Karnak Temple Complex — archaeological site
Image by nadkol19 from Pixabay

Karnak Temple Complex

  • 1 min read
  • 25.718° N 32.658° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • The ancient Egyptians called the complex Ipet-isut, usually translated as the Most Selected of Places; Karnak is simply the name of a modern village nearby.
  • Around thirty pharaohs added buildings, gates or decoration to the site over its long history.
  • In 1903 Georges Legrain uncovered a buried hoard in front of the Seventh Pylon: nearly 800 stone statues and about 17,000 bronzes.
  • Hatshepsut's surviving obelisk, almost 30 metres tall, was the tallest in the world when raised; later kings walled it in to hide it from view.
  • The obelisk now in front of Rome's Lateran Palace began at Karnak around 1400 BC and was shipped to Rome by Emperor Constantius II in 357 AD.
  • The massive First Pylon, 113 metres wide and 15 metres thick, was never completed, and mud bricks from its building works are still heaped against its inner face.
  • The sandstone for the temples was floated down the Nile from the quarries of Gebel el-Silsila, about 160 km to the south.
  • The stone beams resting on the columns of the Hypostyle Hall weigh around 70 tonnes each.
  • Akhenaten built temples to the sun disc Aten here, but they were torn down right after his death under pressure from the restored priesthood of Amun.
  • In late antiquity Christians founded churches among the ruins, and painted saints and Coptic inscriptions survive in Thutmose III's Festival Hall.

Why it is worth it

The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak is large enough that Notre-Dame Cathedral would fit inside its footprint, held up by 134 sandstone columns, with the twelve tallest running down the central nave at about 21 metres high and roughly 10 metres around — big enough that a handful of people can link arms around the base of just one. It remains, by floor area, the largest room ever built for religious use anywhere, and every one of those columns is carved top to bottom with battle scenes, ritual texts, and in at least one case the recorded terms of a peace treaty, turning the architecture itself into a legal and historical archive.

The hall wasn't finished by one ruler with one plan. Work on it stretched across the reigns of at least four pharaohs — begun under Amenhotep III, carried forward by Seti I and his son Ramesses II, and only completed under Ramesses IV — meaning the building site itself outlasted several complete reigns and dynastic successions before the roof went on.

And the hall is only one room inside a temple complex whose oldest core goes back much further, to the Middle Kingdom under Senusret I roughly two thousand years before the hypostyle hall, with new pharaohs adding, enlarging or rededicating parts of it right through to the Ptolemaic period. Karnak isn't a single construction project frozen at one moment — it's closer to two thousand years of continuous architectural accretion by whoever happened to be in power.

Getting there

Located in Luxor. Luxor International Airport (LXR) is about 7 km away.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Luxor 6The Most Beautiful Places in Egypt 35The Most Remarkable Ancient Places in Egypt 5The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Sacred Places in Egypt 5The Most Beautiful Ancient Temples 6The Most Beautiful Temples in Egypt 7The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Egypt 8The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites in Egypt 13The Greatest Archaeological Wonders in Egypt 15The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Egypt 18The Most Beautiful Ancient Sacred Places 18The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Temples 35The Most Remarkable Ancient Archaeological Sites 36The Greatest Ancient Archaeological Wonders 52The Most Remarkable Ancient Places 78The Most Beautiful Temples 95The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Sites 114The Greatest UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Wonders 149The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Sacred Places 179The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites 193The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

The Karnak Temple Complex, commonly known as Karnak, comprises a vast mix of temples, pylons, chapels, and other buildings near Luxor, Egypt. Construction at the complex began during the reign of Senusret I in the Middle Kingdom and continued into the Ptolemaic Kingdom, although most of the extant buildings date from the New Kingdom. The area around Karnak was the ancient Egyptian Ipet-isut and the main place of worship of the 18th Dynastic Theban Triad, with the god Amun as its head.

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