Karnak Temple

Karnak is not a temple. It is a walled precinct of about two square kilometres holding temples, chapels, pylons, obelisks, a sacred lake and the accumulated building work of roughly thirty pharaohs over two thousand years.

The part visitors see is the Precinct of Amun-Re, which is itself the largest religious building ever constructed. Two neighbouring precincts, those of Mut and Montu, are mostly closed.

The Great Hypostyle Hall is the single most overwhelming interior in Egypt, and photographs consistently fail at it. One hundred and thirty-four columns stand in sixteen rows across an area of about five thousand square metres; the twelve down the central aisle rise to roughly twenty metres and are wide enough that several people cannot link arms around one. It was roofed. Standing in it, the thing you understand is that you were never meant to see the far wall.

The scale of time is the other reason. Almost every pharaoh who mattered added something here and defaced or re-carved what a predecessor had added. You can see Hatshepsut's obelisk with the lower section walled up by Thutmose III, and blocks from Akhenaten's suppressed Aten temple reused as rubble inside a later pylon. Karnak is the argument, in stone, between one dynasty and the next.

And it still holds the tallest ancient obelisk standing in Egypt — Hatshepsut's, at about twenty-nine metres, cut from the Aswan granite quarry. Its fallen twin lies on its side near the Sacred Lake, where you can walk the length of it and read the inscription at eye level.

Building began in the Middle Kingdom, around the twentieth century BC, and continued into the Ptolemaic period. The site was in continuous religious use for longer than the span between the Ptolemies and now.

Amun-Re rose with Thebes itself. As the city became the capital of the New Kingdom, its local god became the state god, and the wealth of an empire was spent here — Thutmose III's conquests, Seti I's and Ramesses II's building programmes, and the endowments of a priesthood that grew powerful enough to rival the crown.

The Great Hypostyle Hall was begun under Seti I and finished by Ramesses II in the thirteenth century BC. The ten pylons were added by different kings in different directions, which is why the complex grows along two axes rather than one.

The first pylon, the one you walk through at the entrance, was never finished. The mudbrick construction ramp is still piled against the inside face — the clearest surviving evidence anywhere of how Egyptians actually raised a wall of this size.

The temple was the destination of the annual Opet procession, when the images of the Theban gods travelled to Luxor Temple along the avenue of sphinxes and back. That avenue, nearly three kilometres of it, has been excavated along its whole length and reopened.

• The Great Hypostyle Hall — 134 columns, and the reason to come
• The avenue of ram-headed sphinxes at the entrance
• Hatshepsut's standing obelisk, the tallest in Egypt, and its fallen twin by the lake
• The Sacred Lake, and the granite scarab beside it
• The Festival Hall of Thutmose III, with columns shaped like tent poles
• The unfinished first pylon and the mudbrick ramp still leaning against it
• The Open Air Museum, holding the reconstructed White Chapel of Senusret I
• The battle reliefs of Seti I on the outer north wall of the Hypostyle Hall
• The Cachette Court, where thousands of statues were found buried