Besides his pylon, Amenhotep wrought a vast amount of work at Karnak; but it was not, like that of Sety and Ramses, concentrated in a single great structure, but dispersed in various parts of the sacred enclosure, and so does not produce the same effect. To see the work of Amenhotep on a scale worthy of his importance in the line of Egyptian Pharaohs, you have to go to Luxor with its fine papyrus-bud forecourt, and its noble nave, which, had it been finished, would have almost rivalled the Hypostyle Hall of the later kings in size and exceeded it in beauty; or to try to think back the vanished glories of what was probably the most gorgeous and beautiful of all the Theban temples—the Funerary temple of Amenhotep, which was destroyed, not by the Assyrian conqueror, but by the royal vandals of the XIXth Dynasty, Ramses II and his son Merenptah.

All the same, Amenhotep accomplished no small amount of work, in one way and another, within the enclosure of Karnak. Just beyond the girdle-wall of the great temple on the north side, he built a temple to Mentu, the Theban War-God, with a pylon, and obelisks of red granite. This temple once contained statues in black granite of the king, and of the goddess Sekhmet, towards whom he evidently cherished a feeling of deep devotion, if we may judge by the number of statues to her which he dedicated in the temple of Mut.

The temple of Mentu shared the usual fate of Amenhotep’s work, and was meddled with by Merenptah, Ramses V, and at least four of the Ptolemies, a fair specimen of the fashion in which the history of Karnak is complicated by the multitude of superimposed strata, or rather of interwoven strands, with which you have to do.

On the south side, and just at the girdle-wall, stands the beautiful temple of Khonsu (the son of the Theban Triad), one of the finest examples of a complete Egyptian temple of normal form. This is not the work of Amenhotep, but of Ramses III; but apparently an earlier temple of Amenhotep must have once occupied the site, for the king set up before the gateway a noble avenue of one hundred and twenty-two sandstone sphinxes bearing his name. Beyond the wall, and approached by the eastern avenue of sphinxes, lies another of Amenhotep’s contributions to the glories of Karnak—the temple of Mut, the mother-goddess of the Theban Triad, which was excavated in 1895–7 by two English ladies, Miss Margaret Benson and Miss Janet Gourlay. It is full of Sekhmet statues, and behind it lies a sacred lake, shaped like a horse-shoe.

But the following out of the work of Amenhotep has drawn us away from our main quest, the tracing of the story of Karnak proper. Returning to the great temple by the eastern avenue of sphinxes, we pass the girdle-wall by a pylon built by Horemheb out of the material of a temple which the unfortunate Akhenaten had reared in Thebes to his new deity the Aten. Beside the pylon stands a stele inscribed with a manifesto of Horemheb, which was designed to promote peace in the state after the religious troubles of Akhenaten’s times. The square court behind the pylon has on its east side the ruins of a small temple of Amenhotep II, and the walls of the court have reliefs of Horemheb. Another pylon of Horemheb, in a very ruinous condition, closes the court on the north side, and passing through it we are faced by one of the most ancient parts of the whole building, the pylon of Queen Hatshepsut. The pylon bears witness both to what Professor Breasted calls “the Feud of the Thutmosids,” and to the religious strifes of the XVIIIth Dynasty, for Hatshepsut’s name was erased from her reliefs by Thothmes II, and all allusions to Amen were scrupulously removed by Akhenaten, and restored by Sety I. Behind Hatshepsut’s pylon we pass a pylon of Thothmes III, her successor and enemy, and traversing a court whose walls bear inscriptions of Merenptah, the son and successor of Ramses II, in which he describes his victories over the Libyans and the Peoples of the Mediterranean, we find ourselves back at the point from which our digression started, in the central court behind the great pylon of Amenhotep III. Here was the western front of the temple in the days of Thothmes I, and here still stands the solitary remaining member of the quartette of obelisks with which this king and Thothmes III adorned the front of the pylon which now lies in ruins behind them. The obelisks of the later king are both gone—the survivor of the pair of Thothmes I is a fine shaft, 75½ feet high.

Behind his pylon, and between it and a smaller one which he erected to the east, Thothmes reared a fine ceremonial hall with roof and columns of cedar wood; but his work was not permitted to endure for long. It was within this hall that the priests of Amen arranged a little piece of play-acting in which the god Amen declared his preference for Thothmes III as king, and it was perhaps this unpalatable fact which determined Queen Hatshepsut to make it the scene of a piece of vandalism which was to redound to her own glory. Anyhow, as the time for the celebration of her jubilee drew near, she sent her architect, Senmut, up to Aswan to bring down two great shafts of granite for her jubilee obelisks, and when the tremendous blocks, 97½ feet high, arrived, she stripped off the roof from part of her father’s hall and set them up there. Apart from the filial piety of such an act, the obelisks were things of which she might justly be proud.

