Karnak

Karnak is a vast complex of temples, chapels, pylons and obelisks on the east bank of the Nile, about two and a half kilometres north of Luxor, in what was the ancient city of Thebes. Its ancient name, Ipet-isut, is usually rendered as "the most select of places". The heart of the site is the precinct of Amun-Re, chief god of Thebes, and it grew over some two thousand years, from the Middle Kingdom to Ptolemaic times, as roughly thirty pharaohs each added to it. No other Egyptian temple was developed and used for so long.

Thebes seems to have mattered little before the Eleventh Dynasty, and any earlier shrines there were small; the oldest object yet found in the temple area is a little eight-sided column of that dynasty naming Amun-Re. When Theban kings reunited Egypt and founded the Middle Kingdom, their local god Amun rose with them and was gradually fused with Ra, the sun god. The oldest buildings with surviving remains are the White Chapel of Senusret I and the Middle Kingdom court.

The great expansion came in the Eighteenth Dynasty, when Thebes was the capital of the New Kingdom and the modest temple grew into a huge state religious centre as Egypt's wealth increased. Nearly every king of the dynasty built something. Thutmose I enclosed the older temple with walls and pylons that are now the earliest parts still standing where they were built. Hatshepsut raised a pair of obelisks at the entrance, then the tallest in the world; one still stands. Thutmose III enlarged the main temple by about half with his Festival Hall. Akhenaten, who tried to curb the powerful priesthood of Amun, built his own temple just east of the precinct, but it was torn down after his death so thoroughly that its full plan is unknown.

The Great Hypostyle Hall, perhaps begun late in the Eighteenth Dynasty, was mostly built under Seti I and Ramesses II. It covers about 5,000 square metres and holds 134 columns in 16 rows, twelve of them some 21 metres tall. Merneptah recorded his wars against the Sea Peoples on nearby walls. Besides Amun's precinct, the complex includes separate precincts for the goddess Mut, Amun's consort, and for the war god Montu.

As royal power faded in the Twentieth Dynasty, building slowed, and in the Third Intermediate Period the High Priests of Amun governed Thebes while kings ruled from the north. The Libyan kings of the Twenty-second Dynasty began a new forecourt, where Shoshenq I recorded his campaigns in Syria-Palestine. Taharqa, king of Kush and pharaoh of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty in the early seventh century BCE, built a pillared structure in the forecourt and added to the precinct of Montu. The last major change to the layout came under Nectanebo I of the Thirtieth Dynasty, who built the great First Pylon and the massive enclosure walls. After Alexander's conquest, Philip Arrhidaeus rebuilt the central shrine in red granite, and the rulers of the Ptolemaic Kingdom added gateways and the temple of Opet, the last important cult building at the site.

Egypt was annexed by Rome in 30 BCE, and the Greek geographer Strabo described Thebes in his day as dwindled to a scatter of villages. After the emperor Constantius II ordered pagan temples closed in 356 CE, Karnak, already largely abandoned, was partly taken over by Christians, who set up churches among the ruins; paintings of saints and Coptic inscriptions survive in Thutmose III's Festival Hall.

Medieval Europe lost track of where Thebes lay. The first European description of Karnak, by an unnamed Venetian, dates from 1589, and the name "Carnac" first appears in 1668 in the account of two Capuchin missionaries. A stream of travellers followed in the eighteenth century, and scholars with Napoleon's expedition recorded the ruins in 1798–99. Excavation and restoration have continued since; a team from Johns Hopkins University has worked in the precinct of Mut, which is now open to visitors.

Karnak forms part of the UNESCO World Heritage site of Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis, inscribed in 1979. It is believed to be Egypt's second most visited historic site after the pyramids of Giza.