We started our month in Egypt in the city of Luxor, which is divided by the Nile River. Our two guides, both named Hassan, showed us three temples on the river’s West Bank, an area formerly called Thebes. They explained that most ancient Egyptian temples included a very large relief wall near the entrance, a hypostyle hall with many large columns, a forecourt, and inner chambers dedicated to a temple’s primary god. A few ancient Egyptian temples still retain bits of the very colorful, original paint.

Temple of Hatshepsut – Built in front of rugged limestone cliffs, this colonnaded temple memorializes Hatshepsut, pharaoh from 1503 to 1482 BC. Before then she was the most important wife of Tuthmosis II and served as queen while he was pharaoh. At the time of her husband’s death, his oldest son (from a different wife) was only 2 years old, so she named herself pharaoh. No official records remain of how she died, but some historians theorize that her stepson, Tuthmosis III, may have had her killed so he could become pharaoh sooner. Before her early death, she commissioned royal architect Senemut to design and build the three-level temple and surrounding gardens in honor of her and the god Amun. She was the second female Egyptian pharaoh and was often portrayed as a man in artwork. 

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Reliefs of interest

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Chapel of Anubis (god of death & afterlife)

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Sanctuary of Amun (god of the air)

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Medinet Habu Temple – This complex includes two temples: the Temple of Amun, built by Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III, and the much, much larger temple Ramses III built as his future burial site. Fortunately some of the original painted colors have survived, so we got an idea as to have beautiful Medinet Habu really was thousands of years ago.

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Ramesseum Temple – Ramses II built this temple as a memorial to himself in the 13th century BC. We walked along the main corridor of the hypostyle hall where twenty-nine of the original 48 columns still stand. Hassan explained two very unique statues in this temple. From a distance the toppled, broken statue of Ramses II didn’t look very impressive. But when we stood beside the pieces we got a better sense of scale of the once 19 meter-tall image. One example is the ear, which measured one meter tall. The second unique Ramses II statue was formed from black granite, quarried over 200 kilometers from Luxor. Only the head remains at the temple site.

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