With the single exception of the stone, the work of her deadly enemy Thothmes III, which now stands before St. John Lateran in Rome, and which is 8 feet higher than its rival, the shaft of Hatshepsut, which still remains erect at Karnak, is the largest obelisk existing, and is more than 20 feet higher than the so-called “Cleopatra’s Needle,” which represents to Londoners, as its twin does to the folk of New York, the skill of ancient Egypt.

Hatshepsut was so proud of her achievement that she caused the shafts to be engraved with an inscription in which she swears, “As Ra loves me, as my father Amen favours me ... as I shall be unto eternity like an Imperishable, as I shall go down in the west like Atum, so surely these two great obelisks which My Majesty hath wrought with electrum for my father, Amen, in order that my name may abide in his temple, enduring for ever and ever, they are of one block of enduring granite, without seam or joining.” She goes on to say, what is still more surprising, that the time occupied in the extraction and transportation of the mighty shafts was seven months!

When Thothmes III came to the throne, he showed his love for his distinguished relative by casing her obelisks to a height of 82 feet with sandstone, so that her inscriptions might not be read. As rulers, the Pharaohs of the XVIIIth Dynasty, male or female, stand in the very front rank; they cannot be said to have shone as exponents of family affection.

To the east of his second pylon, Thothmes I had another court, which was altered and added to by Thothmes III, who built also a small pylon in front of his Halls of Records, which come next in the great complex of building, jostling the apartments of Hatshepsut, which stand beside them. In the First Hall of Records stand the two pillars which strike everyone who sees them as one of the beauties of Karnak, and examples of a type not common in Egyptian work. They are of granite, the southern one carved with the Lotus of Upper Egypt, the northern with the Papyrus of Lower Egypt. The Second Hall was turned into the chapel of the temple, in which the sacred bark was kept, by Philip Arrhidæus, at the beginning of the Ptolemaic dominion, so that one of the oldest and one of the newest parts of the building are here united.

In the open space behind the chapel lie the scanty remains of the earliest Karnak known to us—that of the XIIth Dynasty. A few broken polygonal columns suggest a kinship in style, for the earliest parts of the great temple, with the work of the XIth Dynasty at Der el-Bahri; but it is impossible to say with the least approach to certainty what the first temple may have looked like. East again of these remnants comes the last important part of the vast building—the great Festal Temple of Thothmes III, with its fine Hall, 144 feet by 52 feet, and its eastern sanctuary and complex of store-chambers.

The Festal Hall presents a feature unique in Egyptian Architecture. Its colonnade consists of thirty-two rectangular piers ranged round the sides, while down the centre of the hall run two rows of ten round columns, not spaced with the piers, and of extraordinary shape. Instead of tapering from the base to the top, their taper runs the opposite way, and their capitals are inverted, and present the appearance of a bell standing on its mouth. The downwards tapering column is, of course, a familiar feature in Minoan architectural practice, and it is within the bounds of possibility that Thothmes’ columns are an Egyptian adaptation of a Minoan motive, for, as the tombs of Senmut and Rekhmara show, Minoan influence was at its height in the middle of the XVIIIth Dynasty, and intercourse between Crete and Egypt was frequent. Whether Thothmes owed the idea to some Minoan suggestion or not, it never established itself in Egypt. In Crete, with its regular use of wooden pillars resting on stone bases, the downward taper was quite natural; in Egypt, with a prevalent stone construction, it was an exotic, and could show no reason for its existence, and it was never repeated. One cannot say that its disappearance was any great loss to Egyptian architecture, for the effect of the inversion is singularly clumsy.

We have thus traced the story of Karnak as one traverses the great temple from front to rear, and the bewildering complexity of the building is reflected in the variegated fabric of the narrative. To call Karnak, as is often done, “the typical temple of the Egyptian Empire,” is to create an entire misapprehension in the mind of anyone who hears such a phrase used. Karnak is anything but a typical temple; indeed it is not a temple, but rather an aggregate of many temples, and above everything else an epitome of Egyptian history for at least a millennium and a half. One would not even seek it for typical representatives of Egyptian architecture. Karnak, in this respect, possesses its beauties—and its monstrosities; but one would look rather to smaller specimens of the builder’s art for an adequate representation of Egyptian achievement in this respect.

The great temple claims, and will always claim, our attention and wonder, by its sheer vastness, to begin with, for undoubtedly vastness has its own effect, though it is not the highest, in the elements of architectural impressiveness; then by the extraordinary way in which it presents a summary in stone of the vicissitudes of Egyptian history; last, and perhaps least, by the surprising quality, and in some instances the beauty, of some of its detail. The main element in its appeal will always be wonder; admiration, and even that qualified by many reservations, is a bad second to the impression of simple amazement, that human hands and brains should have ever wrought so vast a thing.

