Karnak Temple

Karnak is not a temple but a temple city — roughly two square kilometres of precincts on the east bank at Luxor, built, demolished, rebuilt and extended by some thirty pharaohs over more than 1,300 years. Nowhere else in Egypt is so much of so many periods standing in one place.

The centrepiece is the Great Hypostyle Hall: 134 sandstone columns filling an area of about 5,000 square metres, the central twelve standing over twenty metres tall with capitals wide enough for dozens of people to stand on. Much of the original paint survives high up, where the roof once shut out the light.

Karnak grew the way a cathedral grows. Each king added a hall, a pylon or an obelisk in front of what already stood, so the complex reads outward from the centre in reverse chronological order: the oldest work is deepest inside, and you walk backwards through a thousand years to reach it.

It was also the richest institution in Egypt. At its height the estate of Amun held tens of thousands of workers, vast tracts of farmland, herds, ships and mines — enough that the High Priest of Amun at Thebes eventually rivalled the pharaoh himself for power, and in the Third Intermediate Period effectively ruled the south.

The cachette

In 1903 the French archaeologist Georges Legrain, digging in the courtyard in front of the seventh pylon, struck the top of a buried statue. Below it was another, and another. What he had found became known as the Karnak Cachette: a pit into which the priests had carefully lowered some 800 stone statues and thousands of bronzes — around 17,000 objects in all.

They had not been dumped. As the temple filled up over the centuries, old votive statues were reverently retired, buried inside sacred ground rather than destroyed. Legrain spent years emptying the pit, working in water, and the objects he raised now form a large part of the Egyptian Museum's holdings.