Today's Temple Tromp (at Top Tempo)

3:00 am is when the wake-up call came for today's trip to the Cairo Airport and flight to Luxor, aka Thebes, the ancient capitol of Upper and Lower Egypt.  Getting to the airport took almost as long, even at that early hour, as the flight, itself!  One positive result was our first daytime sighting of the Nile.  Beautiful, at least at this location.

Our on-bus lecture from Mohamed during our journey from the Luxor airport to the Temple Complex at Karnak gave us a pretty good idea of what to look for and at when we arrived.  Temple planning and construction, it seems, had rigid rules that had to be followed.  There had to be a Pilon or entry gate of impressive proportions. Next there had to be an open court adjoining a pillared hall, which led to the Sanctuary.  Elaborations within those perimeters was apparently allowed, especially if you were a pharaoh!  Karnak contains 21 individual temples which were built over 400+ years by 26 kings and one queen.  Today, most of the complex is still in ruins, but, the main temple dedicated to Amun Ra or Re, if you prefer, has been "restored" so that it is possible to get an idea of the magnificence it once displayed.  I am tempted to go into much detail, but the experience has left me humbled by and for my ignorance of ancient Egyptian culture, art, history, etc.  So, I'll simply share the appropriate pix for illustration.

There must be a great Pylon, or entrance gate, followed by an Open Court;  Next comes the Pillared Room and a passage leading to The Sanctuary.  The pictures below display this order at the main temple at Karnak:

The Great Pylon at Karnak

The Open Court

The PIllared Room (this picture does it great injustice!)

The Altar in the Sanctuary

Our leader gave us about an hour to wander around on our own before being loaded back on the bus for the next stop which was the Luxor Temple, a smaller but still quite impressing amassing of sculptured rocks. 

Luxor Temple was begun by Pharaoh Amenhotep III, graced ever so briefly by Tutankhamun, and complete by the ubiquitous Ramses II, whose presence is everywhere in the Egyptian tourist sites.  He (Ramses) assumed the throne at an early age, in his teens, I think, and died at 97, which gave him 70 + years to make his mark, and he certainly did!  Everywhere!  It may have contributed to his appellation, "The Great."  Considering the reigns of most of the ancient rulers, he was clearly quite the serviver, to say the least.

The Luxor Temple has more than a few interesting features, however, that inspire some comment.  Of course it has all the requisite parts.  I've already mentioned that it is smaller and it is better preserved.  It is also centrally located in downtown Luxor and beautifully lighted at night, although I was never able to capture a good enough picture of it's nocturnal splendor.

Pylon and entrance to Luxor Temple

If you look carefully, you can make out a single obelisk at the front of the temple.  The other one, missing for two hundred years is in the Place de Concorde in Paris where it landed as a gift from the Sultan to the French.  We were told that the Sultan, in return for his generosity received a clock which never worked.  Those wiley French!!  All the requisite parts of the Temple are present, but the ages and various uses it has been forced to accommodate over the centuries have left their traces.  Alexander the Great, for example, felt it needed some upgrading to satisfy his Hellenistic inclinations. the Romans used it as a fort during their tenure.  During the Christianization of Egypt in the fourth Century, some bishop or other took over the sanctuary and made it a church, and the Moslems, in the seventh century added a mosque at the entrance, behind the great Pylon.

Inside Luxor Temple

Church door to Luxor Temple's original sanctuary

Mosque built onto Temple Pylon

In ancient time, the Luxor Temple and Karnak Temple(s) were joined by a paved, straight route called the Sphynx Road.  The Egyptian antiquities ministry is in the process of restoring this long unused thoroughfare, dislodging thousand of people and destroying home that have been built on it for centuries.  It was extremely important to the ancient cult for their ceremonies and for easy access for pilgrims visiting their holy sites.  Think of something like the Via doloRosa, or the route down the Mount of Olives.  

The Sphinx Road - Luxor 

 With that, I'm going to close this post.  If you have been following along, and wondered what happened to the entries, this is the answer.  Once we left Cairo, WiFi seemed not to support the band width (?) necessary to continue the making new entries.  By the time we returned to Cairo, it made no sense to try to catch-up in a few hours, and I made the decision to wait until I was back in a better communication space to continue.  There will be more, soon.  I promise.