Who is the great karnak

It is the longest surviving continuous monumental text from Egypt. Alternative names :. Address Luxor Egypt. Contact Add. Social media Add. Write Your Review! Click to rate. Luxor Airports Luxor Railway stations. Best nearby All. Find an attraction, region or country: Search Can't find a place? Karnak has long been one of the major sites for the millions of tourists who visit southern Egypt.

Thousands pass through the Great Hypostyle Hall and the rest of Karnak on a daily basis, taking countless photos of its wonders. Yet even after two centuries of archaeological excavation and scientific study by Egyptian, French, and American Egyptologists, most of the Karnak complex remains scientifically undocumented today. As one of our Egyptian colleagues puts it, Karnak is an archaeological ocean, and we have barely dipped below its surface. This unfathomed sea of antiquities is most profound in the Great Hypostyle Hall, a majestic structure that overwhelms the viewer with a vast array of wall carvings and hieroglyphic inscriptions and whose sheer scale and complexity has largely defied scholarly efforts to record and study it.

While this priceless trove of irreplaceable inscriptions has much to teach us about Ancient Egypt, Egyptologists have only ever scientifically recorded a fraction of them, their true significance being neither well-understood nor fully appreciated.

Alarmingly, a combination of environmental and human-made factors have caused this vast repository of inscriptions to decay and even threatens to destroy the building altogether.

Inscriptions and relief carvings have long suffered from infiltration of ground water, as mineral salts in the stone draw moisture upwards by capillary action, and this, in turn, forces the salts to crystallize on or beneath the surface, destroying the relief. For more information about our work, visit the links for Our Project and our Field Reports.

Skip to main content. Search X. She spent the first couple of months poring through archaeological reports, authored mainly by the French team overseeing work at Karnak. Written in the past four decades, they form the backbone of current knowledge of the complex.

A twelfth volume of the French excavations just came out, and there was additional material from before the s to fill out the picture. Few archaeological sites in the world have been so exhaustively documented as Karnak.

Generations of archaeologists have made painstaking measurements, sketches, photographs, and excavations at this sprawling area. Another student worked on map and video designs that were to be part of the website as well.

Even with the copious data, pulling together a coherent picture of what took place and when at Karnak proved complicated. For example, Amenhotep III had great plans for the complex.

After the Egyptian pharaoh ascended the throne in BCE, he ordered a wave of construction and renovation projects. After all, he was named for the very god—Amun—to whom the temple was dedicated. Though he ushered in a thirty-seven-year reign of peace and prosperity, Amenhotep III never quite finished all the work he planned for Karnak before he was buried in a sumptuous tomb across the river in the Valley of the Kings. And that posed a problem for Sullivan, living nearly two and a half millennia later and halfway around the world.

So Favro suggested she show the image of the gate as nearly transparent—a signal that it was planned but unfinished. That simple adjustment allows students and Egyptologists to follow one step in the complicated evolution of the site.

Ramesses II built a small temple that may have been used by average Egyptians entering the temple complex to pray to Amun-Ra. But it is not the finished product that is most important, Favro insists. While many researchers would like to see uniform software and hardware packages to provide clear guidelines and quality standards, that does not appear to be in the cards. Favro sees little chance that there will be a common package that could be used by architects and archaeologists the world over.

That means it will remain difficult to ascertain quality. But for Karnak at least, each data point is accessible to scholars who want to check. Digital Karnak is already being used by professors across the country. Egyptologist Peter J. Freed from the drudgery of sorting through static models, they experience Karnak as a growing and complex entity which provides a constant reflection of the larger trends in ancient Egyptian society.

And the new technology offers more than an alternative way of presenting reams of paper data. In January, UCLA launched an interdisciplinary effort to explore the relationship between physical spaces and culture Favro is one of four directors of the endeavor.