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~Marie Parsons~
In ancient Egypt the Temple area now known as Luxor was called Ipt rsyt, the "southern sanctuary", referring to the holy of holies at the temple’s southern end, wherein the principal god, Amun "preeminent in his sanctuary", or Amenemope, dwelt.
The name Luxor represents both the present-day metropolis that was ancient Thebes, and the temple on the eastern bank which adjoins the town. "Luxor" derives from the Arabic al-uksur, meaning "fortifications". That name in addition was adapted from the Latin castrum which referred to the Roman fort built around the temple in the later third century ACE.
Luxor Temple was the power base of the living divine king, and the foremost national shrine of the king’s cult. This doctrine of divine kingship separated the Egyptians from their neighbors in Mesopotamia and from the later medieval "divine selection and right of kings" of Europe.
Kingship was believed to be ordained by the gods at the beginning of time in accordance with ma’at., the well-ordered state, truth, justice, cosmic order. The reigning king was also the physical son of the Creator sun-god. This divine conception and birth was recorded on the walls of Luxor Temple, at Deir el-Bahri, and other royal cult temples throughout Egypt. The king was also an incarnation of the dynastic god Horus, and when deceased, the king was identified with the father of Horus, Osiris. This living king was thus a unique entity, the living incarnation of deity, divinely chosen intermediary, who could act as priest for the entire nation, reciting the prayers, dedicating the sacrifices.
Known in ancient times as "the private sanctuary (opet) of the south," Luxor is located south of Karnak. Its god, Amun of Luxor, was a fertility figure with strong connections to both Karnak and West Thebes. Neither the cult nor any part of the temple appears to predate the early 18th Dynasty; the few Middle Kingdom fragments found here probably come from elsewhere and were transported to Luxor after the original buildings were dismantled.
The earliest reference to the temple comes from a pair of stelae left at Maasara quarry, in the hills east of Memphis, inscribed in regnal year 22 of the reign of Ahmose, c. 1550 BCE. The text records the extraction of limestone for a number of temples including the "Mansion of Amun in the Southern Sanctuary." But structural evidence appears at Luxor only during the co-rule of Hatshepsut and Tutmosis III c 1500 BCE. These elements are built into the triple shrine erected by Ramesses II, c 1280 BCE, the most substantial remnant of Luxor temple’s Tutmosid phase. The shrine was erected inside the first court, in the northwest corner, and reused elements from an original chapel dedicated by Hatshepsut and Tutmosis III.. This small building had been the last of six barque stations built along the road that brought Amun and his entourage from Karnak to Luxor every year during the Opet festival.
The present temple is built on a rise that has never been excavated and which may conceal the original foundations. It is so compact it could be explored in an hour
A road was built in the 18th Dynasty to link Karnak to the north with Luxor to the south. Although the position of thus road must have coincided with the avenue seen in front of Luxor temple today, the latter, along with the sphinxes along it, date to the reign of Nektanebo I in the 30th Dynasty. The mudbrick ruins on either side of the road are all that remains of the town of Luxor during the later and post-Dynastic periods. Several other structures stood in the forecourt in front of the temple itself, including a colonnade of Shabaka, later dismantled, and chapels of Hathor, built by Taharqa and of Sarapis, built by Hadrian. The burned brick walls visible to the east and west of the temple are remains of the late Roman town.
The gate through which one would pass from the avenue to the esplanade in front of the temple was constructed after the Dynastic period, for the brick wall around this courtyard is contemporary with the Roman fort built around the temple at the beginning of the 4th century ACE. Substantial remains of the walls, gates, and pillared stone avenues, can be seen east and west of the temple. Buildings used in this transformation and which no longer exist in whole include a chapel dedicated to Hathor that was erected during the 25th dynasty. A modest mudbrick shrine dedicated to Serapis during Hadrian’s reign and which still contains a statue of Isis survives at the court’s northwest corner.
A sanctuary stood on the site of the Luxor temple or in its vicinity at the beginning of the 18th Dynasty, or even earlier, but the temple we see today was built essentially by two kings, Amenhotep III, the inner, and Ramesses II, the outer. The overall length of the temple between the pylon and rear wall is more than 780 feet.