The preservation of the temple is, and will continue to be, a work almost as great, and as difficult, as its erection. It lies in the hands of the Egyptian Service of Antiquities, and is a task as unending as the web of Penelope. Generally speaking, such work is of the kind which has to be its own reward, for it makes no appeal to the average visitor, who only sees that his enjoyment of this court or that is more or less hindered by the progress of work whose one merit is that it will keep safe for future generations priceless treasures which otherwise would ere long pass away. Sometimes, however, the work does bring other prizes in its train.

Such was the case when, in November, 1903, M. Legrain, in the course of his work near the pylon of Thothmes III by which we returned to the central court after our digression to the south, found what has since been known as “the Karnak Cachette,” a great pit full of pieces of sculpture of all types and periods. “For a year and eight months,” wrote Maspero in February, 1905, “we have been fishing for statues in the Temple of Karnak.... Seven hundred stone monuments have already come out of the water, and we are not yet at the end.... Statues whole and in fragments, busts, mutilated trunks, headless bodies, bodiless heads, vases on which there were only broken feet, Pharaohs enthroned, queens standing upright, priests of Amon and individuals holding naos, or images of gods, in front of them, crouching, kneeling, sitting, found in all the attitudes of their profession or rank, in limestone, in black or pink granite, in yellow or red sandstone, in green breccia, in schist, in alabaster—indeed, a whole population returns to the upper air and demands shelter in the galleries of the Museum.”

The reason for the existence of this extraordinary dump of discarded sculpture, whose richness Maspero’s vivacious sentences do not in the least exaggerate, and which gave us, to mention only two examples, the masterly pink granite head of Senusert III, one of the most brilliant examples of XIIth Dynasty sculpture, and the schist Thothmes III, equally one of the finest examples of the art of the New Empire, seems to have been this. The Ptolemies, the presence of whose coins in the pit sufficiently dates it, did a great deal of building at Karnak, and in the course of their cleaning up of the places where they worked, they, no doubt, came on an infinity of out-of-date ex voto statues, some of them broken, some of them whole, but all rather a nuisance and obstruction, as the persons with whom they were associated had long since ceased to be of importance. What was to be done with them? They could not simply be thrown out as rubbish, for they had been dedicated to the god, and were therefore sacred; and they could not be allowed to stand littering up the courts which the Ptolemies were busily tidying. Accordingly the great pit was dug within the sacred enclosure, and Senusert, Thothmes, Senmut, and hundreds of other old Egyptian notables were consigned to its muddy depths, thence to be resurrected, more than two thousand years later, by their degenerate descendants, who baled out the water from the pit with old petroleum cans, and hoisted Pharaoh, High-priest or Statesman, unceremoniously out of his dark resting-place with lever and tackle. It has been a fortunate chance for us, for Egyptian portrait-sculpture might stake its reputation on the two pieces which I have mentioned, and the pit has yielded scores almost as good.

The work of preserving the building, and putting it in a condition of safety for the future, has had a curious interest from the fact that in its progress Karnak has been to some extent rebuilt, and by exactly the same methods by means of which it was built in the beginning. For there can be little doubt, in spite of all talk about the wonderful mechanical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, and their possession of secrets which have been lost to our time, that Karnak, like all the great Egyptian buildings, was built, not by means of any of these remarkable secrets which never existed save in the imagination of those who have talked about them, but by the disciplined and ordered use of the very simplest means known to man, the inclined plane, the lever, and any amount of obedient human muscle. These were the mechanical secrets which M. Legrain found most useful and most economical in the end of the nineteenth century A.D., as those who had gone before him had done in the nineteenth, the fifteenth, the fourth century B.C. Senusert, Thothmes, Hatshepsut, Sety, Ramses, Sheshanq, Taharqa, Ptolemy, they all built Karnak by sheer force of human labour, disciplined and guided by a race of builders who for thousands of years had specialised in the training of men for such tasks, and with no more marvellous secrets to aid them than those oldest of man’s mechanical triumphs, the ramp and the lever. M. Legrain has repeated their miracles with the same equipment; and in an age of machinery has shown that the human machine may still be the most adequate, the most adaptable, and the most economical.

Thus, then, we have seen, at two of the most interesting sites in Egypt, something of the work which has been going on with the double object of extending our knowledge of the past and of preserving its treasures for the future. Realising something of the importance of such buildings as Der el-Bahri and Karnak, and their scores of companions throughout the land, buildings which are, in effect, ancient Egypt to us, one can feel that work such as that which has been meagrely described in these pages, unspectacular though it may be compared with the work of Pharaoh-hunting, is yet of great and enduring importance, the indispensable fabric on which the glittering embroidery of the treasure-troves from the Valley of the Kings and elsewhere is wrought, and without whose rich and durable substance to form a background the golden glory of the royal tombs would lose half its meaning and beauty.