A Sacred Space Odyssey: the Temple of Karnak
Karnak (Luxor), Egypt
Tallulah Bankhead once quipped, “the entire world is my temple, and a very fine one too.” For a brief time in my life, the Temple of Karnak was my entire world and it too was a very fine one. After years of graduate study and with a smattering of archaeology (all theoretical) under my belt, I weaseled my way onto an excavation in Upper Egypt, a lesser and poorly preserved temple in the shadow of Karnak, the mother-of-all temples. Not to diminish the historical importance of our site, with the grandeur of Karnak literally looming above us and separated by a mudbrick wall, many of us felt like the black sheep of the archaeological family. This was borne out by the general lamentations and frequent sighs of envy that were emitted by our site director as he surveyed the orderly system of railway tracks and little cars that the French used to whisk away the detritus from their sites at Karnak. We used small boys.
Karnak is the largest religious complex built by human hands in the world and, over the centuries, every king worth his salt expanded, rededicated, refurbished, redecorated and even desecrated it. It became a national endowment site, a territorial hotspot where kings metaphorically lifted their hind leg and sprayed, leaving their mark for future rivals. Dedicated to the god Amun and his family, the site transformed itself from a backwater of a town in Upper Egypt (near modern Luxor). Almost 4,000 years ago, this clan set up their local god as the focal point of a new and improved religious authority. In fact, the name of the first king of this new dynasty, Amenemhet, translates as, “Amun is at the forefront” or roughly, “Amun is Number One”. Amenemhet was anything but subtle. The temple site is believed to mark the original lump of mud on which Amun stood and, with penis in hand, created the universe out of the waters of chaos.
Fruits of Labour: Nerfertit’s CartoucheWhat initially took me thirty minutes to manoeuvre (the threat of breaking a leg was very real), I could eventually accomplish in ten. Like an alley cat (was not the cat sacred in ancient Egypt?), I would circumnavigate low-lying bits of wall, scale masonry blocks, hop onto columns used to bridge marshy areas with a grace and dexterity that belied my innate clumsiness (I fall up stairs), until I had passed through the Temple of the Hearing Ear. From here it was a disappointingly quick walk to the east mudbrick wall. My journey, like Amun whose nocturnal voyage through darkness into light was reenacted on the nearby sacred lake, would inevitably come to an end as I scaled the wall. My quotidian life existed on its other side. But like Amun’s nocturnal journey, it would be repeated the next evening.
As I mounted the wall I would stop, look back – the queen of all she surveyed. From this vantage point the temple lay before me in all its quirky irregularity, its additions radiating out from its centre (the oldest part of the complex), seeking new directions, forming new axes. During the day, the crescent-shaped sacred lake to the south of Amun’s temple was a welcome respite from the afternoon sun; the water level is still significant enough to cool the air. At night, it not only reflects the austerity of the desert moon, but in its shape emulates the lunar attitude of the moon-god Khonsu, Amun’s adopted son. Symbolic of the primordial ocean, its surrounding walls are layered with zigzagged stones which mirror the hieroglyph for water (three horizontal wavy lines).
On the lake’s far side are the remains of the fowl-yard for the god’s sacred geese. The goose was both associated with and (confusingly) thought to be the actual manifestation of Amun who, in an alternate version of the first act of creation, laid a cosmic egg. From this yard, his geese were driven through a stone tunnel, still visible today, into the sacred lake – a waterslide, if you will, for the god’s pets. The priests performed their daily ablutions by the lake, possibly plucking goose quills out of their morning wash water. Although somewhat marred by the sight of the viewers’ stands erected for the Sound and Light show, the area’s ambience is still evocative of what daily life may have been like for the temple priests. In my mind, it is a precarious balance of irony and blasphemy that the living quarters of the very individuals who tended to their god in all matters religious and mundane are now overlaid by bleachers. Amun’s priesthood numbered among the most powerful men in Ancient Egypt; now they’re eclipsed by the posteriors of the world’s tourists. Perhaps this sense of theatre is a hanger-on from ancient times (archaeological predestination as it were) for this was the site of Amun’s long-night-of-the-soul ritual, signaling the transition from night into day.
One evening, as I approached the retaining wall, I caught sight of a small desert fox weaving its course along the serpentine enclosure wall, padding soft and low in its tracks. In the beguiling shadowplay of moonlight – the fox metamorphosed from silhouette to luminescence as the moon darted among the clouds, obscuring its movements, revealing its shape. In this state of near-rapture, I was conveyed back to my childhood and could once again hear the deep bass tones of my father’s voice as he sang me to sleep:
The fox went out on a chilly night,
He prayed to the moon to give him light,
For he’d many a mile to go that night,
Before he reached the town-o, town-o, town-o,
He’d many a mile to go that night,
Before he reached the town-o.
Mesmerized I watched as the fox dissolved into the inkiness of the night where, in sh’allah (if Allah willed it), it fulfilled its nocturnal mission under the veil of desert darkness. Humming to myself, I climbed the enclosure wall, my feet blindly but expertly finding purchase in the footholds made by countless colleagues and temple guards before me. I waved to the night watchman, startling him, I think, from his reverie, and wished him a good night. I felt at peace with this micro-sphere, this temple-world I inhabited so effortlessly – as hopelessly unreal and ephemeral as it was. Since Amun’s sacred geese are long gone, I felt no qualms at offering up a brief prayer to the moon god that this little desert fox would bring a fat bird home to its den so that the little ones could chew on the bones-o.
