Here the great plan of the temple terminated a length of 1,170 feet, without reckoning the row of sphinxes before its exterior pylon, and without the private sanctuary which was erected by Ramses Miamun directly against the furthest wall of the temple, and in the same area, but in such a manner that the entrance to it was on the opposite side. This enlargement reckoned with it, would make the whole length nearly 2,000 feet, to the southernmost gate of the outer wall, which makes the whole place about the same breadth. The later dynasties, who found this principal temple completed on all sides, and yet could not renounce the idea of doing honour to this centre of Theban worship, began by erecting small temples on the great plain surrounded by the outer wall, and afterwards gradually enlarging these again.
The head of the twentieth dynasty, Ramses III., whose warlike deeds in Asia in the fifteenth century before Christ, were scarcely inferior to those of his renowned ancestors, Sethos I. and Ramses II., built a separate temple with a court of columns, and hypostole above two hundred feet long, which now destroys the symmetry of the outer wall of the great court, and founded at a little distance from it, a still larger sanctuary for the third person of the Theban Triad, Chensu the son of Ammon. This last was completed by the succeeding kings of his dynasty, and the priest-kings of the twenty-first dynasty, who added a stately court of columns and a pylon. Out of the twenty-second dynasty, Sheshenk I. is known, the warrior king Shishak of the Bible, who conquered Jerusalem in 970 B.C. His Asiatic campaigns are recorded in the southern outer wall of the great temple, where, under the symbolical figures of prisoners, he lays one hundred and forty conquered cities and countries before Ammon. Among their names there is one, which, not without foundation, is thought to be the denomination of the kingdom of Judah, as also the names of several well known cities of Palestine.
The two above-mentioned priest-dynasties, which followed immediately after the dynasties of the Ramses, were no longer of Theban origin, but came from the cities of Lower Egypt. The power of the kingdom sank upon this change, and after the short twenty-three dynasties, of which there are, nevertheless, some remains yet to be found in Karnak, there appears to have been a revolution. The present lists of the historians mention only one king of the twenty-fourth dynasty who has not been discovered upon the Egyptian monuments. Under him occurred the irruption of the Ethiopians, who form the twenty-fifth dynasty. Shabak and Tahraka (So and Tirhaka of the Bible) reigned in Egypt in the beginning of the seventh century, B.C. These kings came from Ethiopia, but governed quite in the Egyptian manner. They, too, did not forget to pay their reverence to the Egyptian divine kings. Their names are found on several little temples at Karnak, and on a stately colonnade in the great outer court, which appears to have been first erected by Tahraka. The latter retired, according to history, voluntarily into Ethiopia, and left the Egyptian empire to its native rulers.
The supplanted Saitic dynasty now returned to the throne, and again unfolded in the seventh and eighth centuries the splendour, which in this country, so rich in resources and in outward might, was able to be displayed under an energetic and wise sceptre. That dynasty first opened Egypt for peaceful communication with foreign countries; Greeks settled among them, commerce flourished and accumulated new and immense riches, formerly alone obtained by rapine and tribute. But the excitement was only artificial, for the fresh energy of the nations had long been broken; art, too, matured luxury rather than practical worth. The last national glory soon passed away. The country could no longer withstand the coming storm of the Persians. In the year 525 B.C., it was conquered by Cambyses, and trodden down by barbarian fanaticism. Many monuments were destroyed, and no sanctuary, no wall was raised within this period; at least nothing has been preserved to our times of that era, not even of the long and mild government of Darius, of whom a temple, or only sculptures with his name alone, are found in the Oasis of Kargeh. Under Darius II., just one hundred years after the beginning of the Persian supremacy, Egypt again became independent, and we immediately find again the names of the native kings in the temples of Karnak, but after three dynasties had followed one another in rapid succession within sixty-four years, it again fell under the dominion of the Persians, who soon afterward lost it to Alexander of Macedonia, in the year 332 B.C. After that the land was obliged to accustom itself to foreign rule; it had lost its national independence, and passed from one hand to another, the last always worse than the preceding, down to the present day.
Egypt still had vivifying power enough under the Macedonians and Greeks to keep up its religion and institutions in the ancient way. The foreign princes occupied in every way the places and footsteps of the ancient Pharaohs. Karnak also bears testimony to that. We here find the names of Alexander and Philip Aridæus, who preceded the Ptolemies in the restoration of that which the Persians had destroyed. Alexander rebuilt the back, Philip the front sanctuary of the great temple; the Ptolemies added sculptures to it, restored other parts, and even erected new sanctuaries at no small cost, but of course no longer in the magnificent, classic-Egyptian style of ancient times. Even the last epoch of expiring Egypt, that of the Roman supremacy, is still represented in Karnak by a number of representations, carried out under Augustus Cæsar.
Thus this remarkable place, which in the lapse of 3,500 years had grown from the little sanctuary in the midst of the great temple, into an entire temple-city covering a surface of a quarter of a geographical mile in length, and about 2,000 feet in breadth, is also an almost unbroken thread and an interesting standard for the history of the whole New Egyptian empire, from its commencement in the Old Empire down to its fall under the Roman rule. Almost in the same proportion as the dynasties and kings are portrayed in and about the temple of Karnak, they stand forth or retire in Egyptian history.
Up the river from Karnak, where the stream, parted by the fertile island of el Gedîdeh, again unites, a second glorious memorial of the ancient city arises: the temple of Luqsor. One of the mightiest Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty, Amenophis III., who had only built a side temple at Karnak, adding little to the principal structure, here erected a sanctuary, made the more magnificent on account of the little he had done at Karnak, dedicated to Ammon, which the great Ramses enlarged by a second stately court toward Karnak. For, although a good half-hour distant, this temple must yet be looked upon as within the ancient and sacred bounds of the great national sanctuary. That is proved by the otherwise difficult, and inexplicable circumstance, that the entrance of the temple, although hard by the shore, is yet turned away from the river and toward Karnak, with which it was also architecturally placed in direct connection by colonnades, series of rams, and roads.
With Luqsor end the ruins on the eastern shore. The monuments of western Thebes offer a still greater variety, because here the subterranean dwellings and places of the dead are added to the superterranean structures for the living. From Qurna there once extended an unbroken series of the most magnificent temples to Medînet Habu, almost filling the narrow desert district between the Nile-steeped fertile land and the foot of the mountains. Immediately behind these temples stretches the vast Necropolis, the tombs of which lying close together like bee-cells, are hewn partly in the rock-soil of the plain, partly in the adjoining hills.
Qurna is situated on that spur of the Libyan mountains nearest to the river. In suddenly turning to the west, the mountains form a species of ravine, the outer part of which, where it is separated from the valley by low ranges of hills, is called El Asasîf. Behind it is bounded by high, steep crags, which rear their glorious stone in the noon and morning sun. These sudden precipices of the limestone mountains, so firmly and equally grown, and therefore so eminently calculated for the sculptures in the rock-tombs, seem to have arisen on the clay stratum beneath, which has withdrawn by its gradual disintegration.
In this rock-creek are the oldest graves belonging to the Old Empire. Their entrances are seen far up in the northern rocks, directly under the perpendicular wall, which ascends from the suddenly-inclined rubbish-mounds to the tops of the mountain-ridges. This outer position, and the paths bordered with low stone walls, leading steeply and straightly from the valley several hundred feet to their entrances, reminded me at once of the graves of Benihassan of the same period. They were made in the second half of the third millenium B.C. under the king of the eleventh and twelfth dynasties of Manetho, of which the former founded the might of Thebes, and erected the city into the seat of their dominion, independent of Memphis, the latter rendered it the imperial city of the whole country.