Followers

Tuesday 2 August 2011

Day 172: The Temple At Karnak (19/07/2011)

Well slept and better fed, we bounced off the sleeper train from Cairo, not entirely sure whether we were in Luxor or Aswan, there being only a brief snooze between them.

Establishing from a friendly commuter that we were indeed in the right place, we hopped into a cab and dumped our possessions at the St Josef hotel, last renovated in 1976 but conspicuously maintained since that date so that the brown polyester bed spreads and orange vinyl headboards were in the same condition as when they came out of their wrapping nearly 40 years before.

Straight out into another cab we hurtled, destination Karnak.

It is a word laden with meaning, heavy with the dust of passing eons. A temple constructed 4,500 years ago on an epic scale that belittles anything like it, anywhere. The very structures have found their way into our language, all be it in the grossest form of inverted hyperbole that you are likely to find this side of Blackpool Pleasure Beach. The three Pylons are mammoth sandstone erections that tower above the causeway lined with Sphinx and divide the temple into its compartments. The kiosk is the sole surviving pillar that looms over the second sector, the balance having fallen in various episodes over the millennia, the last as recent as on  3rd October 1899.

Most famous is the Hippostyle Hall, an enclosure of 134 columns, modelled on the priapic qualities of the papyrus stem and flower, from the top of which Michael York was nearly crushed by a falling block in ‘Death on the Nile’. The size and number of the pillars is staggering. As you walk through the hall, avenues between them open and close to your passing, both at right angles and diagonals. You circle again and again, mesmerized at their monolithic silence and run your fingers over the elegant cartouches carved deeply into their surfaces. Nothing can prepare you for the timeless sense of amazement at the advanced construction they required at a time when the Western world was rolling in its own filth.

Dozens of life-like goats line each side of the temple enclosure. Massive statues of Ramses tower of the gateways, dwarfed only by the larger versions at Abu Simbel.

Paradoxically, what gives the greatest sense of perspective are the excellent photos taken over the last 150 years, displayed in what would otherwise be an airport terminal, masquerading as a visitor centre. In the 1890’s the pylons were a pile of blocks strewn chaotically about the site. The Avenue of Sphinx was all but submerged by the sands. The Hippostyle Hall was a confusion of collapsed pillars. The sacred water cistern was dried up and full of sand. Even the delightful Scarab Beetle, standing on a pedestal at the rear of the temple was lost in a copse of mature trees.

Painstakingly, for over a century, archaeologists have catalogued, studied and reconstructed the most complex jigsaw of all time.

Without knowing the disastrous condition they were in 200 years ago, we would have no idea of their magnificence, 4,500 years ago.

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