Although Amenhotep III built the temple proper, the temple is fronted by a pylon of Ramesses II, with reliefs and texts on its outside relating the story of the battle of Qadesh against the Hittites. The pylon towers once supported four enormous cedar-wood flag masts from which pennants streamed.
Two red granite obelisks originally stood in front f the pylon, but only one, more than 75 feet high, now remains. The other was removed to Paris. Several colossal statues of Ramesses II, two seated, flank the entrance. The central gateway of the pylon was partly decorated by Shabaka.
Amenhotep III built the temple proper, at the south end of the site. Behind a columned portico lies the entrance to what was originally another columned hall. The columns inside were removed when this room was transformed into the sanctuary of the Roman fort. An apse, painted with figures of Emperor Diocletian, c 284-305 BCE, and his three coregents, was inserted into the back wall blocking the earlier doorway.
This hall was flanked by a number of chapels that accommodated the processional shrines of Amun as well as Khonsu and Mut when they visited Luxor during the Opet festival. Once a year during the second or third months of the Inundation, a long religious festival was held at Luxor during which the image of Amun of Karnak visited his Ipet-resyt.
A modern doorway built through the Roman apse gives access to the temple’s second columned hall, sometimes called the offering hall, because of the ritual equipment shown being brought into the temple. The walls of the offering hall are carved with offering scenes that feature Amenhotep III, sometimes accompanied by the priestess called "the god’s wife" and a doorway at the southeast corner led to a passage through which provisions and Nile water were brought.
A door in the southwest corner leads to a passage that led into a service entrance into this part of the building on the west side of the temple. Back in the offering hall, a wide portal leads into the bark sanctuary of Amun. This portal was subsequently adapted to include a small priest’s hole inside the masonry of the doorway, perhaps to assist in the delivery of oracles.
The entrance to the processional colonnade of Amenhotep III, with seven columns on either side, has two seated colossi of Ramesses II with Queen Nefertari by his right leg on the north side, while two seated double statues of Amun and Mut are on the south side. The walls behind the columns were decorated by Tutankhamun and Horemheb with reliefs depicting the Festival of Opet. Those on the west wall show a procession of barques from Karnak to Luxor, those on the east wall show the reverse journey.
The colonnade with twelve open papyrus columns, each standing more than 62 feet high, once fronted the king’s temple and was the prototype for the Great Hypostyle Hall of Karnak. Carving of the scenes and inscriptions had barely been started when the king died and then the upheavals of the Amarna period took place, and work came to a halt. Tutankhamun finished most of the interior carving, but he died before reaching the façade, which was finished by Ay. The figure of Amenhotep III alternates with those of his successors on door-jambs and columns. Tutankhamun’s name shows up only intermittently under that of Horemheb. The few scenes still left in paint at the south end of the hall were finally completed in relief a few years later by Seti I.
Beyond the colonnade is the Great Sun Court of Amenhotep III’s temple. The sun court is almost identical to the court in front of the inner part of Amenhotep III’s funerary temple in West Thebes. It was here in Luxor that in 1989 workers found a deep pit containing a large quantity of statuary, buried probably in the 4th century ACE during the installation of a cult of the deified Roman emperor. The cache, similar to one found in Karnak in 1903, included statues of gods, goddesses, queens, kings and kings as gods, as well as triads of divinities and royal groupings. The most amazing statue in this cache was a larger than life sized statue of Amenhotep III, carved from red-gold quartzite.
A peristyle forecourt of Amenhotep III is fused with the hypostyle hall, which is the first room in the inner, originally roofed, part of the temple. This leads to a series of for antechambers with subsidiary rooms. The Birth Room east of the second antechamber is decorated with reliefs showing the symbolic divine birth of Amenhotep III resulting from the union of his mother Mutemwiya and the god Amun. The bark sanctuary includes a free-standing building added by Alexander the Great within the larger chamber created by Amenhotep III. Well-preserved reliefs show Amun’s portable bark shrine and other scenes of the king in the presence of the gods. The sanctuary of Amenhotep III is the last room on the central axis of the temple.