of the divinity of the pharoh.

The temple of Karnak is the largest place of worship ever built. Among the attributes of the collosus are a 54,000 square foot Hypostle Hall containing 134 columns. The temple also contains huge obleisks. Among the largest sacred lakes in the world is the sacred lake at the Temple of Karnak. Every year there would be a festival in which the statues of the gods would sail across the lake on gold plated barges. (see below).

When the capital of the united Upper and Lower Egypt was moved to Thebes, the temples of Karnak and Luxor and their preists became very powerful and the center of worship for not just the pharoh, but the kingdom at large. By the time of the kingship of Amenhotep IV (Akhenaton), whos father Amenhotep III largely contributed to the building of the temple at Luxor, the Preisthood of Amun was powerful enough to rival the power of the pharoh himself. It is beleived that part of the reason Akhenaton dissolved the polytheistic preisthoods of days of old and moved the capital from Thebes to Memphis to start a new order and a new religion was because of the power of the Amon preisthood. A follow-up page outlining the rise of Akhenaton and the founding of the new religion will follow on a later page.