The Karnak temple is made up of a large mix of ancient temples, pylons, chapels, and other buildings. It is located in the northern part of Luxor, Egypt. It is the largest and most famous ancient temple in Egypt as of today.
The pharaoh who initiated the construction of this building was Senusret I and the building kept getting new extensions throughout the years up until the Ptolemaic age. It’s a very unique place that was built over 2000 years ago. Imagine that!
It’s like a city of temples and not just a single temple. Many ancient rulers contributed that it’s even hard to enumerate them.
Yet, most of the buildings present now were built in the new kingdom era. It used to be in the middle of the ancient Egyptian capital of Thebes. The Karnak complex occupies more than 250000 m2 and not all of it is open to the public. The high season for Luxor and Aswan is the winter months. So, If you’d like to get lower prices for your accommodation avoid December and January.
Fun fact: Luxor took on that name because of Arabs. The word ‘Luxor’ means the palaces in Arabic. People who saw the temples were so impressed by them that they called them palaces.
The sacred lake surrounds the Temple of the Goddess Mott in Karnak on its three eastern, southern, and western sides. It is accessible by the eastern side way of the 10th Karnak Temple building.
The temple is so serene and there are definitely some quiet spaces to enter even in the high season due to the fact that the temple is so massive. You might even stumble on some sleeping dogs in the temple. Don’t be afraid of them, stray dogs in Egypt are usually harmless.
The place is just a majestic piece of art with its huge columns and ancient hieroglyphs. It’s hard not to imagine what this place looked like a few thousand years ago.
Due to the nature of this place, the difficulty of understanding hieroglyphs, and the mere vastness of the temple, I would recommend booking a tour with a guide through this website.
There are only 7 remaining obelisks in Egypt as many others were shipped overseas. The Karnak temple possesses 2 of them which is pretty impressive if you ask me!
If you’re going there, I would recommend getting a bottle of water, sunscreen, and a hat, especially in the summer months as it can get pretty hot. It’s also mostly an open-air museum with not a lot of shade in it.
I would highly recommend visiting this place, it might not be as famous as the Giza pyramids or the Valley of the Kings but it’s certainly worth it and may even be a better experience.
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