The Great Temple of Amun-Ra in the site of Karnak, in the ancient city of Thebes is the grandest of all Egyptian temples. It was not built upon one
complete plan, but owes its size, disposition and magnificence
to the work of many kings. It is placed in an immense enclosure along with other ancillary temples that got
built over time and a sacred lake, all surrounded by a wall 9 meters thick, and it is connected by an avenue of
sphinxes with the temple of Luxor. you can see how the notion of axis and
procession that was already established in the journey from the valley temple
through the causeway to the pyramid, is transformed in this new
building type, Egyptian temple, and in fact the procession begins long
before you ever penetrate this big gate. We have an avenue lined with sphinxes, ram headed lion figures each protecting a
small pharaoh figure between their paws, and before you even get to the sphinxes we see these two stone needles
called obelisks over here, obelisks were commemorative landmarks for
pharaohs made out of a single piece of stone, and in some temples behind the
obelisks we see colossal statues so there are many things stretching out to
the desert enforcing the notion of procession, enforcing the idea of the axis, and a gate. The gate in the Egyptian
temples is called a pylon, and they're interesting forms
because in part they're wall-like, defining the edge of a precinct, but they're also gate-like,
permitting the axis to thread through. The temple of Amun Ra had six pairs
of pylons, added by successive rulers, and consists of various courts and
halls leading to the sanctuary, and a large ceremonial hall
by Thutmose III in the rear. If you look at the pylon you might
ask why does it have that shape, well, again, Egyptian architecture is mimetic
of a vernacular way of building, vernacular means common to the people, so vernacular architecture is the
common popular way of building. When I talked about the step pyramid
of Djoser up on the Nile delta we saw that there was a vernacular way of building
that had to do with reeds and mud and kind of weaving an architecture that then got picked
up in the stone articulation of the buildings. Here in Karnak we don’t have
the same growth of river reeds, and the vernacular Architecture
might have been mud brick, and if you want to build a mud wall, it gets thicker toward the base
and tapers more toward the top and you begin to get that message recapitulated
in the characteristic form of the pylon. When you penetrate the main pylon, you’ll arrive to a great courtyard
with rows of columns on both sides, and with a channel of columns in the center, enforcing the axis of the temple
and the notion of procession. To the right is the temple of Ramesses III, whose courtyard has columns with
statues of the pharaoh attached. The feeling of just walking inside this
small temple is from another world, as it has some inscriptions
that are well preserved, some still have traces of color even. If we go back to the main
courtyard of the Amun-Ra temple, you can see that there are many
sphinxes in the lateral side, these used to be part of the
sphinx avenue in the entrance, but were relocated when the pylons were built. Beyond the courtyard is the second pylon, which gives entrance to the vast hypostyle
hall built by Seti I and his son Ramesses II. This is the Great Hypostyle
Hall in the Temple of Amon Ra, a hypostyle hall is a covered
architectural enclosure supported by rows of large columns placed closely together, which can resemble a forest of columns. The roof of enormous slabs of stone is
supported by 134 columns in 16 rows; the central avenues are about 24 meters in height and have columns 21 meters high
and 3.6 meters in diameter, with capitals of the papyrus-flower, while the side avenues are lower with columns
13 meters high and 2.7 meters in diameter. So the central avenue is taller in order
to admit light through the clerestory, which are these huge windows on the sides. We don’t see this method of clerestory lighting fully developed again until the middle
ages in the gothic cathedrals in Europe. The scale of Egyptian architecture is astonishing, you go there and you really do
feel something extraordinary, you have an overwhelming reaction to how small
you are and how big this architecture is, and that sense of being overwhelmed by an
experience of landscape or architecture is called the sublime. You can see that the columns
are really close together. The tight spacing was necessary
because stone cannot span very far, but it's also great, it's just as the physical
experience of being around these huge columns, and getting the shade of
the columns is breathtaking. All these columns were carved with
inscriptions and reliefs in color, and give names of the royal personages
who contributed to its grandeur, and praise the gods to whom it was dedicated. The color has mostly disappeared, but you can see here and there a few
traces of it in the architecture. Beyond this point the temple becomes
more ruinous and harder to follow, but several major features stand out,
such as the obelisk of Hatshepsut, which is one of the largest obelisks in Egypt, and the sancta sanctorum,
the sanctuary of the temple, where the statue of Amun was placed. If you continue your way toward the
right, you’ll find the sacred lake, which was used by priests for ritual
washing and ritual navigation, and you'll also find these
precincts with more pylons, but it's worth looking for a moment
at how disorganized this plan is, I mean we get the Amon Ra temple
behaving in a fairly normative way, and this axis is perpendicular to the
Nile River which is way over here, and so there is that same journey along the causeway from the funerary
barge taking you in there, then we get certain other temples like this one where the pylons are not behaving quite so
axially as we would expect from the Egyptians, and the reason for that is, a larger
engagement of the site is being responded to, here it's all about the Nile
and the path, the procession, here it's all about making a connection to another
temple precinct, a pre-existing temple complex, so sometimes, when you start analyzing
buildings, you might look at something, and you couldn’t find a way
of making sense out of it, like why this thing is so messy? but if you find a site plan and you
find information, you might get it, that the local condition is
compromised to make sense out of the regional condition or the larger site idea, so some of those things are happening over here. Let's look at the type of Middle
and New Kingdom Egyptian temple. Temples were of two main classes; the mortuary
temples, for ministrations to deified pharaohs; and cult temples, for the
popular worship of ancient gods. But by the New Kingdom, both mortuary and
cult temples had most features in common. We have some constituent parts that are conserved
regardless of how much difference we have, like the notion of the threshold, the pylon, that begins to structure a
procession in a hierarchical fashion, you can read the pylons in plan because
they are these massively thick walls, and then you get a series of hypostyle halls, that you can also read in plan because
they’re these halls full of columns. Constituent parts laid out in
quite different ways spatially, but nonetheless close enough to the normative
type to deserve that title of Egyptian temple. This is the temple of Khonsu, located
here in a corner of the Amon Ra complex, and this one's good to look
at because it's so clear, the Amon Ra temple is so big and messy that
it’s hard to read the type in its clarity. If we look closely to these temples we can
begin to see ideas of organization that go beyond the simple notion that there's a big axis, we see how hierarchy is established
by this telescoping scale, and by telescoping scale I mean spaces gathered
together and made more and more condensed, so we have the world out here, we
have the channel of space here, we have a courtyard surrounded by
a double colonnade on three sides, we have this hall full of
columns called hypostyle hall, smaller chambers that become more
and more condensed like a telescope, so the size of the space in
plan enforces the sense that this is hierarchically more and more exclusive, and if you look at the section this
telescoping action is happening in two ways, the floor is stepping up, the roof is stepping
down, you're getting more and more compressed. So, as you penetrate and move
forward through the temple, you keep walking through increasingly darker, increasingly smaller rooms that
have lower and lower ceilings, and at the end, there was the
statue of Amun and his solar vessel, that were processioned throughout
the city, dressed in rich garments and smeared with ointments and perfumes, so the sanctuary felt like a small, dark, and silent place, just like the
humid and silent depths of the earth, where Amun, the subterranean
and hidden god got his power. If you'd like to see some of the pictures I took
in these amazing sites go follow me on Instagram, because I've been posting a lot of images
from Egypt and from other incredible places. Thanks for watching, please support me
with a like, and I'll see you very soon, goodbye!
